Credit: Samsung

After kicking off an unpopular pilot test last month, Samsung made the practice of having its expensive smart fridges display ads official this week.

The ads will be shown on Samsung’s 2024 Family Hub smart fridges. As of this writing, Samsung’s Family Hub fridges have MSRPs ranging from $1,899 to $3,499. The ads will arrive through a software update that Samsung will start issuing this month and display on the fridge’s integrated 21.5- or 32-inch (depending on the model) screen. The ads will show when the fridges are idle and display what Samsung calls Cover Screens.

As part of the Family Hub software update, we are piloting a new widget for select Cover Screens themes of Family Hub refrigerators. The widget will display useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements.

Samsung also said that its fridges will only show contextualized ads, instead of personalized ads, which rely on collecting data on users.

The Verge reported that the widget will appear as a rectangular box at the bottom of the screens. The box will change what it displays “every 10 seconds,” the publication said.

The software update will also introduce “a Daily Board theme that offers a new way to see useful information at a glance,” Samsung said. The Verge reported that this feature will also include ads, something that Samsung’s announcement neglected to state. The Daily Board theme will show five tiles with information such as appointments and the weather, and one with ads.

The ads experience, though, seems to have improved somewhat from the earlier pilot testing in that users can use their fridge’s settings menu to opt out of seeing ads. If users set their Cover Screen to show integrated Art or Album themes, then the display won’t show ads. But doing this would prevent users from taking advantage of the new widget’s helpful features.

Samsung fridge owners can also opt to avoid the latest software update altogether. However, they would miss out on other features included in the software update, such as a UI refresh and the ability for the internal camera inside some fridges to identify more fruits and vegetables inside the fridge.

The changes are part of a frustrating trend among smart home products to change the user experience in unwanted ways after people have already made their purchases. It also shows Samsung’s growing reliance on ads with its smart home products, even after downplaying the idea that that would happen. As the companies behind smart home products look for new ways to grow revenue, deliver new features, and build demand beyond selling expensive hardware that people rarely buy, customers are increasingly bearing the brunt, which, in many cases, includes dealing with more ads.