I gave it a try, and the processor does clock back and isn't even fully used, so if they are cryptomining, they are not very efficient. And with all the bugs aliexpress has had for years, I doubt they have the capability of implementing something so stealthily and efficiently that nobody has noticed if they had.
More likely it is just graphics processing which is very intense, or requires a minimum speed. See what happens with some mobile games or something, you'll probably see the same behaviour.
“More than reasonably required” in OPs caption is doing a bit of the heavy lifting here, we understand that games will use processing power but at the end of the day these are simple games and the operations the phone are working thru seem relatively more complex.
Indeed, and with most people having the game open for at most 5-10 minutes it isn't even efficient.
especially with a large variety of phones using the app, its impossible to make a difference between a cheap 100$ device and a high end 1000$ device.
Based on this we can assume they are just poorly optimized
Crypto miners would be flagged by any antivirus software, why would they take a risk like that?
All this is is the weird China paranoia.
The purpose of grow to get, is to show you a lot of products, and create this repetitive/addictive behavior, so you have a reason to open the app every day.
Online stores need to solve the shopping mall problem, stores have these labyrinths that you have to follow to see all the stuff. Online stores, you can just search exactly what you want. This is why the search in aliexpress is so bad, and they use different methods to show you a lot of stuff.
Aliexpress is a platform, so they need to offer this service to the sellers. They need to solve this issue on how to get people to browse a lot of stuff.
its not weird china paranoia. I'm chinese and shit like this does happen, you'd be surprised..
grow to get makes a lot of sense business wise, and that just makes it a even better cover.
Not saying it is mining, but it definitely is a possibility.
Sure it happens. But to my understanding crypto mining is illegal in China, so a big actor like Aliexpress probably would not risk it.
Also, phones simply are not good for mining.
Something being illegal never stopped anyone in China.
Melamine in baby formula by one if the largest baby milk formula companies in China. I rest my case.
exactly this. tofu buildings obviously illegal building materials used but welp. When theres money involved anywhere in the world you'll have people doing illegal things :)
lol nothing is illegal in china if you got enough money and connections
yes aliexpress higher ups might not risk it, but theres so many departments and different companies underneath. Plenty of opportunities to do shady shit to make a quick buck.
also if you know a thing or two about china, they do n o t give a fuck lmao. I wont dip into it but there is a lot of history and cultural things that explain these unfortunate behaviours of a lot of bad eggs.
eg.
Tofu dreg buildings built by huge companies they wont risk it right? but at the end of the day still happens cause corruption and greedy people, most likely somewhere further down the chain🤷
For context phone is reasonably powerful 13T pro in balanced mode, everything else closed except for background processes. I don't even want the damn towel, but hey it's there.
No, the "stealth" mining programs run in the background at limited CPU power to be less suspicious. If they're doing it they have thousands of devices mining, so they can lower the usage and still get a good cut.
My guess would be really badly optimized game. The “if you press buttons too fast the game will break!” popup that merge boss gives you makes it quite obvious how they prioritize.
A stupid in-app game that doesn't require thought, strategy or skill, but requires pressing a button about 10,000 times over a period of weeks. Probably coded with many wasteful 'do until' loops. Prize is a small towel.
The aliexpress app has some games built into it that can be used to gain advantages to use on aliexpress, usually it's coins, but with the anniversary-sale that ended a few days ago it was a game where you could earn credit to exchange for store-credit.
One of these games is 'Grow to get' where you 'grow' cotton-plants by watering them and eventually you can get a coupon to get one of a few selected items at a discount price of about 10 cents. At first it was a 'towel set' (really one microfiber towel) but they've added a few more items.
Not sure why more people aren’t talking about this. Oh wait, addicted to the game. It’s funny, if there was a popup in the app, “donate spare phone cpu cycles to china?” Most would say no. Make it look like candy crush, and people are all about it and up in arms when you question it.
That's pretty reasonable suspicion since if you open the game on BlueStacks it should have a URL on top, which means this 'game' (website) is running on top of a browser and either it isnt optimized or it is definitely a crypto miner
No i doubt it but i think what might be happening is that they are using processes to track every single thing you do in return for advertising, a similar story I've experienced actually is whenever i use Instagram or Facebook the same thing happens to my CPU usage, my phone starts to get hot super fast & my battery starts to drain as if i was playing a demanding game
All this and i only use those apps mainly for messaging people, my phone has a snapdragon 865 & 12 gigs of ram so this isn't a problem with my phone being on the weak side, also knowing meta's history it's not really a surprise if they are hoarding their user's data in this way, tracking every single move you do it takes quite a lot of processing power.
Probably, or if not then some other distributed problem which is aided by parallel processing. Thanks for bringing this up, I’m glad other people are thinking about this in a clever way and not just “mUh GaMeS, mUh ToWeL”
The point of this thread is that is is hard on your phone, for negligible gains, and might be running some shady shit in the background. And you’re falling over yourself to get it?
I gave it a try, and the processor does clock back and isn't even fully used, so if they are cryptomining, they are not very efficient. And with all the bugs aliexpress has had for years, I doubt they have the capability of implementing something so stealthily and efficiently that nobody has noticed if they had. More likely it is just graphics processing which is very intense, or requires a minimum speed. See what happens with some mobile games or something, you'll probably see the same behaviour.
“More than reasonably required” in OPs caption is doing a bit of the heavy lifting here, we understand that games will use processing power but at the end of the day these are simple games and the operations the phone are working thru seem relatively more complex.
Indeed, and with most people having the game open for at most 5-10 minutes it isn't even efficient. especially with a large variety of phones using the app, its impossible to make a difference between a cheap 100$ device and a high end 1000$ device. Based on this we can assume they are just poorly optimized
I can confirm that most Ali games are very poorly optimized. If I turn on low power mode while playing Merge Boss, the game begins to lag a lot.
I mean your using a mediatek processor , what do you expect
The same on a Snapdragon 732G. Ali's app infill methods can't really optimize for chipset. Edit: and a Snap 870 is similar
Okay, but 732G is a very low performance gpu chipset , but there is not one mediatek cpu that’s solid
Crypto miners would be flagged by any antivirus software, why would they take a risk like that? All this is is the weird China paranoia. The purpose of grow to get, is to show you a lot of products, and create this repetitive/addictive behavior, so you have a reason to open the app every day. Online stores need to solve the shopping mall problem, stores have these labyrinths that you have to follow to see all the stuff. Online stores, you can just search exactly what you want. This is why the search in aliexpress is so bad, and they use different methods to show you a lot of stuff. Aliexpress is a platform, so they need to offer this service to the sellers. They need to solve this issue on how to get people to browse a lot of stuff.
its not weird china paranoia. I'm chinese and shit like this does happen, you'd be surprised.. grow to get makes a lot of sense business wise, and that just makes it a even better cover. Not saying it is mining, but it definitely is a possibility.
Sure it happens. But to my understanding crypto mining is illegal in China, so a big actor like Aliexpress probably would not risk it. Also, phones simply are not good for mining.
Something being illegal never stopped anyone in China. Melamine in baby formula by one if the largest baby milk formula companies in China. I rest my case.
exactly this. tofu buildings obviously illegal building materials used but welp. When theres money involved anywhere in the world you'll have people doing illegal things :)
And people got executed over it. I wish corporate people who caused hundreds of deaths in Brazil got any kind of punishment at all.
lol nothing is illegal in china if you got enough money and connections yes aliexpress higher ups might not risk it, but theres so many departments and different companies underneath. Plenty of opportunities to do shady shit to make a quick buck. also if you know a thing or two about china, they do n o t give a fuck lmao. I wont dip into it but there is a lot of history and cultural things that explain these unfortunate behaviours of a lot of bad eggs. eg. Tofu dreg buildings built by huge companies they wont risk it right? but at the end of the day still happens cause corruption and greedy people, most likely somewhere further down the chain🤷
For context phone is reasonably powerful 13T pro in balanced mode, everything else closed except for background processes. I don't even want the damn towel, but hey it's there.
It seems you can get other products besides the towel lol.
If it was mining, you'd expect it to be pegged to max, wouldn't you?
Nah, plausible deniability plus if you burn out the gamers phones they can’t “play” anymore
No, the "stealth" mining programs run in the background at limited CPU power to be less suspicious. If they're doing it they have thousands of devices mining, so they can lower the usage and still get a good cut.
My guess would be really badly optimized game. The “if you press buttons too fast the game will break!” popup that merge boss gives you makes it quite obvious how they prioritize.
So at the very least, if it isn’t harvesting cpu cycles, it is wasting them. Leading to degradation of the phone and battery.
Aren't we all wasting CPU cycles degrading our cellphones and batteries by using it for social media?
Idk does your phone get noticeably hot to the touch and start throttling from social media? Didn’t think so
Can somebody explain “Grow to get” plz never heard of it
A stupid in-app game that doesn't require thought, strategy or skill, but requires pressing a button about 10,000 times over a period of weeks. Probably coded with many wasteful 'do until' loops. Prize is a small towel.
That also progressively gets harder (as in, you need to do more to progress) to the point it's just not worth it and you feel like a clown
The aliexpress app has some games built into it that can be used to gain advantages to use on aliexpress, usually it's coins, but with the anniversary-sale that ended a few days ago it was a game where you could earn credit to exchange for store-credit. One of these games is 'Grow to get' where you 'grow' cotton-plants by watering them and eventually you can get a coupon to get one of a few selected items at a discount price of about 10 cents. At first it was a 'towel set' (really one microfiber towel) but they've added a few more items.
Mine looks alright: https://imgur.com/gallery/8PLOWih
Why down vote lol proof is right there.
Probably
Not sure why more people aren’t talking about this. Oh wait, addicted to the game. It’s funny, if there was a popup in the app, “donate spare phone cpu cycles to china?” Most would say no. Make it look like candy crush, and people are all about it and up in arms when you question it.
damn, theyve found out🤣 musta develop new crypto game for stuupid american man play again
That's pretty reasonable suspicion since if you open the game on BlueStacks it should have a URL on top, which means this 'game' (website) is running on top of a browser and either it isnt optimized or it is definitely a crypto miner
https://www.reddit.com/r/Aliexpress/s/mXstSbV7Ul https://www.reddit.com/r/Aliexpress/s/7pe2OxHXyn
No i doubt it but i think what might be happening is that they are using processes to track every single thing you do in return for advertising, a similar story I've experienced actually is whenever i use Instagram or Facebook the same thing happens to my CPU usage, my phone starts to get hot super fast & my battery starts to drain as if i was playing a demanding game All this and i only use those apps mainly for messaging people, my phone has a snapdragon 865 & 12 gigs of ram so this isn't a problem with my phone being on the weak side, also knowing meta's history it's not really a surprise if they are hoarding their user's data in this way, tracking every single move you do it takes quite a lot of processing power.
Probably, or if not then some other distributed problem which is aided by parallel processing. Thanks for bringing this up, I’m glad other people are thinking about this in a clever way and not just “mUh GaMeS, mUh ToWeL”
Yes: image or contextual analysis would be worth doing.
I have the same phone
Anyone know if grow to get isn’t available in Canada? Can’t seem to find it.
The point of this thread is that is is hard on your phone, for negligible gains, and might be running some shady shit in the background. And you’re falling over yourself to get it?