Yet another Hacker News

Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy

241 points MC995 1 hour ago 156 comments

busymom0 1 hour ago | parent

I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.

Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.

Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.

boxed 1 hour ago | parent

It's worse than that. App names must be unique, but if you search for the exact (unique!) name, the exact hit isn't even rated on top! I have the app "Bit" on the app store and you have to do quite a bit of scrolling, even if you don't count the ads.

busymom0 1 hour ago | parent

Same problem here too. I have a game called "Unscramble!" and it's impossible to find it with that name. I have scrolled for many pages and can't find it. Meanwhile, many very old apps which haven't been updated in many years are showing in the results.

HumblyTossed 1 hour ago | parent

when i am looking for a specific app on the App Store, I never use the app store to search. I search the web and look for a link to it on the app store. Mostly it's faster that way.

mikeyouse 1 hour ago | parent

I've always found it crazy that if you search for a brand name / trademarked name that it's legal for the search provider to shove a bunch of vaguely related shit above the results unless that brand pays for ad placement to be the top result. Sure, fine, put whatever ad pays the most at the top of the search for "best iOS game" - but when someone searches "Wordle" - that you can't rely on Wordle being the top result is a indictment of the whole ad-supported internet. (Sub 'Claude' or 'Discord' or whatever other search term and it's the same issue)

fedeb95 1 hour ago | parent

I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.

Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.

I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.

I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

boxed 1 hour ago | parent

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.

You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

hnhg 1 hour ago | parent

They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.

wombat-man 1 hour ago | parent

yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.

bee_rider 1 hour ago | parent

>> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

> You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

My first guess would be Linux. Although maybe they used Gnome as a one-off, liked it, and then switched to Windows for some reason.

sholladay 1 hour ago | parent

I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.

The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.

There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

bee_rider 39 minutes ago | parent

I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?

The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.

latexr 32 minutes ago | parent

> Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that

It’s supposed to grow to the size it needs to fit the content. That button was never a “maximise” but a “zoom” (you can confirm this by checking the “Window” menu in an app).

> Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window.

It depends. The general rule is that for apps which can only ever have one window (e.g. System Settings), closing the window quits the app. For apps with multiple windows, closing the window only closes the window.

> And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

We (the users) are the ones who call them traffic lights, though. As far as I’m aware, Apple hasn’t suggested that as an analogy.

> though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great

The old behaviour is still there, if you ⌥+click.

> The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder

The insight there is that (most) apps aren’t really “installed”. You can grab that file (actually it’s a folder, a package bundle) and put it and run it from anywhere.

> Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it.

Unless I’m misunderstanding you, that UI is part of the DMG. If an app is distributed as a zip, for example, you won’t see it.

> but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

But it’s not. You yourself listed an example where it changed (zoom/maximise). Installing apps with PKG files used to be more common. The scroll direction thing isn’t that old, it was only some time after iPhones that trackpads changed the default motion.

eigencoder 29 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, macOS is in a difficult position because some paradigms it's just had forever, and changing them would be unintuitive to established users even though they're not intuitive for a newcomer.

For me, I always felt like the dragging an app into a folder is pretty intuitive. I feel like it follows the unix "everything is a file" philosophy; installing is just putting the app file somewhere on your computer.

But everything else I pretty much agree with you.

thewebguyd 18 minutes ago | parent

All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

delecti 58 minutes ago | parent

The keyboard shortcuts are way more inconsistent on Mac. On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as entities. No such rule of thumb exists in Mac.

The simplest example of that to me is Cmd+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+Tab/PgUp/Dn to cycle through tabs, whereas it's Ctrl for all of them on KDE or Windows. There simply is not a way to deterministically switch to a specific other program/window, where in Windows/KDE you can do Win+1 to move to the first program on the taskbar (and so on with other numbers). And the behavior of Home/End is very inconsistent between programs, with seemingly no consistent way to move the cursor to the beginning of the current line.

eigencoder 11 minutes ago | parent

Does ctrl+a not work for you? ctrl+a and ctrl+e work for me across every app I use on my Mac.

delecti 4 minutes ago | parent

It seems it does. Thank you.

That is a very strange keyboard shortcut when the home and end keys exist though.

fedeb95 31 minutes ago | parent

I have used a lot of systems, and inside them a lot of programs (I make design choices for a living, even if they are at a lower level, UX and intuitiveness exists also in libraries). I was comparing Mac OS to GNOME and not to Windows because Windows is almost the same as Mac OS relative to my point, just worse.

It being different is a fair point, and when designing a system you always make tradeoffs; what I feel is that Apple tradeoffs and design goals are slowly turning more toward additional monetization after you buy the product than focusing on the product per se.

eigencoder 10 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I feel that in my bones. They've started down this road, and I don't know they'll be able to turn back.

RankingMember 1 hour ago | parent

I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.

ryandrake 1 hour ago | parent

Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?

The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.

2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.

delecti 1 hour ago | parent

> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old

Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.

benoau 38 minutes ago | parent

The last Intel Mac was actually just 3 years ago!

The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.

This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.

ryandrake 31 minutes ago | parent

Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.

_ks3e 50 minutes ago | parent

There are a few projects that let you access iMessage on non-Apple devices. I've been using https://github.com/lrhodin/corten-matrix to relay iMessage to Matrix, and there's also https://openbubbles.app/ for something that runs solely on an Android phone.

ryandrake 27 minutes ago | parent

Thanks, I’ll look into both of these.

Barbing 59 minutes ago | parent

Thank you for your comment. We’ve charged F1: The Movie to your default card.

ulimn 1 hour ago | parent

I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.

What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.

On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...

hansonkd 1 hour ago | parent

I feel like Apple is always pushing the dev side forward in pretty awesome but small ways.

I’m super excited for containers. Yes they exist without Apple recreating them, but built in container runtime for the OS is developer forward thinking

ajross 1 hour ago | parent

> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.

Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.

"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.

[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.

RandomGerm4n 58 minutes ago | parent

I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.

OptionX 1 hour ago | parent

IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.

Basically everyone is getting shafted.

LetMeLogin 1 hour ago | parent

Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).

iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.

I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.

warkdarrior 1 hour ago | parent

Wasn't Google ordered by courts to low third party app stores? So more freedom?

kayson 1 hour ago | parent

I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.

Cider9986 38 minutes ago | parent

Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.

The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.

Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.

VPNs work much better on Android.

Settings is laid out better.

Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.

lack of back button is a crime.

can't customize home screen launcher.

clock alarms often doesn't work

default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.

The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.

someguyiguess 3 minutes ago | parent

I prefer iOS UX wise but I agree with you on keyboards, settings, alarms. I loathe the multiple back buttons.

rootusrootus 37 minutes ago | parent

I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.

fedeb95 36 minutes ago | parent

right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".

jlarocco 21 minutes ago | parent

Well even if you think the iPhone UX is great, they'll change it for no reason in the next release.

someguyiguess 4 minutes ago | parent

Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+

ndiddy 1 hour ago | parent

> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:

- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?

- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?

- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?

- Why don't I have any system tray icons?

- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?

nozzlegear 43 minutes ago | parent

- Why do I need a damn extension for everything in Gnome?

fedeb95 37 minutes ago | parent

this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)

some-guy 37 minutes ago | parent

> Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?

Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.

luqtas 36 minutes ago | parent

dios mio!

i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist

your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app - i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the speed sensibility (inside GNOME not on hardware), really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP

now the extension critic i found it valid! but who knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom text box at my top-bar after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)

Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box

armadyl 22 minutes ago | parent

My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.

Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.

jlarocco 17 minutes ago | parent

Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.

There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.

someguyiguess 6 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form. They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!

butlike 1 hour ago | parent

It's a little disingenuous that I can't toggle notifications for Settings.app off in the Notifications section of Settings.

clcaev 1 hour ago | parent

What are the free software alternative phones/tablets and how do we concentrate our support so at least one of them is successful?

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Reach out to Fulu, this should be a project.

https://www.fulu.org/contact-us

dathinab 1 hour ago | parent

best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years

there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible

but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.

The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.

tamimio 1 hour ago | parent

This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.

rjh29 1 hour ago | parent

That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.

bm3719 1 hour ago | parent

My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).

With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.

Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.

CodingJeebus 58 minutes ago | parent

I want (and plan) to have a flip phone one day, but work necessitates that I have a mobile OS that can support things like MFA, unfortunately.

BoxOfRain 52 minutes ago | parent

You might want to check out the Bigme HiBreak phones, they're basically low-mid Android phones with e-ink screens. They work perfectly well for the dull functional things expected of a phone, while rendering all the addictive and spammy patterns pretty ineffective. I've found my one very useful as an intermediate step between a dumbphone and a traditional smartphone.

thoughtpalette 44 minutes ago | parent

I tried out dumb.co. Their flip phone supports maps, MFA, Uber, imessage/call forwarding.

I unfortunately didn't use it nearly as much as I thought I would have. It's also significantly bulkier in my pocket than my 13 mini. Loved the idea though.

hmokiguess 1 hour ago | parent

The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "account@icloud.com". Continue"

I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.

I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.

Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.

californical 1 hour ago | parent

Yep, after being a huge Apple Maps advocate for years to family and friends, I have quit it completely after I got a pop up introducing new ads.

Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.

If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…

a34729t 12 minutes ago | parent

I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...

kqp 1 hour ago | parent

Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.

sda2 1 hour ago | parent

I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.

Barbing 55 minutes ago | parent

Nice. Someone made a site to notify for updates when you have that subdomain blocked.

https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...

This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.

AnonC 1 hour ago | parent

I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.

But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

api 1 hour ago | parent

Ad revenue is bad revenue if you're going for the high end of the market. If it has ads, it's crap.

Apple has all but conquered the high end of the market, but that ad revenue... it's so tempting... soooo tempting... just one hit...

malfist 1 hour ago | parent

What are you going to do? Switch to android which has even more ads?

What we need is antitrust enforcement so there are other options and more competition. The free market can't fix anything if the market is just a race to the bottom between two companies

graemep 55 minutes ago | parent

I do not see a lot of ads on Android but i think that might be my particular (light and limited) usage.

You are right though. A duopoly is rarely a competitive market, especially for complex products (it can be for commodities)

rootusrootus 40 minutes ago | parent

> that might be my particular (light and limited) usage

Probably. There aren't many ads on iOS either aside from when you buy another Apple product and add it to your collection. If you just have the phone you won't see most of the ads mentioned in the article.

kyriakos 50 minutes ago | parent

I am either blind to ads or i see no ads in android (samsung). of course many apps have ads, at least not in the actual OS.

TheDong 47 minutes ago | parent

> Switch to android which has even more ads?

Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier, but you can easily make it have far fewer ads by installing LineageOS, and then installing Firefox with the real uBlock origin (not ublock origin lite).

iOS does not allow you to install alternative browsers, nor can you customize the OS to the level of lineageOS, so iOS simply cannot match the best that you can do on android.

Android has more of a free market because on my pixel phone, I can choose either Google's android distribution, or LineageOS, or Graphene, or build my own ROM. I can use F-Droid or the google play store.

What we need is laws requiring that all iDevices apple makes are open hardware which support installing android, iOS, or a custom OS you build yourself, all hardware-essential drivers are free, and so on. That would let people compete on the software side of thing while Apple's hardware team iterates on that. If iOS really is better on its merits, people would install it even with the option to pick other OSs.

eldaisfish 35 minutes ago | parent

I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

Izkata 30 minutes ago | parent

> Android has more ads if you buy it through a carrier

Or just none? I'm not doing anything special and the only ads I ever see are from some games.

coldpie 37 minutes ago | parent

I had an iPhone 13 Mini. I found it to be much worse about ads.

Every time I opened the system settings, it would insert an ad for an Apple TV Trial after a 2 second delay, causing all the items to shift down, forcing me to either wait every time I opened Settings or else mis-click when it finished loading the ad.

Android doesn't do this, it just shows me the system settings. I was so glad to go back to Android.

curt15 35 minutes ago | parent

At least Android allows truly alternative web browsers with ad blockers that aren't handicapped by Manifestv3 limitations.

Teever 15 minutes ago | parent

I use the Orion browser on my iPhone and it doesn’t have ads.

I also don’t install the YouTube app so I use the browser to visit the YouTube site and have an ad free experience and can even have audio playing on it while the screen is off or I’m in another app so it’s an objectively better experience than using an android device with the YouTube app that is automatically installed on it.

animuchan 10 minutes ago | parent

Android user here, switched from iOS (not because of ads, a different gripe).

Not going to lie, it's a holistically bad experience, very similar to iOS in this regard. But Android doesn't show ads. The closest thing would be the Google Photos pestering to back up to cloud, things like that. It's per app, and usually there are better apps to replace the offending ones. (And vendor garbage can even be uninstalled, although it's very deliberately inconvenient to do.)

Bonus points for having Brave browser with built-in adblock, for the free YouTube Premium-ish ad-free experience.

rapind 1 hour ago | parent

Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.

On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.

I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.

cousinbryce 1 hour ago | parent

Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend

rapind 53 minutes ago | parent

In general, no where yet. I do think the smart phone interface (iOS) could become at least somewhat obsolete soon. As we move more towards a primarily inference interface it will open up the field to more competitors (less moat). That's just my opinion though. Be interesting, as usual, to see what comes out of China in the next few years.

Cider9986 25 minutes ago | parent

GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical uses will go because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.

Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.

readthenotes1 3 minutes ago | parent

Just about everybody with money uses contactless payment and it doesn't look like that works with graphene so I'm not sure I would call it premium except for privacy.

Likewise, no Android Auto

TheDong 51 minutes ago | parent

They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (for the Kindle it was $20 one-time).

For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.

rapind 47 minutes ago | parent

Maybe. How are the seat heater subscription services going for BMW? I thought the market had clearly rejected it, but maybe they powered through and people have begrudgingly accepted it now?

I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.

TheDong 37 minutes ago | parent

I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.

rapind 33 minutes ago | parent

> I think the more comparable thing would be youtube premium (paying to not have as many ads there), and I certainly pay for that.

This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.

gloosx 5 minutes ago | parent

>I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.

It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension

delta_p_delta_x 16 minutes ago | parent

> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?

Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.

bix6 35 minutes ago | parent

Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.

daveidol 32 minutes ago | parent

That one gets a worse rep than I think it deserves.

You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.

genxy 24 minutes ago | parent

It is already built into the damn car. Everyone already paid for it.

techdmn 21 minutes ago | parent

It's bad because you already paid for the hardware, any additional charge is just a money grab.

alentred 14 minutes ago | parent

> On the flip side

Pun intended?

dmux 7 minutes ago | parent

Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!

akudha 9 minutes ago | parent

Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.

someguyiguess 8 minutes ago | parent

You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.

qwerpy 6 minutes ago | parent

At least with this website, ad blockers will hide most/all of the ads. The ads built into iOS cannot be blocked or even dismissed. The future is going to be apps- and OS-level ads.

GuinansEyebrows 1 hour ago | parent

> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.

benoau 58 minutes ago | parent

I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.

alt227 56 minutes ago | parent

Ive often wondered if there is some magic internally Appleid setting which turns an account into an ad free one for internal execs.

mentalgear 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).

In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.

latexr 47 minutes ago | parent

> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products.

I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.

alentred 11 minutes ago | parent

That’s bad hardening. You are not supposed to use your root account for everyday work.

avazhi 15 minutes ago | parent

Jobs would truly lose his shit if he saw what Apple has become.

Source - worked at Apple ~2010.

someguyiguess 9 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.

jimt1234 4 minutes ago | parent

Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.

spottedmarley 1 hour ago | parent

What are you talking about? Apple users love ads. Dial it up a notch, force users to only watch ads. They'll pay twice as much.

0gs 1 hour ago | parent

the quotes around the word ads are pretty infuriating.

herpdyderp 1 hour ago | parent

Is this a bigger problem on iOS 27? Should I continue to stay on 18?

karmakurtisaani 1 hour ago | parent

It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.

xutopia 1 hour ago | parent

I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.

teekert 1 hour ago | parent

I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).

The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".

Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).

I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)

colonwqbang 1 hour ago | parent

The article then ends by displaying an ad for Apple products.

fzeindl 1 hour ago | parent

I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.

I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.

But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.

AFAIK you can click them away.

It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.

dumbmrblah 26 minutes ago | parent

I have a subscription to Apple+, 2 TB, $40 month plan.

I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?

SOTGO 14 minutes ago | parent

From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:

> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."

> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.

There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."

Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.

bigyabai 6 minutes ago | parent

> Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons

That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.

pixl97 56 minutes ago | parent

Wow, I've joked twice in the past two days about Apple becoming Microsoft and it's completely true.

1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.

2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.

3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+

andruby 55 minutes ago | parent

The irony of this website being so loaded with ads that I can barely read the contents is palpable :P

But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.

altairprime 53 minutes ago | parent

Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.

bilekas 51 minutes ago | parent

There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.

coldfloor 51 minutes ago | parent

This is clickbait. The way they put "ads" in quotes every time shows they know what they're doing. I've seen some other comments here complaining about ads in Maps (which I've never used and can't speak to), but this article is specifically calling out the long-existing practice of Settings showing a little badge on new devices that says "You're entitled to some free months of Arcade/TV" or whatever. That's not an ad, or an "ad."

adrian17 46 minutes ago | parent

Agreed, clickbait. The only reason I clicked the article was because I _didn’t_ see any new ads after upgrading iOS, so I was curious what they meant.

bigyabai 7 minutes ago | parent

> new ads

That's the thing, though. Those modal offer popups have been in macOS and iOS for a really long time, and does cheapen the experience like Microsoft and Google products do.

imagetic 51 minutes ago | parent

A true Microsoft-like moment for Apple.

MadrasThorn 50 minutes ago | parent

I want to pay a premium for no built in adds and a more secure product.

If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.

_doctor_love 46 minutes ago | parent

"Just don't look at the ads! What's the big deal?"

davidee 45 minutes ago | parent

It's not just iOS. Final Cut Pro on MacOS now regularly advertises iPadOS Final Cut Pro (which is a paid SaaS tool). Professional applications (arguments about Final Cut Pro X not being all that professional notwithstanding) that advertise like that are almost non-existent in the pro audio and video industry; an Apple pro app advertising, would have been heresy a few years ago.

And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.

Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).

I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).

Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.

skoopsy 45 minutes ago | parent

The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.

reddalo 28 minutes ago | parent

They show a notification for that, which is super annoying.

wat10000 23 minutes ago | parent

The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.

altcognito 41 minutes ago | parent

Can't have ads and tell me you're privacy focused.

jakequist 39 minutes ago | parent

There’s some irony here about an ad-filled tech blog complaining about ads.

Gander5739 32 minutes ago | parent

I don't think it's entirely the same situtation with ads on a blog you read for free vs ads on a device you pay a lot of money for.

bithammerthunde 37 minutes ago | parent

Why put it in 'quotation marks'. It's ads, not 'ads'.

jorisw 31 minutes ago | parent

Because they’re not. They’re just a little added row in the Settings app exclusively.

And you can dismiss them.

apparent 36 minutes ago | parent

It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.

It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.

cillian64 26 minutes ago | parent

You could move the settings app to a less-used home-screen page, or you can remove the settings icon from the home screen entirely.

It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.

jorisw 32 minutes ago | parent

I haven’t seen any of these. iOS 27.0, in the EU fwiw

wolfi1 30 minutes ago | parent

so let me get this straight you pay more than 1500 bucks for a phone and then you get ads delivered to said phone?

uhx 29 minutes ago | parent

its funny reading an article like this and seeing 5 ads across it

amiune 26 minutes ago | parent

The ‘ads’ appear even if you are already paying for those services of the ads

ostensible 25 minutes ago | parent

Apple promotes other Apple products in Apple products. End of the world. This yellow press is annoying. "Journalism". All this outrage to fullfill daily quota of text output.

And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.

molind 15 minutes ago | parent

Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.

alexnewman 15 minutes ago | parent

If it wasn’t broken I wouldn’t mind

someguyiguess 11 minutes ago | parent

The irony of this site having ads that cover 1/3 of my screen on mobile was absolutely lost on the author.

Danox 10 minutes ago | parent

Where are these ads?? Are they when you open up a program?.

splittydev 10 minutes ago | parent

Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice

tharmas 7 minutes ago | parent

Enshitificaion!

emacdona 5 minutes ago | parent

Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.

F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.

I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!

All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"

Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.

I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.

Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.

In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research