How can I block unwanted unityadscache folder on my device?

Good afternoon I have an android tablet

I have been recently getting two folders in my google photo app the first is Unity Ads Cache which usually has between 1 to 5 pictures and a short video like 20 sec. The other is an empty files folder. I have deleted both folders multiple times. They come back after my device has rebooted or restarted. Please note these ads are for games that I have never even heard of nor want.

Can someone please tell me how to permanently remove this as I never asked for this to be added to my photos app?

Thank you for any help.

 

Hi,

We should not be using photos folder for storing cached videos for Unity Ads. Do you know which games you have been playing, which is using Unity Ads SDK?

/Rasmus

 

The only games that I have are candy crush soda saga, papa pear saga and cafeland... I have been playing these games for a long while. I have never had these ads folder to show up until about a month ago.

 

I am having the same problem except that I can't even find the pics and videos on m phone. I just upgraded to a Galaxy S9+ and everytime I upload pics to my computer I get stock photos, facebook photos of people I have never seen before and unity ad videos. I never had this happen on my previous phones with the same game on them. I believe they are coming from the only game I have on my phone Township. I looked at the link to stop them but that's pretty complicated for me and I can't find them on my phone to even start doing anything about it. They just show up on my photo uploads. Please help. I take photos for my job and it's time consuming to have to go through and delete so many extra photos all the time. It's also very very very annoying.

 

Hi @promptrecovery, thanks for reporting. We will investigate ofc, it should not happen as you describe. Is this the game: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playrix.township ?

/Rasmus

 

Hello. I have a similar problem, but I have clicked the info button on the ads in my gallery, and it says they're from my MP3 player app I use (GO Music) Also, it seems that the old ads come back, because the dates say they're from various months in 2017 and some even in 2016. Please help me fix this, it's really really annoying.

 

Your ads have interrupted Google Maps while navigating a new city, botched the video of my daughter's recital, and startled everyone nearby while I was quietly reading the news in the library.

I want specific instructions on how to permanently block Unity on a SAMSUNG-SM-G920A.

 

I have deleted literally MULTIPLE THOUSANDS Of UnityAdsCache Pic.s and Vid.s, only for them and more, to reappear! *gaming wise, i mainly play Angry Birds Friends and 'king' games which some Do look like being from the free in-game videos etc. But Also the pics seem to be emoticons and stickers from facebook messenger??? Reaaally need to stop these storing on HTC phones camera pic photos folder!! #HeadIsOfficiallyDoneIN!

 

I Have exactly the same problem with a brand new Galaxy Note 8. The only game I have on it is SimCity Buildit. Every time I sync my photos from phone to PC, using the Microsoft Photo app, my PC Pictures folders are filled with screen shots from the phone, all of which relate to the game in question. Interestingly I cannot see the images in question on the phone itself (neith in the Google Photos app, or in samsung Gallery). My phone is not rooted, nor do I want to. How to fix the problem is all I need to know. I'm talking about hundreds, possible over a 1000, unwanted images here, so it's a major issue to me.

 

Hello, I don't have any Unity games on my phone, have photo and video ade for Coin pop and some game with the Simon's cat keep popping up in my phone. I checked the info on them and it said they were from the Lolo game app. I even tried turning off the games storage permission but the problem still continues.

 

Hi, i have the same problem on my new oneplus 6. The games i play rightnow are rules of survival,dune and hitman sniper. Pls help me out on this.
Thank you

 

Can't you just stop caching ads?

 

Yes they are showing up as a .nomedia file, and they keep showing up on almost all of my gaming apps, all from different companies.

 

I am having the same problem. The source is from the Airbrush photo app. Deleted several times and it keeps coming back.

 

Swamp Attack is the unfortunate culprit for me.

 

if you are using root android device, then the best solution is to install Adaway, get into its black list section (you will have to download the host files) and transfer those unityadscache folder into the black list of the app. This will block and remove them permanently forever.

 

I have downloaded Sniper 3d Gun Shooter: free shooting.

I deleted it. I did everything to make stop pop up unity ads windows, but nothing worked. J have a samsung S9+. This is really annoying it goes on as I do audio and video recordings! I get a pop up video of yours evety 100 seconds!!! Please tell me what to do step by step asap please

 

I'm having the same issue. I'm about to get an iPhone. Every 2 mins theres a pop up. Smh.....

 

So in the process of trying to get rid of this unity ad mess I found out alot of my important personal information is deleted. Wtf. Yall are doing a horrible job of giving us a straight up solution to getting rid of yall pointless ad spree yall created that pops up every 2 mins. I can not do anything on my phone that I paid so much money for btw. Everyone in the comments if furious! FIX THIS ASAP!

 

I have this issue as well!!

Ever since I downloaded and playes Cafe Story a while back, just about any game I play is saving UnityAds in my google photo's :/ I have deleted the pictures and videos from there, and from my device, but they keep coming back any time I open a game... It's really annoying, and I ended up quitting on my favorite games because of it.

As to questions I saw devs post above here: There was no .nomedia file. I tried inputting one myself but it didn't seem to work :/

 

This is a known issue that we are currently tracking. We hope to address this in a release later this year.

 

I'm an Android user who recently noticed that Unity has been caching ads, videos,and thumbnails to my photos in a device folder! It's happening with any game I install from Google play (this includes Cookie Cats Pop, Simon's Cat Pop Time and Gardenscapes). I'm getting extremely frustrated having to delete device folders in my photo device folder that your ads created! Please do something to permanently fix this problem asap!! Thank you.

 

I really hope this gets resolved quickly... I was like wtf when accessing twitter and to see a bunch of ads in my gallery preview wasn't really cool per se....

 

Hello everyone, i have the same problem and i habe a question about this.. If i allow the app to access to my gallery, does it mean that i let the app to drop photos/videos in the gallery? I've noticed that in my music gallery ther are a lots of audio caches, all coming from the same source... Now i deleted "Real Racing 3" and deleted all of the albums that appeared in the gallery, and the audio files just disappeared from my music gallery. Thanks to everyone who will answer

 

This is definitely a problem for me too. I find Facebook pictures which are not mine in a folder on my device, so it's not just from games. I delete hundreds of extra pics from my device every week, sometimes several times a week. I have to sort through these hundreds of pictures every time I want to share one of my actual pics. This is incredibly annoying. Attached as a screenshot of some of the folders I've had to repeatedly delete.

 

Sadly, this is hapohappeto me and alot of friends.... I'll delete a out 100 and they come right back smh.. can y'all tell us what's causing thise? I have denied permission for photos and gallery AND IT STILL DOES IT! That's crazy man and so freaking annoying! I deleted a couple or games die to this man, I hope y'all Tix it before new years or all the other games will be long gone!

 

I've never heard of Unity until you started taking over my phone.
I first noticed a bunch of garbage game photo ads when I opened Swarm and couldn't upload my own photos. Same deal with Yelp. Over a hundred photos, dozens of videos, mostly for games, some other topics.
My SO does IT, he deleted them, they were hiding in Plant vs Zombies: Heroes.
Within a day, all useless photos and videos reappeared on my phone. I uninstalled PvZ, next up they appeared in my Google Maps folder, after that they were in my FB folder.
They are absolutely being HIDDEN inside game folders if available, and if not, they are just hiding them elsewhere on our phones. Apparently Unity is used for rewards on games, so technically it could have come from my PvZ, yet when I uninstalled that game 3 entire times completely, plus deleted the Unity crap, all of the photos and videos magically reappeared on my phone! Just hidden in different folders. Really outrageous.
"We hope to address this in a release later this year," I've never heard of you. You have No Permission to house your garbage spam ads and videos on my phone! Where is this legal? Who here agreed to this?
Guess what. Google this issue. You will see it is not new.

I'm not sure why the "playing dumb", talking about .nomedia and whatever else, they've been doing this for years. I see complaints about Unity dating back to 2011, same story, storing unasked for, unfamiliar, spam photos and videos on individual's cell phones. This is absolutely being done on purpose, with intention, by Unity.​

 

Guys Unity is a development platform. If you are seeing a Unity folder in an application folder it is because the developer of that application built it in Unity.

 

We are hoping to address this issue in the next release. It was purely unintentional, and is because of the missing .nomedia file and so the photos get indexed and displayed.

 

Hi, im having a simular problem. Usually 4 or 5 times a week Unity Cache Ads creates over 500 new albums in my gallery on my android phone. Ive tried searching for the file creating these annoying files and deleting with no luck. Can you please help ?

 

Im having a simmular issue but in messenger. When i want to send a picture to someone messengers shows me lots of pics and videos of ad caches. The worst thing is that in cant remove them because my gallery isnt showing them. I can remove them temporarily. After a week they are back. And even if i remove them messengers is showing me that he cant load the file. But i think its problem with messenger because it shows me another cashe photos for example messenger stickers.
I have Huawei P9 Lite 2017 Android 8.0 (idk if you need that information)

 

Hello everyone,

I've been searching for an answer for quite some time now and I have found a solution ! All you need to do is to find the folder that is concerning your issue and add a ".nomedia" file. Let me show you with some of the most common examples :

First, with the Facebook messenger stickers. You can use the technique used by asylum23 just above. Use a computer and show the hidden files and the extensions. Then, go to "Android/Data/" and find the folder "com.facebook.orca" and in "files". Here, you have two folders, "Download" and "stickers". Well, all you have to do is to add a ".nomedia" file. You can create it yourself or you can find it somewhere already existant on your phone (this is how I did). I personally found it in "Android/obb" (I'm on a Oneplus 6t).

Then, it is quite similar for the "UnityAdsCache". The difference is, you might really need a computer for that one. I didn't found the folder directly on my phone, but with asylum23 technique I succeeded. You just need to do as asylum23 did, just found the folder (do not forget to show hidden files and the extensions) and when you are in the "cache" folder of the game, just add the ".nomedia" file. Do it to all your games with a UnityAdsCache and all the photos and videos in your gallery or Google Photos will disappear and not come back.

I did the technique just before writing this so I don't know if it works at 100%. Maybe when you restart the phone everything comes back or it just last for some time. But for now, this works. If there is anything that changes I will come back here and try to fix it. If you have any questions or if this does not work, do not hesitate to tell me. If it works too, I want to have your feedback !

 

The easiest solution to this problem i have found is to install the Gallery app by Oneplus. In their 'Collections' tab they have categorised these horribly invasive ads into a section named 'other collections'. You can group select the folders in question and click delete. It's not just Unity Cache ads either.

 

Be honest with us...this isn't something you plan to fix, is it? Since it's happening across so many games (mine is Hogwarts Mystery), this isn't an issue with them individually. I've found people asking for help with this as far back as 2016. This is a known issue.

Creating a .nomedia folder didn't fix it. Obviously, deleting the images didn't fix it. My only option seems to be to delete the game I'm getting the ads from, which sucks because I actually like the game and the problem goes deeper than them. The only thing these unwanted ads guarantee is that we will be so annoyed that we will never download the games being advertised .

 

@Mattiness You are describing a separate issue. The .nomedia issue causes the images to be indexed and images shown in your photo browser. Only the images from ads are shown when you browse your photos. They don't "pop up". The issue you are describing is when ads are actually SHOWN with a close button, etc. If you are receiving ads from a game when you are not actively running the game, it is a violation of our terms of service. Please open a support ticket so we can identify the offending developer and turn off their ad delivery. See this post regarding ads displaying when you don't want them to https://forum.unity.com/threads/random-unity-ads-from-background-apps.610777/

 

I have been getting these random seeming pictures starting a few days ago. The other night I have more than 500! I don't play games on my phone (Galaxy S7). How can I know what apps I have installed that are using Unity?
I should add, the pictures are coming from a folder UnityAdscache and also their names begin with UnityAdsCache

 

But they are not popping up, with an X close button, correct? Where are you viewing them, in your Photo Gallery? This media indexing issue has been fixed in Unity Monetization 3.0.1, but you'll still see the behavior with games with the previous version until the developer upgrades their games.

 

>But they are not popping up, with an X close button, correct?
Correct.

>Where are you viewing them, in your Photo Gallery?
yes in photo gallery

How can I know what apps on my phone are using Unity sdk ?

 

I'm having this same problem except I'm getting 2 folders of unityadscache it used to just be the files folder which had a blank pic in it but now its the other 2 but the only games I play are
ZYNGA Poker
Wold at War
And Clash of Clans nothing powered by unity last I checked unless the are paired with Zynga and the only games I have played that are powered by unity is on my tablet not my phone if anyone could help me keep these from showing up in my gallery that would be great as I am limited storage to 16 GB on this phone till I get a new one.

 

Hi, is there any update on this? I am still getting dozens of screenshots from Sim City Buildit uploading to my PC (via the Microsoft Photos app). I have looked in the Photos app setting and cannot see an option to turn off uploads of the Unity screenshots. On the Note 8, they are visible in the Screenshots folder, which is a subset of the 'Things' folder. Here is my question: why are all the screenshots appearing in that folder? I certainly don't take them, so how do I stop them being taken automatically? Thanks for assistance!

 

How can I block unwanted unityadscache folder on my device? I have a Droid Moto Z Android version 8.0.0. Photos, videos and emojis are constantly spamming my phone and making folders at an alarming rate daily. The only game I play is Alien Shooters by ABI Game Studio...please help soon. This has to be illegal and an invasion of privacy.

 

The funny voice app on the Android market is a culprit for forcing ads on my phone. They just pop up randomly always the same unity ads

 

i deleted every game and i still cant delete the unity cache folders. DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS PROBLEM. I am tired of ads blasting from my phone everytime i unlock it. i made a unity account just to reply on this forum to let you know this sucks and that you seem to be doing nothing about solving this problem. ✌