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.
People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.
And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.
Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.
> People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.
If I had to guess, the Mafia will have professional economists on payroll telling the bosses about the Laffer curve and emigration.
But in this context, Apple's clearly on the low end of the Laffer curve* because they don't need a million apps, so who cares if the store fees are 15% or 85%, the supply is still there?**; while for emigration, being the least bad of the Apple/Google duopoly is all that is necessary.
* if you take literally that the App store fee is the "Apple tax"
** Answer: Judges in market abuse/monopoly cases because Apple is not actually sovereign; on paper neither is the Mafia, but this is where "monopoly on violence" is a useful definition of a state, in that where anything like the Mafia can exist, the state is de facto not sovereign no matter what it says on paper.
How so? In china, app stores are open to market competition as an eventual consequence of a maoist insurgency.
It's fine if you're personally a coward or you just don't think it's worth it. But not only does it work, it is so far, the only thing that has ever been proven to work.
> definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading
Thinking about it. Your post now is also reductionist. Maybe that is your thing?
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.
Perhaps not even that is completely safe long term, as companies can introduce a locked down dependency, reverse policies (see Google's recent sideloading stance), or find some other workarounds.
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.
It’s not just money left on the table, it’s a way to differentiate from the competition. When someone is trying to decide iPhones vs Android for their next purchase, being able to say “our OS doesn’t have ads” is big. I hear people complain about ads more than just about anything else.
I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, they will keep pushing them.
I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.
Well, my Androids do not have ads because I can install Firefox with uBO and Blockada to block ads even inside apps. I don't know if uBO works in Safari and I don't know if iOS allows for something like Blockada. In doubt (and for other reasons,) I'm on Android. However I'm not the typical user. The typical buyers just want an iPhone or do not want one, like they want one brand of shoes or a brand of bags, no technical considerations. Fashion.
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.
> It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.
That's enshitification in a nutshell.
People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:
The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.
The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.
So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.
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.
I think I ran into one of the most dangerous situations without looking for it. What happens if you install the first result and put your microsoft account credentials in...
It's not clearly labeled, it is a very small label with white text on a pale blue background in an already very busy UI. It is clearly made to look like a real search result and not an ad. On top of this, the screenshots are clearly made to mislead the user into thinking that this is the officiel Microsoft authenticator app by having a large text saying "Authenticator for Microsoft" and a second screenshot with a "Microsoft" TOTP entry.
This is an example of a company whose financial incentives are in direct conflict with the interests of their users, and so they choose to be complicit in borderline fraudulent auctivities.
I knew the top result is an ad and is marked, and still didn't notice the mark. I think there's actual research put into making these markings "visible" but not "noticeable". And on my phone only the top result shows that big picture banner taking all the attention while the rest of the "real" apps are presented as one liners. [1]
But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
A clear blue ad label!! Is this sarcasm? Your remark is so dystopian, you full accepted this as normal.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you and me can reason through this, but my kids get this BS as well, the grow up with this as normal.
You search for something, you don't get what you search for. This is our normal.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
My next phone will be something like FairPhone with e/OS or Sailfish. Or I'll wait for that Graphene hardware partner stuff to finally be revealed. I'm so sick of this bs. You pay a lot of money for something and they slap you with ads. Same on smart TVs, my Philips Hue system (hundreds, maybe thousands of euros I spend on that), ads ads ads.
It’s well known that the App Store is a cesspool of scam apps and ads, they’ve been criticised for many years for it, including by prominent Apple-centric blogs and authors, many of them submitted to HN over the years.
Context: we're migrating to MS cloud services at work from Google so everyone is setting up accounts, authenticators etc. Pretty seamless migration overall btw, guess our admins worked like dogs.
So I post this screenshot in a work chat as a warning (that's why i still have it). All my Android using colleagues tell me "it's the same in the Play Store, watch what you click."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition.
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
Rhetorical question, though; does Apple execute better? Or do they just sell it better?
Because there are many entirely-feasible things that Apple failed to execute well. Xserve, Airpower, Apple Car, all dead and buried in one way or another. Today, all their tentpole successes are difficult to distinguish from pervasive marketing influence. We can't logically use sales, customer satisfaction or user retention as metrics to measure how successful services iCloud or the App Store are. And, with integrated products like Airpods and Apple Watch, the iPhone nearly reaches similar levels of arbitrary lock-in.
I think it’s a little of both. Sure, they have failures, not no one is perfect.
I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.
Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.
The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.
Before that monster you described, there was Windows CE (Windows CE used a different kernel), specifically for mobile. It supported networking and peripherals.
I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that.
But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
It’s still early. The model for
AI that will seem as if it was inevitable in 10 years is likely something we haven’t seen yet. There are a ton of chatbots and they are all in the App Store. Apple brings nothing to the table by doing another chatbot, and their users can still use all of them. I don’t see why everyone seems to harp on that so much.
Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow.
Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
You picked a bad example. The iPod was very innovative (first time you could have all your music with you on the go – instead of having to decide on a tiny selection before you leave home and slowly upload it to your player).
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
The first iPod had 5 GB of storage, less than e.g. the Creative Nomad Jukebox which had 6 GB. If you were around at the time you may remember the (in)famous verdict of CmdrTaco [1]:
. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
So no, the fruit factory did not produce the first device which could haul your entire music collection. What they did is what has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread: they took an existing product - digital high-storage portable music player - and put it in a sleek package with an equally sleek user interface - click wheel etc. Then they marketed the hell out of it to their loyal followers, portraying it as the thing to be used by all the right people. They also locked the thing tight into their own 'ecosystem' so that you could not just hook it up to any old computer and dump music on it like you could do with most other devices in this category except for Sony's - which is not that strange given that the fruit factory seems to have taken quite a few clues from Sony elsewhere.
Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that.
What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.
Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.
> 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.
We've had voice recognition for over a decade, but we have not had “tell your phone what to do”. Heavy structured voice input to a command line is not what we're talking about.
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.
> 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.
Don't you worry - there are many, many ways for GPUs to inject ads :)
Of course you'll first have to dismiss the ad injected by your monitor manufacturer, but before that you'll have to dismiss the ad injected by your mouse manufacturer (or keyboard if you prefer that). Whoops, looks like your OS ads refreshed - drink another verification can! Just in time for your ISP to inject ads. But to dismiss them, first you have to dismiss the ad injected by your mouse manufacturer.
Oh look, another GPU ad! I feel lucky that all these companies want to provide me with the best information about new products and services.
HPC is still only a portion of the overall datacenter market. Nvidia is well-equipped to tackle the networking and cheap RISC VPS portions if they set their mind to it.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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, 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. 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The "increased opportunity" is for advertisers. For users it will mean more ads in their search results. Not sure if they provide users with a switch to turn off the opportunities. Apple doesn't like configuration options too much, i guess users will have to live with more ads and spend extra time to find what they were searching when using the shop search where you go to search for specific apps. Maybe Apple AI will present the user with their desired search result without first scrolling through more ads but i sense that there, too, might be new opportunities.
Thus Apple announces that they're making their already piss-poor, fraudulent app-store search WORSE.
I wrote an app for my company and put it on Apple's app store. It was basically IMPOSSIBLE to find. You could search for the company's exact name (it was the publisher of the app), and it did not appear in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up).
What I caught Apple doing was essentially hijacking the company's (trademarked) name and not showing it, but rather any and every alternate spelling of a similar word... or listings that had no part of the string in their name or description at all. The search string was not present in ANY part of the vast majority of search "hits."
I complained to Apple, and after being blown off once with a bullshit boilerplate response, I mentioned legal action in defense of our trademark. Then they addressed my case with a lie: They claimed that the publisher name is one of the top three search criteria. That is utter bullshit, in practice.
How long until the AppleTV will look like your own in-home billboard? At least on the NVIDIA Shield you could just not install the update that changed the homescreen to incorporate ads (or install an alternative launcher). With the closed eco system of the AppleTV, the options are probably limited if/when Apple decides they need to extract more money from you by blastering ads all over the interface.
Projectivy Launcher, for Nvidia Shield Home Screen.
Before that I was building a rooted firmware and downgrading from that awful advert ridden update. I also tried Dispatch as a home screen replacement, but Projectivy wins.
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, ...
I recently switched to GrapheneOS and it's been great. Letting any sort of commercial entity between you and your computing just seems like a bad idea these days. Linux is top notch, self-hosting has never been easier. There's really no excuse (as a technologist at least) to subject yourself to these increasingly enshittified platforms.
As someone who works in tech for a career it's honestly a bit of an existential crisis. I actively work on a SaaS product but would never even consider paying for SaaS any more myself.
Apple is just another runner in the race to the bottom, and they're trying their best to catch up to 'the leaders'.
One thing I've noticed with the Play Store is that top-level advertised app results are, more often than not, totally unrelated to what I searched for, and therefore completely useless as both a suggestion to the user and an 'opportunity' for the app creator. In fact, it usually invokes a 'this app must be a scam' response from me.
Thank you, Apple, for increasing the number of opportunities for getting scammed and manipulated on your platform. I will be telling my friends.
> Search results ads help customers discover your app right when they’re searching for apps to download.
One would think it's good search that helps users find what they want. But noooo! It's ads!
Ads help users! One has to love this kind of orwellian language. And one has to wonder if it's ever written in good faith? Or is everyone lying as a matter of course, to people who know perfectly well they're being lied to.
Is it even lying if you know they know you're lying?
Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
Your experience illustrates precisely why the ads in the ad store should be worthless. I have never clicked on the ad in the app store. Regardless of how legitimate it looks, I will never click it. The vast majority for ads are clearly either scams or they are at least attempting to piggy back on the popularity of others, and I'll support neither of those cases.
I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
When I switched to iOS from Android it took me a while to realize why App Store search was so bad compared to the Play store (and f-droid, at least back then). It was because the first option was never wat you wanted. The highlighted app at the top was always an ad, never relevant.
I immediately lost some respect for Apple “so this is the expensive luxury platform people talk about?”
I hate that “we” focus on the second derivative to determine value (not just growth but speed of growth). It’s just for the shareholders, meanwhile us customers are looking at a company that is rich beyond believe thinking: “Seriously??”
Enshittification at its best (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), I'm very disappointed that Apple is doing the same thing as everybody else: degrading user experience for short-term increases in profits.
The continuing enshittification of Apple software is so unfortunate. It has already gone too far.
Apple was the one vendor you could buy stuff from to be able to look down on the peasants bombarded by ads all the time. Now, when I specifically search for an app in the App Store, the result is barely on the screen because it is filled with an ad for another. You get deeply embedded ads and nudges for iCloud pretty often. It already sucks. It‘s like they hate USPs.
You can charge a premium for a premium experience, or you can show ads, but not booth. This reinforces my determination to move off macOS and iOS to Linux and GrapheneOS.
The App Store has one slot at the top of the search listing for a promoted app. This will change to multiple slots.
As an app developer, I used to have to outbid everyone to get the one and only spot. Now I need only outbid the top 3 bidders (or however many slots there are).
I advertised for many months back when App Store ads first started, and it was worth the expense because of higher sales. I no longer advertise because the one and only slot is far outbid what that slot is worth to me, and that I can recoup without spending a lot or raising the price for the app.
So I chose not to advertise and keep the app price lower.
You will be able to win more bids, but you'll be bidding for something significantly less valuable, and the entire experience for users will be worsened.
It's the Amazonification of the App Store. Next it'll morph into more ads than legitimate results. Your app won't show up at all unless you pay your mafia dues.
A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.
He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.
Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.
Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.
This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.
Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.
And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!
Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.
Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.
Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.
Other than all the scammy & microtransaction BS for the kids I’m always confused about this as well. I can count on one hand how many “new” apps I’ve installed in 2025 - one - the Bambu app for talking to the 3D printer.
I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.
I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…
If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.
"Increasing opportunity" what could that even mean when you ignore the fact that they actually mean clicking ads out of an impulse? But if you'd even ignore the truth, what could this even be in a positive sense?
Imagine paying $100 a year for the privilege to develop apps, only to have your revenue confiscated to the tune of 15% - 30% and for the same entity to spam users who are looking for your apps, on the only place they can look for apps, with ads for your competitors, or with scummy ads that make you look bad by association.
If such a platform can get your business billions of dollars I think they are happy to have access to such a platform. Businesses are free to partner with other platforms if they don't like the agreement.
Yes, they can go to the 1 other option, where they've boiled the frog completely by matching the App Store's policies, practices and advertising schemes. The entire mobile app and mobile app distribution markets are captured by two entities, including Apple.
I'd buy your suggestion when Apple's duopoly status is rightfully fixed, perhaps by breaking out the App Store into its own independent business, along with the rest of Apple.
They are not free to do that when there is a duopoly and in most countries the platforms don't even allow competitors for that market (especially true for Apple).
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
No one is forcing people to make businesses that release ios apps. A business could be based off of a Windows app. Or they could even not have an app and do business through an existing one like Discord.
Well there's only a single other mobile platform and it has the same pricing as the other one (I'm sure it's a total coincidence, nothing to see here!)
It's crazy that a piece of marketing material like this isn't gated behind an advertiser portal. For a company that's been so professional and protective of its brand this is a pretty insane look. Just posting a public article telling its customers that they're getting more ads soon! Could this article not be gated to the paid developer audience?
This would be like if Disney put a press release out bragging about how Mickey Mouse was going to help sell alcohol sales inside their theme parks.
I hate ads with such a gigantic passion it may be a good thing i'm not in any power to block them all over this universe. Oh well, back to blocking as much possible by any means necessary again. Still rule my own home infrastructure, thank Zeus.
I saw someone using an app that's 'ad-supported' recently, and it reminded me of the vastly better internet/device experience I have as a result of my not-insignificant efforts at ad-blocking at various layers.
It took them 20 seconds and a number of very specific button presses (sometimes mis-clicked because the size of the 'correct area' to dismiss the ad is so small and this was an adult male with our sausage-sized fingers) before they could show me the thing they were intending to show me. And that 20 seconds was after the ad had finished playing.
If I try to search for Mastodon on the App Store the ad at the top of the search results is Truth Social. I cant wait for the second and third results to be X and Threads
/s
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.
> 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.
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.
That's how you self select as a high value ad target
People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.
And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.
Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.
> People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.
If I had to guess, the Mafia will have professional economists on payroll telling the bosses about the Laffer curve and emigration.
But in this context, Apple's clearly on the low end of the Laffer curve* because they don't need a million apps, so who cares if the store fees are 15% or 85%, the supply is still there?**; while for emigration, being the least bad of the Apple/Google duopoly is all that is necessary.
* if you take literally that the App store fee is the "Apple tax"
** Answer: Judges in market abuse/monopoly cases because Apple is not actually sovereign; on paper neither is the Mafia, but this is where "monopoly on violence" is a useful definition of a state, in that where anything like the Mafia can exist, the state is de facto not sovereign no matter what it says on paper.
That seems rather reductionist.
How so? In china, app stores are open to market competition as an eventual consequence of a maoist insurgency.
It's fine if you're personally a coward or you just don't think it's worth it. But not only does it work, it is so far, the only thing that has ever been proven to work.
I am not a maoist.
I meant that this is reductionist:
> definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading
Thinking about it. Your post now is also reductionist. Maybe that is your thing?
> and in the long run, we're all dead.
Well gee, when you put it like that all morality is relative huh?
Of course morality is relative. But still, there's no point to compare something to nothing and say "why bother". Comparisons can be useful.
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.
Perhaps not even that is completely safe long term, as companies can introduce a locked down dependency, reverse policies (see Google's recent sideloading stance), or find some other workarounds.
Apple Ads+, curated selection of premium ads for 9.99€/month.
Also available as part of Apple One if you buy 2TB of extra iCloud storage.
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.
It’s not just money left on the table, it’s a way to differentiate from the competition. When someone is trying to decide iPhones vs Android for their next purchase, being able to say “our OS doesn’t have ads” is big. I hear people complain about ads more than just about anything else.
I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, they will keep pushing them.
I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.
Well, my Androids do not have ads because I can install Firefox with uBO and Blockada to block ads even inside apps. I don't know if uBO works in Safari and I don't know if iOS allows for something like Blockada. In doubt (and for other reasons,) I'm on Android. However I'm not the typical user. The typical buyers just want an iPhone or do not want one, like they want one brand of shoes or a brand of bags, no technical considerations. Fashion.
For now. With Google blocking ad block ability on their browsers, what's to stop them from blocking ad blockers in their OS?
AdGuard works great, it has a native Safari extension and I don’t see a single ad on there.
There's ublock for safari but it's sad compared to Firefox on Android. Also Safari is a dumpster fire on its own
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.
> It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.
That's enshitification in a nutshell.
People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:
The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.
The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.
So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
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.
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.
I think I ran into one of the most dangerous situations without looking for it. What happens if you install the first result and put your microsoft account credentials in...
You say it's not marked as an ad, but in that image there's a clear blue "Ad" label. Are there cases where that label is not present?
It's not clearly labeled, it is a very small label with white text on a pale blue background in an already very busy UI. It is clearly made to look like a real search result and not an ad. On top of this, the screenshots are clearly made to mislead the user into thinking that this is the officiel Microsoft authenticator app by having a large text saying "Authenticator for Microsoft" and a second screenshot with a "Microsoft" TOTP entry.
This is an example of a company whose financial incentives are in direct conflict with the interests of their users, and so they choose to be complicit in borderline fraudulent auctivities.
It's marked as an ad the exact same way they do it on Android and the exact same way it's done on Google.
These responses are a bit surprising. I wonder how people would have responded if this were about Android.
I knew the top result is an ad and is marked, and still didn't notice the mark. I think there's actual research put into making these markings "visible" but not "noticeable". And on my phone only the top result shows that big picture banner taking all the attention while the rest of the "real" apps are presented as one liners. [1]
But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/BkGmPGc
Seriously? I haven't noticed it.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
A clear blue ad label!! Is this sarcasm? Your remark is so dystopian, you full accepted this as normal.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you and me can reason through this, but my kids get this BS as well, the grow up with this as normal.
You search for something, you don't get what you search for. This is our normal.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
My next phone will be something like FairPhone with e/OS or Sailfish. Or I'll wait for that Graphene hardware partner stuff to finally be revealed. I'm so sick of this bs. You pay a lot of money for something and they slap you with ads. Same on smart TVs, my Philips Hue system (hundreds, maybe thousands of euros I spend on that), ads ads ads.
OMG, this requires it's own submission here on HN, I suggest you do it, this egregious. How low has Apple sunk. This is "the luxury brand" people.
It’s well known that the App Store is a cesspool of scam apps and ads, they’ve been criticised for many years for it, including by prominent Apple-centric blogs and authors, many of them submitted to HN over the years.
Meh.
Context: we're migrating to MS cloud services at work from Google so everyone is setting up accounts, authenticators etc. Pretty seamless migration overall btw, guess our admins worked like dogs.
So I post this screenshot in a work chat as a warning (that's why i still have it). All my Android using colleagues tell me "it's the same in the Play Store, watch what you click."
So it really is normal, wherever you go. We're not even surprised about it, let alone outraged.
We've lost.
Or maybe Apple lost. I haven't used their store for application discovery since i had an iPad 1 and it was the latest model.
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.
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.
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.
On android, I love when I search for my bank's app I get a bunch of scam apps taking up all the above the fold results.
If iOS goes that route I really don't know what the differentiator is
You will have a better UX while being scammed
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 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.
> I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours.
In case you didn’t know, there is a medication reminder built into Apple Health that might work better than an alarm.
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.
> They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition.
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
Rhetorical question, though; does Apple execute better? Or do they just sell it better?
Because there are many entirely-feasible things that Apple failed to execute well. Xserve, Airpower, Apple Car, all dead and buried in one way or another. Today, all their tentpole successes are difficult to distinguish from pervasive marketing influence. We can't logically use sales, customer satisfaction or user retention as metrics to measure how successful services iCloud or the App Store are. And, with integrated products like Airpods and Apple Watch, the iPhone nearly reaches similar levels of arbitrary lock-in.
I think it’s a little of both. Sure, they have failures, not no one is perfect.
I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.
Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.
The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.
Before that monster you described, there was Windows CE (Windows CE used a different kernel), specifically for mobile. It supported networking and peripherals.
And it was very successful for years.
They innovate in design and user experience.
I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that.
But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
It’s still early. The model for AI that will seem as if it was inevitable in 10 years is likely something we haven’t seen yet. There are a ton of chatbots and they are all in the App Store. Apple brings nothing to the table by doing another chatbot, and their users can still use all of them. I don’t see why everyone seems to harp on that so much.
Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow.
Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
> But their innovative design tends to be
They should release iphone pocket mankini edition as their hallmark of innovative design
You picked a bad example. The iPod was very innovative (first time you could have all your music with you on the go – instead of having to decide on a tiny selection before you leave home and slowly upload it to your player).
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
The first iPod had 5 GB of storage, less than e.g. the Creative Nomad Jukebox which had 6 GB. If you were around at the time you may remember the (in)famous verdict of CmdrTaco [1]:
So no, the fruit factory did not produce the first device which could haul your entire music collection. What they did is what has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread: they took an existing product - digital high-storage portable music player - and put it in a sleek package with an equally sleek user interface - click wheel etc. Then they marketed the hell out of it to their loyal followers, portraying it as the thing to be used by all the right people. They also locked the thing tight into their own 'ecosystem' so that you could not just hook it up to any old computer and dump music on it like you could do with most other devices in this category except for Sony's - which is not that strange given that the fruit factory seems to have taken quite a few clues from Sony elsewhere.Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that.
What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.
Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.
> Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base
Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!
> 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.
We've had voice recognition for over a decade, but we have not had “tell your phone what to do”. Heavy structured voice input to a command line is not what we're talking about.
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.
Presumably the person who wrote this comment is too young to have used Apple products prior to 2010?
They do have a point though, because you can't continue to use a phone made by Apple in 2010.
I would if I could!
Apple has been a mess since they lost Steve Jobs.
> 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.
What will happen to nvidia when their market becomes saturated? That seems inevitable.
Don't you worry - there are many, many ways for GPUs to inject ads :)
Of course you'll first have to dismiss the ad injected by your monitor manufacturer, but before that you'll have to dismiss the ad injected by your mouse manufacturer (or keyboard if you prefer that). Whoops, looks like your OS ads refreshed - drink another verification can! Just in time for your ISP to inject ads. But to dismiss them, first you have to dismiss the ad injected by your mouse manufacturer.
Oh look, another GPU ad! I feel lucky that all these companies want to provide me with the best information about new products and services.
Maybe just reduce production amount an increase prices? Profit probably continues, but on a lower level, I guess.
HPC is still only a portion of the overall datacenter market. Nvidia is well-equipped to tackle the networking and cheap RISC VPS portions if they set their mind to it.
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.
> and isn't in direct competition with Apple.
Of course they are, they are on the same stock market.
What, are you one of those that believe competition is still about capturing markets and appeasing customers?
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...
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.
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.
> When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up
"You are holding it wrong", maybe it's intentional and Apple decided that you should use Siri more
It is intentional: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232528
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)
Yeah. It’s hard for me to get worked up about ads in a store.
This looks like enshittification :(
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 :(
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
Both have had ads in apps, in app stores and on websites. This was never a differentiator.
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.
there was definitely a time when iOS App Store did not have ads
And both have an advertising id built-in into the OS (which I find insane as a concept)
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone
You're already paying a huge premium on the phone.
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.
> 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.
You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
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.
The John Sculley Apple is back, the time of being nice for survival reasons is long gone.
“I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.”
I guarantee you will do both soon
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?
> Ads provide more insights to user real needs than anything else
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?
Well if the app creator isn’t going to pay Apple money. You have to pay Apple money. If you don’t like ads. Thank Tim Swineey
Ads is just a tool, I hope Apple does it right for UX, as it is planning to do w/ Maps
A bicycle... no, a hamburger for the mind.
> 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.
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.
they are tarnishing their brand.
> 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’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
With the average lifetime of a phone these days $100 might not justify it.
Apple has decayed into a bog-standard $$$-maximizing lawnmower. Any products, services, ads, or other performances are merely incidental to that goal.
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.
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
Best to find a link to a companies app from their website - searching in the store is asking for trouble. Too many hijacked search results.
Greed is the law of capitalism
How does market capitalism work again? Shareholders what higher ROI each quarter. Where does that come from? Profits.
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?
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".
but, but, think of the shareholders!
Enshittification is Inevitable.
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.
> We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
Worse. The bad actors have become the authority figures.
> Enshittification is Inevitable.
Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
> Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
I think we shouldn't hope those changes, that could lead to interesting times.
but but but but 'if you're not paying then you are the product'
Turns out that doesn't work, either
The App Store is an absolute sh!t hole of an experience. Irrelevant ads, impossible to find anything decent. It’s the internet of 1998 pre google.
Have you browsed Google Play? :) Or Amazon appstore for that matter.
Why? Does Apple allow you to download apps from Google Play or Amazon?
In think the point of your parent comment is those are as bad or worse.
In EU and Japan it would (have to) if Google/Amazon managed to provide iOS binaries.
If Apple had always strived to for their products suck as much as others, they would never have gained any traction.
> 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.
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.
Shame on Apple. And thanks for making me consider alternatives for me and my relatives
In EU, and freshly Japan, alternative iOS app stores are allowed. Let’s hope they manage to use this to their advantage.
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/18/altstore-japan-launch/
"Increase opportunity in search results" is hilarious PR. Obviously it's to increase revenue.
No worries, Apple will execute ads better than others. We will love with it and praise Apple for it.
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.
The "increased opportunity" is for advertisers. For users it will mean more ads in their search results. Not sure if they provide users with a switch to turn off the opportunities. Apple doesn't like configuration options too much, i guess users will have to live with more ads and spend extra time to find what they were searching when using the shop search where you go to search for specific apps. Maybe Apple AI will present the user with their desired search result without first scrolling through more ads but i sense that there, too, might be new opportunities.
Thus Apple announces that they're making their already piss-poor, fraudulent app-store search WORSE.
I wrote an app for my company and put it on Apple's app store. It was basically IMPOSSIBLE to find. You could search for the company's exact name (it was the publisher of the app), and it did not appear in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up).
What I caught Apple doing was essentially hijacking the company's (trademarked) name and not showing it, but rather any and every alternate spelling of a similar word... or listings that had no part of the string in their name or description at all. The search string was not present in ANY part of the vast majority of search "hits."
I complained to Apple, and after being blown off once with a bullshit boilerplate response, I mentioned legal action in defense of our trademark. Then they addressed my case with a lie: They claimed that the publisher name is one of the top three search criteria. That is utter bullshit, in practice.
How long until the AppleTV will look like your own in-home billboard? At least on the NVIDIA Shield you could just not install the update that changed the homescreen to incorporate ads (or install an alternative launcher). With the closed eco system of the AppleTV, the options are probably limited if/when Apple decides they need to extract more money from you by blastering ads all over the interface.
Projectivy Launcher, for Nvidia Shield Home Screen. Before that I was building a rooted firmware and downgrading from that awful advert ridden update. I also tried Dispatch as a home screen replacement, but Projectivy wins.
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, ...
The title should probably mention that this is for search results in the App Store, which already had ads.
Still an unfortunate development though.
I recently switched to GrapheneOS and it's been great. Letting any sort of commercial entity between you and your computing just seems like a bad idea these days. Linux is top notch, self-hosting has never been easier. There's really no excuse (as a technologist at least) to subject yourself to these increasingly enshittified platforms.
As someone who works in tech for a career it's honestly a bit of an existential crisis. I actively work on a SaaS product but would never even consider paying for SaaS any more myself.
Apple is just another runner in the race to the bottom, and they're trying their best to catch up to 'the leaders'.
One thing I've noticed with the Play Store is that top-level advertised app results are, more often than not, totally unrelated to what I searched for, and therefore completely useless as both a suggestion to the user and an 'opportunity' for the app creator. In fact, it usually invokes a 'this app must be a scam' response from me.
Thank you, Apple, for increasing the number of opportunities for getting scammed and manipulated on your platform. I will be telling my friends.
What baffles me is when people defend this broken wallet garden to be used by their grandmas.
Surely they won't be able to tell which one of the 20 ChatGPT apps is the correct one in search results.
> Search results ads help customers discover your app right when they’re searching for apps to download.
One would think it's good search that helps users find what they want. But noooo! It's ads!
Ads help users! One has to love this kind of orwellian language. And one has to wonder if it's ever written in good faith? Or is everyone lying as a matter of course, to people who know perfectly well they're being lied to.
Is it even lying if you know they know you're lying?
Related: How Apple’s ad targetting works https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
> App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy
Well put. So it is a combination of a walled garden and a torrent search; just not sure whether it's the best of both worlds or the worst.
> torrent search levels of trustworthy
Proper torrent search sites have a comments section that you should check before downloading anything :)
Your experience illustrates precisely why the ads in the ad store should be worthless. I have never clicked on the ad in the app store. Regardless of how legitimate it looks, I will never click it. The vast majority for ads are clearly either scams or they are at least attempting to piggy back on the popularity of others, and I'll support neither of those cases.
I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
> Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
Exactly this, the same reason why Facebook relies on scam ads for at least a third of their revenue.
30% curation tax doing a wonderful job.
> I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
join a private tracker friend :)
There are also a lot scummy Microsoft Authenticator clones with near identical icons being advertized ahead of the real one.
Be careful in the App Store!
When I switched to iOS from Android it took me a while to realize why App Store search was so bad compared to the Play store (and f-droid, at least back then). It was because the first option was never wat you wanted. The highlighted app at the top was always an ad, never relevant.
I immediately lost some respect for Apple “so this is the expensive luxury platform people talk about?”
I hate that “we” focus on the second derivative to determine value (not just growth but speed of growth). It’s just for the shareholders, meanwhile us customers are looking at a company that is rich beyond believe thinking: “Seriously??”
Enshittification at its best (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), I'm very disappointed that Apple is doing the same thing as everybody else: degrading user experience for short-term increases in profits.
The continuing enshittification of Apple software is so unfortunate. It has already gone too far.
Apple was the one vendor you could buy stuff from to be able to look down on the peasants bombarded by ads all the time. Now, when I specifically search for an app in the App Store, the result is barely on the screen because it is filled with an ad for another. You get deeply embedded ads and nudges for iCloud pretty often. It already sucks. It‘s like they hate USPs.
"increase opportunity in search results" - what a bunch of bollocks
You can charge a premium for a premium experience, or you can show ads, but not booth. This reinforces my determination to move off macOS and iOS to Linux and GrapheneOS.
The App Store has one slot at the top of the search listing for a promoted app. This will change to multiple slots.
As an app developer, I used to have to outbid everyone to get the one and only spot. Now I need only outbid the top 3 bidders (or however many slots there are).
I advertised for many months back when App Store ads first started, and it was worth the expense because of higher sales. I no longer advertise because the one and only slot is far outbid what that slot is worth to me, and that I can recoup without spending a lot or raising the price for the app.
So I chose not to advertise and keep the app price lower.
You will be able to win more bids, but you'll be bidding for something significantly less valuable, and the entire experience for users will be worsened.
It's the Amazonification of the App Store. Next it'll morph into more ads than legitimate results. Your app won't show up at all unless you pay your mafia dues.
How long until we get ads in our lockscreens like in certain android devices?
Serious question: who still goes on the App Store, and why? Personally, I haven’t searched for anything there except once out of boredom in 5 year
It's literally the only way to download apps.
A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.
He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.
Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.
Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.
This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.
Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.
And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!
>but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade
So what already happens when you ssh into an Ubuntu server to run apt upgrade to manually update it. It turns out people don't care that much.
$SEARCH_ENGINE engine is nowadays copilot or chatgpt, both ad-free if you use a simple ad-blocker.
For how long? Months?
4 years, 11 months, and 3 days. Guaranteed. So not an issue right now.
Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.
Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.
> It's literally the only way to download apps.
Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.
Other than all the scammy & microtransaction BS for the kids I’m always confused about this as well. I can count on one hand how many “new” apps I’ve installed in 2025 - one - the Bambu app for talking to the 3D printer.
I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.
I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…
If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.
Ads in the App Store are filthy and everyone at Apple should be ashamed. The responsible people should be fired.
"Increasing opportunity" what could that even mean when you ignore the fact that they actually mean clicking ads out of an impulse? But if you'd even ignore the truth, what could this even be in a positive sense?
Imagine paying $100 a year for the privilege to develop apps, only to have your revenue confiscated to the tune of 15% - 30% and for the same entity to spam users who are looking for your apps, on the only place they can look for apps, with ads for your competitors, or with scummy ads that make you look bad by association.
If such a platform can get your business billions of dollars I think they are happy to have access to such a platform. Businesses are free to partner with other platforms if they don't like the agreement.
Yes, they can go to the 1 other option, where they've boiled the frog completely by matching the App Store's policies, practices and advertising schemes. The entire mobile app and mobile app distribution markets are captured by two entities, including Apple.
I'd buy your suggestion when Apple's duopoly status is rightfully fixed, perhaps by breaking out the App Store into its own independent business, along with the rest of Apple.
They are not free to do that when there is a duopoly and in most countries the platforms don't even allow competitors for that market (especially true for Apple).
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
No one is forcing people to make businesses that release ios apps. A business could be based off of a Windows app. Or they could even not have an app and do business through an existing one like Discord.
Well there's only a single other mobile platform and it has the same pricing as the other one (I'm sure it's a total coincidence, nothing to see here!)
It's crazy that a piece of marketing material like this isn't gated behind an advertiser portal. For a company that's been so professional and protective of its brand this is a pretty insane look. Just posting a public article telling its customers that they're getting more ads soon! Could this article not be gated to the paid developer audience?
This would be like if Disney put a press release out bragging about how Mickey Mouse was going to help sell alcohol sales inside their theme parks.
I hate ads with such a gigantic passion it may be a good thing i'm not in any power to block them all over this universe. Oh well, back to blocking as much possible by any means necessary again. Still rule my own home infrastructure, thank Zeus.
I saw someone using an app that's 'ad-supported' recently, and it reminded me of the vastly better internet/device experience I have as a result of my not-insignificant efforts at ad-blocking at various layers.
It took them 20 seconds and a number of very specific button presses (sometimes mis-clicked because the size of the 'correct area' to dismiss the ad is so small and this was an adult male with our sausage-sized fingers) before they could show me the thing they were intending to show me. And that 20 seconds was after the ad had finished playing.
How do people settle for such an experience?
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310986
If I try to search for Mastodon on the App Store the ad at the top of the search results is Truth Social. I cant wait for the second and third results to be X and Threads /s