Comment by AnonC
8 hours ago
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...
Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
Use AppRaven, its better for discovery and actual discussion of app stuf
Worth remembering that Steve Jobs championed "iAds"... https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/13/steve-jobs...
Yeah & they veered so hard into tying to make them tasteful & not suck that it failed. Turns out the real money is in spyware.
How so? This smells like Apple Distortion Field. "Yeah our ads are better. Its the other guys' ads that are bad".
The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.
- Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes
- Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo
- We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.
- AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.
Think Different indeed.
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...
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
> 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.
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What ads does android have? I see ads when I'm inside specific apps, youtube, chrome, etc, but not when I'm using apps that don't have ads?
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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.
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At least Android allows truly alternative web browsers with ad blockers that aren't handicapped by Manifestv3 limitations.
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Android by itself does not have any ads.
I have had until now 4 Android smartphones, which did not have any ads whatsoever.
Like other posters have said, if you do not buy the phone directly, but subsidized by some carrier, then it might come with crap installed on it.
Of course, currently Google appears to make efforts to make Android worse, so it would not be surprising if ads would appear.
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> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I am on Android, I have no ads.
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.
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> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I never see ads on my android phone
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)
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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.
My stock Pixel phone has zero ads. It prompts you to enable things like Wallet and all the AI stuff, but I just turned that off, and it's not bothering me anymore. There are no persitent ads.
> Switch to android which has even more ads?
I use Android
No ads.
I feel left out, thank Dog for that!
Throwing it out there, YouTube is top-of-their-class and ran mostly from ads
YouTube's market is still shit though. High end of that market is those billionaires who pay for actual cinemas in their mansions.
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> 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.
Who _is_ using the App Store these days? It's such a mess.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
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Ive often wondered if there is some magic internally Appleid setting which turns an account into an ad free one for internal execs.
If you could buy into an account like this, with the cost being just over the ad profit from my account, I’d be interested.
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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.
omg, thank you for this
> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option
It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of those boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
Android apps also have the icon-tap-and-hold actions…
Android is just as bad. But it has one huge advantage: you can install apps on it.
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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.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
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Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
it'll still be a net loss. how many customers sign up to icloud+ because of these ads -vs- how much do these ads tarnish the brand apple has spent so much money building?
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
> lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
Going to Google Maps in response to Apple adding ads to Maps doesn't make a lot of sense. Google has been putting ads in Google Maps for many years. Is the view that they're both the same now, in terms of having ads, so they might as well use the one with the better POI data?
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> 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've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
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Customers who are "only" willing to pay $130 for a shirt should get ads, it's fine, because if they didn't want ads, they should pay up for that shirt, to the tune of $500¹?
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
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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.
> it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones.
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
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I guess advertising to people who pay 2000 for a phone are a more valuably audience than those buying phones for 80 bucks.
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
>which is even more bloated and ad infested.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
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We need an open phone platform badly.
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.
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.
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> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
Where would the luxury market go? Asking for a friend
GrapheneOS with FOSS apps is a premium experience but not where non - technical users will go currently because of the setup. Once setup it's very premium.
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
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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.
You mean like when I clicked this article? What an ad filled mess of a website.
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.
Where would they go? Android? That's even more spammy and ad ridden. They sure aren't installing grapheneOS.
Is BMW still doing the $20/mo for heated seats or whatever? All these companies man… not everything needs to be recurring revenue ffs.
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.
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> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
> On the flip side
Pun intended?
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!
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> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
Jobs would truly lose his shit if he saw what Apple has become.
Source - worked at Apple ~2010.
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.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
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I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.
That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.
How did it affect Durov?
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Didn’t Jobs frequently lose his shit when he did work at Apple?
Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…
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'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
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Jobs wasn't always correct about things. There are a large number of examples where he wasn't.
> 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.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
why do you say a hardware VP would be driving adware? totally different part of the apple world, at least when i was there for years.
Sorry. For some reason got him mixed up with Steve Lemay lol.
But still.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye or Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was just picked up randomly out of a box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to checks notes lead all of Apple.
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What are these plethora of eyesore ads because the one that they’re mentioning in this article is the only one I have come across.
> 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.
That’s bad hardening. You are not supposed to use your root account for everyday work.
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
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Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.