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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
The amount of advertising that has permeated our lives is insane. It’s everywhere, and it’s just getting worse.
I use Apple for nearly everything I can. I have multiple iPhones, Apple TV, I use iCloud, I have multiple MacBooks, Apple Watch, AirPods, an iPad… and yet Apple still thinks that’s not enough. They still shove ads in my face to try and squeeze more out of me. They still repeatedly add more dark patterns to try and trick me to use Siri. And they do so unabashedly.
And it’s not just these products either. Advertising brain has taken hold everywhere. I’d say at least a third of my interactions with coworkers these days are them trying to pitch me to use their shitty vibe coded app.
Advertising is one of the root causes of how shitty every product is becoming.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
They are both infuriating, as a long-time user of both.
yeah it took me years to get used to the nuances of MacOS after growing up with windows. Both are fine.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for your comment. We’ve charged F1: The Movie to your default card.
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...
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
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.
I highly recommend Asahi Linux. It runs pretty well on MacBooks with the M1 chip.
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.
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.
Wasn't Google ordered by courts to low third party app stores? So more freedom?
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.
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?
It's a little disingenuous that I can't toggle notifications for Settings.app off in the Notifications section of Settings.
What are the free software alternative phones/tablets and how do we concentrate our support so at least one of them is successful?
Reach out to Fulu, this should be a project.
https://www.fulu.org/contact-us
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
From a recent post by John Gruber:
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...
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...
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
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)
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.
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.
Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ive often wondered if there is some magic internally Appleid setting which turns an account into an ad free one for internal execs.
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.
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.
the quotes around the word ads are pretty infuriating.
Is this a bigger problem on iOS 27? Should I continue to stay on 18?
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.
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.
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 ;)
The amount of advertising that has permeated our lives is insane. It’s everywhere, and it’s just getting worse.
I use Apple for nearly everything I can. I have multiple iPhones, Apple TV, I use iCloud, I have multiple MacBooks, Apple Watch, AirPods, an iPad… and yet Apple still thinks that’s not enough. They still shove ads in my face to try and squeeze more out of me. They still repeatedly add more dark patterns to try and trick me to use Siri. And they do so unabashedly.
And it’s not just these products either. Advertising brain has taken hold everywhere. I’d say at least a third of my interactions with coworkers these days are them trying to pitch me to use their shitty vibe coded app.
Advertising is one of the root causes of how shitty every product is becoming.
The article then ends by displaying an ad for Apple products.
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.
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+
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.
[delayed]
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.
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."
A true Microsoft-like moment for Apple.
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.