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)

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.

> 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 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.

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 On Windows and KDE (and I presume Gnome though my experience is very out of date), Ctrl shortcuts pretty consistently relate to the window that currently has focus, and Meta/Windows shortcuts relate to manipulating and navigating windows as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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

[delayed]

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

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Comparing the Settings banner as 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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