Project repo:
I did use this app for a couple months on a Samsung S10 and it worked to jam the microphone. No more ads from some brands or products when we talked about the brands or even about wanting a new kitchen. Someone else within my household still did get the brands and advertising about kitchens 
But I did stop using the app because battery-life became much shorter.
If you don’t want to have a listening device, you can also mislead your microphone with a false audiojack when your phone has a jack input.
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Respectfully, are you sure this wasn’t just confirmation bias? I find it dubious at best that this does anything that just… denying the microphone permission doesn’t, especially if the app shouldn’t need it, like a calculator app or something. How do you know none of your other activities such as browsing didn’t give anything away such that the only possible vector for an advertiser to get this info was your microphone?
I read this a while ago and was thinking the same thing. There is no evidence that apps listen to your microphone when you aren’t actively using it (there was a study a while ago but unsure whether that was before or after the microphone and camera indicators). It is more likely either you or someone else looked it up on Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. There are lots of ways to gather info on people without using a device’s microphone. In fact, using the microphone could give the wrong info. Just like you can send a message saying you are at X while the metadata actually says you are at Y. It’s why metadata is so useful for law enforcement: it doesn’t lie. Not unless you go out of your way to change it.
Well this could simply be tested and we did.
We talked about shoe brands we never search or did visit, within couple of hours there were advertisements on the other phone, but not mine with microphone jammer.
This post reveals also something about the technology
Which revers also to
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