Comment by bigyabai

Apple doesn't care. Most people ignore the ads, which is why Apple can keep adding them to first-party apps without pushback. Rage-protesting ad campaigns probably pumps the Apple ads KPIs.

There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.

This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.