Peel Smart Remote

» see peel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

For about four years, flagship Android phones had a small dark window on the top edge. That was an infrared blaster, the same emitter that was in every television remote in the house, and Samsung put it back into the Galaxy S4 in 2013 after the industry had spent a decade taking it out. Something had to drive it, and the something was software from a company in Silicon Valley called Peel.

Peel Technologies was founded in 2009 by Bala Krishnan and Thiru Arunachalam, and it raised more than ninety million dollars over its life, fifty of it from Alibaba in a single 2014 round. The product was a universal remote that happened to be a phone. You picked your TV brand and your set-top box from a list, pointed the phone at the screen, and the on-screen buttons worked. It also tried to be a program guide, which is where the trouble started.

The distribution was the whole business. Peel wrote the S4's remote app for Samsung, where it shipped as WatchON. It wrote the S5's, where it shipped as Smart Remote. By the Galaxy S6 and the HTC One M9 in 2015 it had stopped hiding behind vendor names and shipped as Peel Smart Remote on both. That year the company claimed a hundred and twenty million registered users and a hundred billion remote commands sent, numbers that are true and completely misleading, because the overwhelming majority of those users received the app rather than chose it.

The Galaxy S4 and S5 sold enormously in Turkey, and I spent those years as an engineer with an Android phone like everybody else I worked with. Peel is in that specific category of software you have used without ever deciding to: it was already there, it worked the one time you tried it on a hotel television, and then it sat in the drawer with the rest of the preinstalls. I could not have told you the company's name until I looked it up for this.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the infrared years ~

Infrared on phones was a genuinely good idea that lasted four generations. The S4 through the S6, the HTC One line, some LG and Xiaomi models, a run of tablets. It cost almost nothing to add and it solved a real problem, which is that every household in the world has more remotes than surfaces to put them on.

Then it stopped. Samsung dropped the blaster after the S6, HTC after the M9, and by 2017 it was a Xiaomi feature and not much else. The stated reasons were bezel space and waterproofing. The unstated one is that televisions were becoming networked, and a TV you can reach over WiFi does not need a line of sight to anything. Peel had built a company on a hardware feature the hardware makers were done with.

~ the ads ~

What happened next is the reason anyone remembers the name. Starting around 2017, Peel began putting advertisements on the lock screen. Not in the app, on the lock screen, on a phone whose owner had never installed it and in many cases could not uninstall it, because it had shipped in the system partition. It ran constantly in the background. It sent notifications about television shows to people who had no idea what was sending them.

The support forums from that period are a specific kind of reading. Thread after thread of people asking what Peel is, how it got there, and how to make it stop, on Verizon's community boards and Android Central and Samsung's own help pages. The most-read answer was usually a set of instructions for disabling a system app without root. A universal remote had turned into something users were trying to escape.

~ the disclosure ~

On 7 June 2019 the mobile security firm Pradeo published a teardown of Peel Smart Remote, then sitting at over a hundred million installs on Google Play. The finding was that the app was transmitting users' pictures and other personal data to a server that did not belong to Peel. Version 10.7.4.2 had gone out the Friday before with no communication from the company explaining anything.

Google Play removed it. Peel never issued a statement, never wound anything down publicly, and never explained where the photos went. The app kept limping along on the Amazon Appstore and the Galaxy Store for a while as an artifact nobody was maintaining.

~ what is left ~

peel.com still resolves. It redirects to an Amazon S3 bucket serving a single HTML page whose only content is a centered image tag pointing at peellogo.png. Ninety million dollars of venture funding, a hundred and twenty million claimed users, and the terminal state is one logo on a static host, vertically centered.

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