I’m really not a fan of this direction for Apple. One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium. Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience.
Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.
I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
THIS. Never promote the idea of "can you please not bother me with ads, there you go there is your extra $100, what, $200? okay sure". That's how mafia operates. Do not promote such.
The only way to avoid that is if that $100 buys you actual ownership, like the ability to have your own secure boot keys and modify the software. So long as Apple still owns your phone, they can alter the deal, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Apple is just admitting like everyone else that not having ads is just money left on the table. Where are people going to go? So yea they’ll keep adding more ads, keep charging more for their phones and there’s nothing anyone can really do about it.
If that happens then people will just switch to the less premium, fully ad supported platform, Android, because the platform have just become commodities.
It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
I'm surprised that this wasn't brought up during trials as an argument against Apple's supposed "curated" walled-garden. There is a bunch of dangerous scammy junk on there.
This is the same experience on Play Store. 100% of the time, the top result when I search is NOT what I want but something completely irrelevant or downright fraudulent and/or misleading. And Google is complicit in this fraud by even selling no 1. search results.
I hate so much the fact that you can’t disable app store search ads. Like shove ads down users’ throat if you want, but at least give the chance to the ones who can’t tolerate them to opt out. It’s hostile on people with attentional dysregulation such as ADHD people.
Yeah it's so cheap! The whole app store feel like that: I go there to install an app I know and need, and am immediately slapped in the face with anime girl dating games. WTF. I feel ashamed if people would see my screen like that.
Absolute garbage experience, and I came from Android expecting to "the luxury platform", I paid 2x what I usually do for a Phone. What a disappointment in step 1.
They already plaster iOS with ads...just for their own services and it's disguised as a system feature.
It's especially obvious if you don't subscribe to paid iCloud and see ads for "Apple Arcade", "Increase iCloud Drive storage space", "Sign up for Apple Music", "Have you heard of Apple Fitness+" or "New show on Apple TV+"-push notifications everywhere. Something that in theory they discourage to use these for promotional messages, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads.
Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Jokes aside, they're not the most valuable company anymore. Nvidia is ahead, I think MS has jockeyed with them on that position a few times and is still on their heels, and Google is ascendant (even ahead of MS as of end of close) after the antitrust clouds started to recede and Gemini started to match Claude and ChatGPT.
They can't sit idly forever if they want to please shareholders, and there aren't many avenues for expansion.
Apple was the first $1T company, the first $2T company, and the first $3T company. Okay, they weren't the first $4T company, but also Nvidia is an admittedly freak situation and isn't in direct competition with Apple.
Point being, why fuck with a strategy that is working? Is being #1 so important that you'll throw it all away because of an unpredictable and outlier event that isn't in competition with you? That seems incredibly irrational and a great way to lost your market advantage. It is incredibly myopic.
On top of this, I find ads on app store search results to be particularly bad. It's a business model that comes with all sorts of perverse incentives. It's so bad for users and legitimate developers.
Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have loads of highly paid people designing and creating beautiful UIs. A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. But that would put most of their employees out of work. So instead they are going to milk and lock in their user base, and hope rivals don't get traction.
Apple hasn’t been much of an innovator for decades. They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition.
It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
Apple spent a lot of time already doing a lot of this with Siri instead of focusing on external knowledge. This didn’t replace their UI people. Voice commands aren’t always appropriate and a UI is still needed.
The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier.
As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off.
Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
> A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping.
I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
1. Their UIs were never beautiful or really good tbh. The iOS26 is the worst so far, and they really went too far this time.
2. They are no charity, they don't care for giving work to their designers.
3. They won't milk their userbase or long, friends and family are already abandoning their ecosystem due to v26's atrocious UI, I'll be doing so also. Adding more ads to the mix will just speed things up.
I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
This is the result of effectively having a duopoly on the smartphone OS market and the extremely hostile environment for post-market operating systems. Apple just has to make sure that they are marginally less shitty than Google, and Google can keep increasing how obnoxious their ads are once Apple catches up.
>Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both.
The way the modern economy works they don't care for maintaining the same revenues and profit level. They need to show they do better than other stocks so people buy theirs.
So if they have to increase margins by doing whatever crap, show ads, etc they will do it.
>I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Half of your wish is granted: you already pay $100 extra for the phone or even more. On top of that, it will also have ads.
I see many ads and irrelevant results in the App Store regardless. So much so, that at some point said "why don't I turn on personalised ads, since I am seeing all this trash anyway", and it turned out it was already on. So I cannot really imagine how this will change things.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Wasn't that part of the deal with iPhones in the first place? You pay more for less but you get a "more premium" experience.
Though lately I feel like Apple is just really bad at being... Apple
It's like they are dumping all the good parts and doubling down on all the bad parts. Things are far from "just working", have more glitches/bugs, but at the same time they're increasing hostility towards developers and walled garden. At least with Android (or linux) I can fix any issues but with Apple it's more "fuck you, deal with it." This was frustrating but passable when it was more streamlined but now? God fucking damnit I swiped one word just fine but when swiping the second word you decide the first word wasn't correct and none of the suggestions are what I'm intending to type but pressing delete deletes both words and now I can't swipe the original word because you already decided I'm not trying to type that word because I pressed delete? This is version of Apple is just rotten... When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up. I mean how long have they even failed to capitalize a singular "i"? What the fuck is going on over there?
Side note:
Try searching "Claude" in the iPhone app store. For me I get a half page ad for Gemini, a small result for Claude, and then a larger result for Grok. Literally the thing I searched for, and has an unambiguous result, is the smallest thing on the page! This is some bullshit dark patterns that is very anti-user.
The crapification pathway where Services can place ads in Product 1) neutralizes a historical Apple differentiating advantage and 2) is probably going to increase monotonically. :(
I think that, on the App Store, ads may be the least worse solution.
Currently, some developers try to get into your view by creating multiple similar apps, as that gets them screen space for free.
Given developers the ability to pay to have their app show above the sea of (almost) clones may revert that trend, as such developers would either have to pay for multiple adverts or to put all their money on one horse.
(It wouldn’t make the iOS App Store good, though. One thing it definitely also needs is clearer information on what features you get for free, what you can buy as add-on, and what requires a subscription)
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.
This. If you pay them $100 for no ads, they'll just come back next quarter to ask for another $100, unless you actually own your device, i.e. are able to modify its software to actually enforce your rights.
This isn't ads all over your phone. It's ads for the App Store. Honestly the App Store looks gamed af as it stands and this might be a move toward curation (instead of letting the App Store descend into SEO hell).
When a company that sits on enormous reams of cash, and positions itself as a premium brand, goes for a fistful of dollars more per customer by showing them ads, it can mean two things. One is that it's a cold calculated move, another, that it's clueless enthusiastic "brilliant idea". In either case, the company is going to burn a lot of its customers' goodwill, and much of its longer-term prospects, in exchange for some more immediate revenue, and higher stock valuation.
What looks like stupidity in doing such a move is more likely cynicism. The corporate officers who will reap the benefits will have retired by the time when their successors would have to handle the fallout. It's not stupidity, it's rot at the highest echelons.
This would explain the really poor recent software decisions, and the general decline of its quality.
But at least Apple still has amazing, best-in-class hardware! Well, like Nokia did. And like Blackberry did. Like Boeing used to.
Yeah. My iPhone SE finally ran out of steam recently and I decided to go ahead and exit the ecosystem as best as I could. Saw grapheneos had just added experimental support for the Pixel fold 10 and picked one of those up. Some annoyances like no tap payment, but honestly a great experience so far, no regrets. Probably not for people who need the interop with other apple devices tho.
Yeah, and no way of using a browser with ad blocker for a decade or to avoid them in apps. If anything, the iOS experience has always been more ad-riddled than Android.
Yeah I’m dreading a change in Apple TV in this direction. I avoid the crappiness of smart tvs by not connecting them to wifi and just using Apple TV, but how long before that becomes crappy too?
There have been ads in App Store for a long time. The upcoming change is that they will also appear further down in search results, right now they only show on top...
AI needs more personal info (like iCloud is not enough yet). Ads provide more insights to user real needs than anything else, and there's inescapable sharing of user behaviour (otherwise ads business model does not work) that allows Apple to collect and process the user behaviour for its own AI training and to sell it to others.
Sitting on a tons of value (even though backed by users trust) gives no rest to Apple's managers who just does not connect the dots between users trust and profits.
Or they think they are a monopoly. Maybe Apple is?
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
I always wonder how apple's marketing team pulled this off.
- If you use any decent browser like Firefox* (or its different clones) one get enhanced privacy, no ads, byepasspaywalls etc.
- Even Chromium forks have decent adblocking
- Using NewPipe (like revanced opensource) for ad free YouTube
All my iOS friends scroll through so many ads - admittedly - SIM/data is paid for my their employers but it is awful experience.
* -> Don't be pendantic and point out yesterday's Verge article that Mozilla is becoming bad.
The same Firefox that only survives because most of its revenue comes from Google?
Your friends are only scrolling through ads because they haven’t installed an ad blocker. They have been available for iOS Safari for over a decade - since iOS 8.
Rather not create a told you so moment, but I switched to Samsung - which has tons of garbage apps pre-installed, and tons of ads - but I'm not atleast buying into a delusion that a private company somehow has my privacy at its best interest just because I paid a premium to them. In the end, I got a good deal with a cheaper price for more features - I can have a real file system access, install apps from anywhere I like, etc.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium.
Both app stores always felt like fumbling in the dumpster. Between the ads and the gambling, if you managed to find an app that treated you right it was like finding a baby who was somehow living despite choking in all the ashes
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
Ma'am they literally sell ads through the apps on their app store
I hate to break it to you, but it's been like this for YEARS now. The frog has been boiled. Line must go up and the market is saturated.
I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms. A lot of us iPhone users think that Android phones are like a used car sales lot with bloat apps and you can't delete Facebook and all that.
You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.
iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.
Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.
You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!
Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.
App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.
Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).
As an Android user, it really is depressing to see screenshots of how clean the Android Market used to be. Nowadays even when I search an app name verbatim it's a crapshoot if I'll actually find it
In future this will be cited as a canonical example of enshittification.
They’ve extracted 80% or whatever of the value out of customers in the current markets and now, rather than figuring out a new value adding product or service they can offer to make another 80% in a slightly different market, they’re going to expend a completely disproportionate amount of effort to slowly and miserably grind out that last 20% in the markets they already operate in.
Ya, they are at the top doing what they are doing. There is little room for growth. So, to continue growing, Apple must now do something different. If ads pull money today, but threaten the brand in 5 or 10 years, then that is a problem for 5 or 10 years from now. With the monopoly in hand, now is the time to squeeze the blood from the stone.
Where do profits fall? In several quarters when users vote with their wallet and let you know about your decisions to disrespect them and reduce their trust in you. It isn't about maximizing profits, otherwise they wouldn't make shortsighted choices. It's cashing in on goodwill that took decades to build. We are a far cry from "only the paranoid survive".
Perhaps, but it exploded in the tech industry as soon as Steve Jobs died.
Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public.
Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty.
Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the time, obviously). And his reputation was such that people listened.
We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
I haven't looked at Apple in a long time. The page reads like a parody, and I had to double check that I was actually on apple.com. The whole industry seems to be in a place where everyone just accepts that most good things are now ruined anyway, so might as well ruin them some more.
> Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search
This is misleading - does it mean people are searching for an app that they already know about and want to download - chatgpt, samsung, gmail etc. Or searching for a topic or problem and see what apps are available - LLM, camera, running etc.
I rarely do the latter - using web search to find reviews or asking an LLM to give me a list comparing the features and then search for the apps in the appstore (trying to ignore the ads)
Exactly. This is just a racket so that bad apps can "steal" downloads by getting in the way. The good apps then also need to pay the racket to fight the bad apps.
Yup, and this is the thing Apple really doesn't have to do because they make plenty of money. Enough that they never need to run ads; but certainly enough that you should never be allowed to pay to be at the top of app searches. It forces the actual best hit to pay to be a hit. I just searched for ‘Jellyfin’ and got an ad for an app that tells you your Spotify stats.
Just to add yo this, the way the AppStore is set up, if you know you want to download the app “MyLocalCoffePlaces7thAppThisYear” and you search for it with the exact name. The first “Hit” will most often be an add for that exact app. And you’ll click it, despite the “natural search result” 5 rows below. This of cause is exactly the intention because the add click means apple gets to charge the app owner for the interaction because it wasn’t just a search it was an add.
I make a point to do exactly not that. Its so seldom relevant or attractive and its almost reflexive at this point.
By default, appstore will show you the scummiest, subscriptioniest, privacy-invasive apps in hopes you'll be lazy and click but thats never been the answer for me. All the gems I found I had to look quite hard for which pisses me off
Doubtful. App Store ads predate European and Japanese regulation, if Apple wants to compete on-merits then they should be removing ads to justify their developer fees.
I searched for "Sparkasse" on the German Apple App Store, the good old staid conservative public savings bank. The top result was an ad for Crypto.com: Buy BTC, ETC, ...
Google Play is plagued with these ads and they are just scams most of the times. You search for an app and get ads from similarly names apps, apps with visually similar icons, ebooks to use the app you searched, etc. They prey on the less tech savvy to install this spam. There's zero user value in them.
When you think about it, why should you trust any app that tries to trick you when you’re looking for something else? It’s such awful behaviour, I don’t want any part of it, I don’t want to reward it so in any place where I can’t forcibly remove this trash I go out of my way to never click on the ad results even if in the rare case it’s exactly what I searched for.
You are also not the target of these ads. My parents, on the other hand? My mum doesn't have a lot of experience with this stuff, and my dad's eyesight deteriorated. They could definitely fall for lookalike apps in an app store.
This seems like something in need of some laws and regulation. It fosters a kind of phishing-light ecosystem. Apple and Google are laughing to the bank while pretending they're helpless against fraudulent apps. They're not, they're creating a marketplace that makes them viable in the first place.
Readit News
Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.
I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
Also available as part of Apple One if you buy 2TB of extra iCloud storage.
It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Deleted Comment
Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted.
Here's a nice ad I ran into recently:
https://imgur.com/a/sq1HFHK
I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is.
If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have to only use external searches to install apps.
Absolute garbage experience, and I came from Android expecting to "the luxury platform", I paid 2x what I usually do for a Phone. What a disappointment in step 1.
It's especially obvious if you don't subscribe to paid iCloud and see ads for "Apple Arcade", "Increase iCloud Drive storage space", "Sign up for Apple Music", "Have you heard of Apple Fitness+" or "New show on Apple TV+"-push notifications everywhere. Something that in theory they discourage to use these for promotional messages, but that hasn't been the case for a long time.
Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Jokes aside, they're not the most valuable company anymore. Nvidia is ahead, I think MS has jockeyed with them on that position a few times and is still on their heels, and Google is ascendant (even ahead of MS as of end of close) after the antitrust clouds started to recede and Gemini started to match Claude and ChatGPT.
They can't sit idly forever if they want to please shareholders, and there aren't many avenues for expansion.
Point being, why fuck with a strategy that is working? Is being #1 so important that you'll throw it all away because of an unpredictable and outlier event that isn't in competition with you? That seems incredibly irrational and a great way to lost your market advantage. It is incredibly myopic.
If iOS goes that route I really don't know what the differentiator is
It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier.
As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off.
Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!
I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
The way the modern economy works they don't care for maintaining the same revenues and profit level. They need to show they do better than other stocks so people buy theirs.
So if they have to increase margins by doing whatever crap, show ads, etc they will do it.
>I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Half of your wish is granted: you already pay $100 extra for the phone or even more. On top of that, it will also have ads.
Though lately I feel like Apple is just really bad at being... Apple
It's like they are dumping all the good parts and doubling down on all the bad parts. Things are far from "just working", have more glitches/bugs, but at the same time they're increasing hostility towards developers and walled garden. At least with Android (or linux) I can fix any issues but with Apple it's more "fuck you, deal with it." This was frustrating but passable when it was more streamlined but now? God fucking damnit I swiped one word just fine but when swiping the second word you decide the first word wasn't correct and none of the suggestions are what I'm intending to type but pressing delete deletes both words and now I can't swipe the original word because you already decided I'm not trying to type that word because I pressed delete? This is version of Apple is just rotten... When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up. I mean how long have they even failed to capitalize a singular "i"? What the fuck is going on over there?
Side note:
Try searching "Claude" in the iPhone app store. For me I get a half page ad for Gemini, a small result for Claude, and then a larger result for Grok. Literally the thing I searched for, and has an unambiguous result, is the smallest thing on the page! This is some bullshit dark patterns that is very anti-user.
"You are holding it wrong", maybe it's intentional and Apple decided that you should use Siri more
You're already paying a huge premium on the phone.
Currently, some developers try to get into your view by creating multiple similar apps, as that gets them screen space for free.
Given developers the ability to pay to have their app show above the sea of (almost) clones may revert that trend, as such developers would either have to pay for multiple adverts or to put all their money on one horse.
(It wouldn’t make the iOS App Store good, though. One thing it definitely also needs is clearer information on what features you get for free, what you can buy as add-on, and what requires a subscription)
Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.
You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
When a company that sits on enormous reams of cash, and positions itself as a premium brand, goes for a fistful of dollars more per customer by showing them ads, it can mean two things. One is that it's a cold calculated move, another, that it's clueless enthusiastic "brilliant idea". In either case, the company is going to burn a lot of its customers' goodwill, and much of its longer-term prospects, in exchange for some more immediate revenue, and higher stock valuation.
What looks like stupidity in doing such a move is more likely cynicism. The corporate officers who will reap the benefits will have retired by the time when their successors would have to handle the fallout. It's not stupidity, it's rot at the highest echelons.
This would explain the really poor recent software decisions, and the general decline of its quality.
But at least Apple still has amazing, best-in-class hardware! Well, like Nokia did. And like Blackberry did. Like Boeing used to.
Sad :(
Both have had ads in apps, in app stores and on websites. This was never a differentiator.
I guarantee you will do both soon
Sitting on a tons of value (even though backed by users trust) gives no rest to Apple's managers who just does not connect the dots between users trust and profits.
Or they think they are a monopoly. Maybe Apple is?
How?
You can get insights into user behavior without ads, and I'm sure Apple is doing that already.
Doesn't making good products that people want give more insight to user needs? Who wants ads?
Deleted Comment
It means you have enough money (status) to have a green bubble.
It means you can afford an adorable little infotainment gewgaw.
Apple products don't look unique because they need to, they look unique so that you can effectively signal your consumption.
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I always wonder how apple's marketing team pulled this off.
- If you use any decent browser like Firefox* (or its different clones) one get enhanced privacy, no ads, byepasspaywalls etc. - Even Chromium forks have decent adblocking - Using NewPipe (like revanced opensource) for ad free YouTube
All my iOS friends scroll through so many ads - admittedly - SIM/data is paid for my their employers but it is awful experience.
* -> Don't be pendantic and point out yesterday's Verge article that Mozilla is becoming bad.
Your friends are only scrolling through ads because they haven’t installed an ad blocker. They have been available for iOS Safari for over a decade - since iOS 8.
Both app stores always felt like fumbling in the dumpster. Between the ads and the gambling, if you managed to find an app that treated you right it was like finding a baby who was somehow living despite choking in all the ashes
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
Ma'am they literally sell ads through the apps on their app store
I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms. A lot of us iPhone users think that Android phones are like a used car sales lot with bloat apps and you can't delete Facebook and all that.
You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.
iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.
Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.
You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!
Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.
App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.
Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).
They’ve extracted 80% or whatever of the value out of customers in the current markets and now, rather than figuring out a new value adding product or service they can offer to make another 80% in a slightly different market, they’re going to expend a completely disproportionate amount of effort to slowly and miserably grind out that last 20% in the markets they already operate in.
Honestly, screw all of this.
With the average lifetime of a phone these days $100 might not justify it.
Where do profits come from? Selling data, innovation, selling hardware, etc.
Biggest profit margins come from selling stuff you have to multiple buyers that costs you nothing to duplicate/produce.
My data can be sold to multiple buyers, multiple times to make that magic profit that shareholders want.
Just wait until everyone on this planet has apple devices, how will apple continue to grow ROI?
Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public.
Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty.
Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the time, obviously). And his reputation was such that people listened.
We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
Turns out that doesn't work, either
They will make a lot more money. Their customers will keep buying their phones.
They want a slick looking, fashionable cell phone. The usability has been horrid forever.
They probably can have ads and increase the price.
This is misleading - does it mean people are searching for an app that they already know about and want to download - chatgpt, samsung, gmail etc. Or searching for a topic or problem and see what apps are available - LLM, camera, running etc.
I rarely do the latter - using web search to find reviews or asking an LLM to give me a list comparing the features and then search for the apps in the appstore (trying to ignore the ads)
By default, appstore will show you the scummiest, subscriptioniest, privacy-invasive apps in hopes you'll be lazy and click but thats never been the answer for me. All the gems I found I had to look quite hard for which pisses me off
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/altstore-japan-launch/
Appraven has collections which are pretty handy, like actually curated lists
This seems like something in need of some laws and regulation. It fosters a kind of phishing-light ecosystem. Apple and Google are laughing to the bank while pretending they're helpless against fraudulent apps. They're not, they're creating a marketplace that makes them viable in the first place.