Posted by ksec 1/19/2026
Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen.
If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products.
It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
They sell a walled garden. If shit gets inside the walls, we might as well come out.
I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Let the ad sellers pay if they’re the main costumers.
Problem here is that when you decide you no longer wish to pay the tax and want to exit the walled garden, you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go, and add complexity and cost to your setup.
I actively avoided relying on iCloud even when it was the sane option, but many people that will feel like the walled garden is no longer suiting them will have to figure out ways to move files, emails, and (crucially) communication channels out of the ecosystem.
I think a large number of them will decide that it's not worth the hassle, and remain walled in. Which is the idea to begin with.
Sure, this is HN, and many will say "screw it, I'll Nextcloud my way out", but the genpop will remain within the gilded cage.
This is still true even if you use a Mac as an intermediary (if you have one), which also implies that you're probably going to be using iCloud to sync those as well.
Bottom line: it's exceptionally difficult, even for tech-forward Apple-philes, to move your own data off your iPhone without actually going DEEPER into the Apple ecosystem, and Apple has been actively removing capabilities and neutering apps like NextCloud etc (always for 'privacy' or 'security' reasons) to make it MORE difficult to exfil your own data.
Cloud storage of pictures is not an issue as I do regular backups (we all should, we’re a false positive account termination away from crying otherwise).
What’s else is there? I’m not American so no iMessage, I struggle to find some other blocker.
Which is?
Every time I got an Apple product, it felt like a step back. They were late to widgets, late to AI. Their security is historically poor.
> Their security is historically poor.
Citation needed.
It's not a bad thing to be late to AI. Most of it has shown to be a complete waste of time, money and resources.
As for poor security - this has got to be a joke, right? If anything, it's the Windows world that has a piss poor track record when it comes to security. Apple meanwhile, unless you're a terrorist or drug kingpin, no way the police can access a properly protected device.
> It's not a bad thing to be late to AI.
This is just cognitive bias. If Apple was doing well with AI, you'd be praising it.
I've been having gemini look at my screen and add events to my calendar in 2 clicks.
Not to mention... I don't really have lots of faith in the people who don't see the value in AI. Its halved my programming costs if not more.
>As for poor security - this has got to be a joke, right? If anything, it's the Windows world that has a piss poor track record when it comes to security. Apple meanwhile, unless you're a terrorist or drug kingpin, no way the police can access a properly protected device.
You do you then. I need my device secured. I won't explain because it makes myself a target.
That's a very outdated point of view. All mobile ecosystems have practical feature parity. Convenience - that's a tricky one. With Apple stuff, you only have convenience if you're one of the bubble people who has their entire family and close friends in the Apple ecosystem. The reality outside that is that for every 1 iOS person, there are ~2 non iOS people they need to collaborate with and share stuff. Convenience has left the room a long time ago.
I’m still dealing with the fallout even today. There are tons of things in 2026 that you can no longer conveniently do without an Apple or Google mobile OS. For example, you’re out of all the group chats. No more WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. You can’t have those on a computer unless you have the account tethered to a phone.
The only thing right now that I need my Android phone for is Duo Mobile authentication to log into my work computer.
to me, no idea what you are talking about, i find the iphone/Apple experience to be a huge pita, all the time. i love unix for the swiss army knife of general purpose tools, not the many different garden walls with no garden inside.
the reason fsckboy doesn't leave is that all his bitches expect it, otherwise, gone in 60 seconds.
Those external people are going to run Apple just like whatever other companies they were running before. You need to keep the vision alive and promote people internally who understand that vision to keep running the company.
Being publicly traded probably doesn't help either.
However, the alternatives are currently illegal, so your point doesn't hold
Having never been in there, I can't imagine buying in now.
I'm not saying I like what Apple is doing here, but I trust Google a lot less with my data.
I am not aware of any alternatives that exist for Apple devices though
First just don't use Gmail, docs, search, chrome and co. But even better get a Pixel with Graphene and Google's invasive tactics are even more limited.
However it is sad that a company like Apple that used to produce superior hardware with superior UX is falling apart on all fronts - hardware (especially pricing), UX (hello glass design), software (macos just getting worse every release without adding ANYTHING of value)
And now introducing more and more ads while keep selling you "pro" laptops with 512GB SSD :-/
You don't. LineageOS works without a Google account. I would be surprised if GrapheneOS worked differently.
Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.
People definitely do this. When I worked for a large social media company, we almost always had ads in position 2. People noticeably (in the aggregate data) spent less time with this position in the viewport.
But honestly, most people are just extra impressions/revenue for most advertisers, there's a much smaller number of people who drive ~all of the conversions.
in every search ive done on the app store in the last several years, I'm looking for a specific app. That app is never the ad result at the top, its always the second result down.
Right now i did a search for several different popular social media apps. TikTok was the top 'ad' result for all of them. Then i did a search for TikTok and got some random app i've never heard of as the 'ad' result. Its like it doesn't want the same app to fill both of the top two slots, but there is always an ad. So what you are looking for is always second on the list. Never first.
Because of this, why would i ever click the ad? If i search something less-specific like "flashcard app" the best result will fill the second slot. Something else goes in the ad slot.
I wish there was regulation enforcing background colors for ads.
But how would we know what should or shouldn't exist, if someone doesn't bring it into existence first so we can figure it out?
There are many other things that would be a net positive of they didn’t exist.
Just because something can exist, just because some people might want it to exist, doesn’t mean we’re better off. Honestly I think the Amish and their measured approach to technology is correct (though my rubric would be different than theirs).
The solution is to stop caring so much about what you miss. Whatever it is, it’s not worth the unrelenting assault on your senses.
Replace your FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out).
the Sponsored Brands banner at the top of the search results page, and the Top of Search Sponsored Products slots.
[1] https://advertising.amazon.com/lp/build-your-business-with-a...
It's a quip, anecdata, not quantitative analysis————why would you need to "confirm that exact percentage"?
I'm not saying it's good or that therefore Amazon or Apple should be excused. I'm just saying, the naieve me thought Coke was on the end of the isle because the store thought it's what customers wanted. No, it's what Coke wanted, and paid for. And it's the same with Amazon and now Apple.
> Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there.
Often, though endcaps are also used to move product that wasn't selling well and you want gone. But in any case, as a consumer you're usually better off ignoring products on the endcaps.
Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
That's default firefox behavior.
It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful.
Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.
E.g. I search for "nuk baby bottle warmer" and the first result is a window washing squeegee and the second is a bathroom grime scrubber.
I used to look for stuff on Poshmark but now when you search it is almost impossible to find your search results as everything is "Promoted". So I just gave up and stop using their product.
The internet is over. Pack it up.
On an app I have to see the ad.
On a website I can use Firefox + ublock origin and I won't see an advert.
But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that.
Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.
(aka a personalized Ad)
Lets say you compete in a market with 3 players.
You have a 95% trust rating.
Your other competitors have a 55% and 35% trust rating.
Modern capitalism would tell you that you have a 40% trust margin you can burn to make more profit with.
I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
They've hit the limits of iPhone sales - and upgrade cycles are slowing. Hardware products in general are "streaky" - ie. demand and sales drop in the period after a new product is released, so how often can you produce a new version and what happens if that new version isn't a hit?
Whereas subscriptions provide recurring revenue. And services, in general, can bring in more money without an equivalent increase in costs.
I recently read "Apple in China" and one of the things I hadn't realised is how many people at Apple came from IBM under Tim Cook's reign. What he's done for Apple is turn them into a predictable, consistent, revenue machine.
Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape.
But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege.
Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
Due to the previous idiot's brilliant idea of not allowing major version paid upgrades, everything is either a subscription or an IAP fest.
The "App Store" should be called the "Gacha Store".
This new idiot it just ruining whatever was left to be ruined, software wise.
Too bad about the hardware.
Great ecosystem for my aging parents, but not for me.
See, instead of leaving a lot of cash on the table to be way better than the other, they'll pocket that cash and become just a little bit better than the other
No choice. Most Apple users usually defend by telling... they are not as bad a Google or now it is impossible to escape ecosystem.
And often, the only reason they do that is due to legal requirements.
Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.
Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.
Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.
Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.
Amazon isn't blameless here, either.
So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.
Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.
Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark
Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.
Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.
What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?
Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.
I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
Some fraction of consumers are duped. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many knockoffs.
If I enter Acme Orbital Thrusters into a search engine, the exact match, their actual website, must be the top hit. Otherwise it's a racket, not a search engine.
Or what about when there are multiple trademarks for different goods and services from different companies that are all exact matches for the search terms?
This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.
I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
That's fine, ads should be downright forbidden and get no "freedom of speech".
It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).
That is pro-transparency and ethics, not anti-speech.
That's specifically what I'm proposing in the post you replied to?
Thanks. I misread a sentence, missed your nuance, and then off to the races.
Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode.
If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder.
Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales.
The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.
(It's a contrived hypothetical, but the closest I could get to a meat-space version of search keywords.)
For bare trademark searches, we could write laws that allow competitors, but restrict taxing and bidding off the reserved mark above the trademark owner's result.
There used to be plenty of ways to get in touch with the owner of a brand directly. Now they're all being camped by rent extractors.
Google is chief amongst those taxing businesses. They are not government anointed to perform this role. Google should not be allowed to do this.
As a business gets more successful, Google extracts more money from them. Simply trying to access the business will send revenue to Google.
Google took the standard URL bar and turned in into a rent extraction product. This should have been illegal, but our regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google adds costs to every business, every product, every entrepreneur. They should stick to servicing user inquiries, not stuffing ads in front of simple trademark lookup.
It's time to knock on their doors of regulatory bodies, both in the US and abroad. No more trademark camping from the "URL bar".
If google wants to rebrand to an advertising platform instead of a search engine, I will accept that argument. And I mean truly, fully rebrand, making it clear to everyone that visits.
Until then, their rent extraction is a real problem. They're pretending to return information and putting ads in the way in a deliberately deceptive manner.
Companies wouldn't feel nearly as compelled to bid on their own name if that deception wasn't there.
This is NOT okay. Google is using monopoly power to do this. They have inserted themselves as parasitic middle men. No different than a cymothoa exigua eating away at the tongue.
This is not advertising. It's a road bump. It's getting throttled by the mafia. It's a protection racket on people's hard-earned brands. A tax on cognition and communication.
Google is a villain here. They are not offering value or service or anything useful. They're extracting.
They're the Harvey Weinstein of the internet here -- nobody wants to do business with the guy, but he's there and he's asking you to do what he wants. You can go along, and do the thing, or you can say no and completely lose your customer.
The customer that already knows you by name. You made it this far. Now there's this gross middle man asking you to give up.
So you let Harvey Weinstein slip his hands in. Cost of doing business.
That's what Google is in this story.
This isn't advertising. It's the R-word, being perpetrated because of a lack of the other R word: healthy market regulation.
90 percent of all humans on the planet are being fleeced by this. Every time you put something into the URL bar, Google gets a piece of the action.
What I'm saying is, when these are brand names, this is theft. Highway robbery. Monopolistic pillaging.
Google needs a slap down.
Brands can ask you to add them to your contacts with their website in their vcard. They can prompt you to bookmark them. They could publish a feed for you.
Sure Google can get us to routed in a way we’re all conditioned to depend on, but there are plenty of other ways to get to your destination. There must be 50 ways to leave…
Is it a coincidence that they started exploring this once they've been forbidden from collecting the "Apple Tax"? This is exactly why I've been arguing against preventing Apple from collecting money from developers: the laws of capitalism will force them to collect money somewhere else, and putting ads in their app store is the obvious next step.
To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.
Everything in the app store is an ad - all the content is produced to get people to download Apps. It's just that some is 'promoted'.
I'd be interested in hearing from any HN readers that use the App store to actually discover apps - don't people do Web/Reddit searches to see what people are using and rate and then search by name? Even an LLM can provide an overview of what's available and summarise features, drawbacks, and reviews.
I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.
Apple is having its Ballmer moment. Google did too before AI lit the fire under their feet.
Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella? Steve Jobs was the original.
>Ensheetification is a newly coined, informal term, likely from Hacker News, describing the trend where web/app interfaces become dominated by large, card-like "sheets" or panels that slide up, covering content, similar to how apps like Google Maps, Instagram, and Apple's iOS use full-screen or partial-screen overlays, effectively "sheeting over" previous views to present new information or actions.
I propose MSDS in stead, short for My Sheet Don't Stink.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
The alternative business decision making framework is the Jobs method: Do the thing that you know is good, because of your pure human sentiment.
Ensheetification puts the focus on what's happening within the business to cause this.
It probably doesn't help that I just spend an hour trying to figure out how to update to 18.7.3 on my iphone. It turns out you can't. The only way to get security updates now is to upgrade to iOS 26. Apple no longer supports security updates to old major versions if the device is capable of running the new major release. Apple is no longer making choices that benefit customers, but ones that benefit project managers.
For the last 20 years this is exaclty what Apple fans have believed. Its refreshing to see people finally realise that they are just a normal company, making money at the expense of their customers. Its just they dont hide it as well anymore.
I’ve seen enough people defend these companies and their billionaire CEOs often and fervently enough, even in response to news that unilaterally fuck customers, that I’m not convinced people would stop buying even in your scenario.
From moment on, Google search tanked: from a userexperience perspective and a useracquisition-vehicle perspective. Lots of companies could have been built only Google worked 15years ago the way that Google did work. Lots of companies today do not have the same lane anymore, so spending more and more on advertising....
Maybe I’m too old, but if Apple fixed every single bug and added absolutely zero features until the day of my death, I would still be a satisfied customer.
The problem is not lack of innovation, the problem is that everything barely works.
They’ve done it recently with their hardware. Past time for the other side of the house to refocus.
Platform agnostic choices, because clearly Apple is not to be trusted anymore as the guardian of good taste, and also not anymore as the guardian of acceptable morals (i.e. the insane sucking up to the Great Orange leader).
There are still some services I need to move (mainly, music and reminders) but once achieved I am ready to jump to another platform without it impacting my daily life.
Linux phones are just not a realistic thing yet.
Nadella is a budget Larry Ellison.
Nah, they're full of ideas. Mostly around sucking out every dollar from anyone foolish enough to build on their OS.
They've seen which way the wind is blowing and their extortionate payment processing fees are going to get limited by most governments. The plan flatly is to extort companies for money in the app store to make up for it.
eg allowing companies to advertise against other companies' names: just like google, they plan to extort companies on navigation (ie direct product/company name) queries.
As for Ballmer vs Nadella, what did Microsoft do under Nadella that wasn't started under Ballmer? The big things: 365 and Azure were both started under Ballmer. Bing, the only real competitor to Google search, which is also profitable, was made under Ballmer too. Essentially, Nadella continued Ballmer's job, as expected from a MBA CEO to another MBA CEO. The shift from Windows-first to cloud-first was already in the making when Nadella took over.
Same thing that killed Intel, Microslop, pretty much every american company.
Fadell might also be a good choice. Either way it should be someone currently outside Apple. The company needs an external eye to review its processes and cruft that built up under Cook (nothing negative against the guy, but what worked 5-10 years ago won’t necessarily work 5-10 years down the road).
Unfortunately now under Nadella AI is taking the role Windows used to play, but even there he understood the importance of AI before most of his competitors did which is what allowed Microsoft to gain such a substantial footing in OpenAI.
Also it is quite clear for us old timers, that since the AI obssession started in Redmond, the old rotten Microsoft culture is back, it probably never left but it was tamed in the early Satya years.
Remember Nadella doesn't read emails (he gets AI to summarise them all), he doesn't pay attention in meetings (he claims to get the minutes and then AI summerise them), what makes you think he even really knows the nuances of what the board want?
No.
But for mega-tech CEO salary, I’d probably do exactly the same.
The enterprise is going to choose Windows regardless for the masses and even if consumers make a mass exodus to Apple (not going to happen because of price) or Linux (even less likely) they are out of $30 they charge OEMs.
I had VMWare Workstation before, and it isn't as if there were not Terminal alternatives already.
Other than that the whole UAP/UWP/WinUI/WinAppSDK, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT has been a mess. They may shout to the winds it is the future, yet it is mostly crickets and endless list of bugs on the Github repos and related VS tooling.
Buy a new Apple Watch and notice that the settings app with have a [1] badge trying to upsell you to buy AppleCare+. They obscure dismissing these by clicking the "Add AppleCare Coverage" button and then having a button that says actually no.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
It's certainly not as bad _right now_ as what you'll see on Windows 11, but this is something that will almost certainly only get worse over time.
You don't need to buy a Windows Watch to get ads on Windows though. They'll be right there anyway, and more of them.
The workarounds to get rid of the nag to log into your icloud account on macOS are far more difficult than the workarounds to avoid using an MS account in Windows.
Do you have an example? I have to set up macOS on the regular, and after saying no to iCloud on the setup screen, it never bothers me again.
They are very aggressive with trying to get me to “update” to Tahoe, though.
If you are choosing to use Apple online services, sure, you'll get upsells I guess, as with any other online service. I don't use any of Apple's online services, and never see those ads.
Windows is absolutely miserable, but with WSL installed it's far and away the better dev environment. I say that as someone who dailies Linux and hates all three OSes.
But the problem with Apple Maps was easy to see (and can only be fixex over time)... data. Google and others had a decade+ head start on Apple when it came to collecting data for maps. Judge Apple Maps 5 years old vs Google Maps 5 years old. Not Apple Maps brand new vs Google Maps 10 years later.
Forstall is the one that pushed to make iOS based on macOS/Unix. He was definitely a lightning rod but had product sense.
>when Apple issued a formal apology for the errors in Maps, Forstall refused to sign it
It's obvious that apple maps would never be able to be a perfect replacement for google maps at launch, and it's possible Forstall in fact voiced these exact concerns but was overruled before launch, only to then be used as cannon fodder when he turned out to be right. Given all the clearly empty corporate-style "we take full responsibility" stuff you see today, someone actually _refusing_ to play those games when it wasn't his fault is a very positive sign for authenticity.
(He also did work on Siri, but given that he was booted right after its launch, I don't think it's fair to attribute their present incompetence on that front to him.)
Apple Maps launched much too early. It's certainly plausible that someone else forced Forstall to launch it, but I don't think we actually have reason to believe that, do we?
In any case, Apple Maps (a NEW then product, in an entirely new space for Apple) being bad, is not at all related to "enshittification".
Apple Maps is absolutely the wrong thing to judge Forstall on.
Not to mention that its main problem is coverage i.e. data quality. Regarding software engineering it's fine, even better than Google Maps in lots of aspects.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
If you've made a game, it doesn't matter how high quality it is, how many awards it has won, etc.
The only thing that matters is that it's live service, that it doesn't "have an end", that it can drive engagement and perpetual revenue.
Quite a few testimonies from game devs: according to them, Google representatives pretty much told them this.
See also: the requirements to constantly update your app/game even if it's a "finished product" that does not inherently require any updates.
Is there any platform that does not use these dark patterns? I hope the agent era will allow users to bypass the crappy search responses and slop on feeds. But by the looks of it OpenAI is moving in the same conflict of interest direction to its users.
Allowing weekly subscriptions is so comically evil.
It only exists to trick people into overpaying since 99.99% of subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, so hopefully you don't notice that it says "wk" instead of "mo".
consumer manipulation en masse does impact you even if YOU don't fall for it.
A whole new generation has never known an App Store without ads.
To them this is the norm.
Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.
The iOS App Store was introduced in 2008. Ads in it began in 2016. We’re in 2026. The App Store has had ads for longer than it didn’t, but the early period was not “very minimal”, it was almost half its current life time.
Yes.
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/06/ads-appearing-app-store...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13184346/apple-app-store-...
Since I’m unemployed, I need them to approve my financial plan, and they’re really pressuring me into a subscription model. It’s crazy how many spreadsheet folk don’t think of anything but recurring revenue with a captive customer base.
> This makes no difference
It makes no difference to us personally, but it does make a large difference to other people, many of whom may be friends and/or family we support. And it is another step in the shit road Apple is walking on, which will continue to affect us.
A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.
On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.
I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.
Or Java Bridge, Carbon, AGL for some more recent on OS X timeframe.
An example on Github compiling on Tahoe is welcomed.
Nope, "Apple does keep supporting old APIs indefinitely.". doesn't stand.
Oh, come on, that’s just bad faith arguing. “Indefinitely” does not mean “forever”. When an API stops working because the OS around it fundamentally changes, that‘s understandable. But they don’t usually break something they deprecated just because it was deprecated, those keep working.
> An example on Github compiling on Tahoe is welcomed.
Sure, buddy, I’ll get right on it. I’ve been avoiding Tahoe since it was announced but I’ll install it and create a project just for a random troll on the internet. I’ll even make a series of them, and a private YouTube channel just for you while I’m at it.
A sample for Sequoia will do as well.
Every step in the wrong direction makes a difference, and IMO it makes sense to keep saying that it's wrong. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "oh well, we're fucked anyways" doesn't help either.
No one likes it that you can't distinguish an ad from an organic result. Regulation to make ads more visually distinct would be widely welcomed. It can be done, why the hopelessness?
App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Just take a screenshot of that album description, and ... sigh
Playing around with it for ten seconds, it looks to me you might even use the Shortcuts app to
- Take interactive screenshot - Extract text from screenshot - Copy text to clipboard
and assign that to a keyboard shortcut to at least clean up this abominable workaround a bit.
Microsoft has degraded Explorer, though. For example, you used to be able tell which directories were empty by simply noting whether there was a + symbol next to them. Clever and time-saving.
Now, not only did MS replace the universally-understood + sign with a stupid triangle, but it now HIDES all the triangles unless you happen to roll the cursor into the left pane. WTF, WHY?
Oh, and if you select multiple files in Explorer and right-click to say "Open with..." NOPE! Microsoft inexplicably removes "open with" if you select multiple files, even files of identical type (PNGs, for example).
The opening of multiple files was fully functional 30 years ago. WTF?
The Contacts app is worse and returns anything with a string anywhere in the contact details starting with that letter.
A near fraud from the company and real failure of curation from Apple.
Makes you scroll past shit with a 0.001% chance you will download it on the way to the app you are really looking for.
Every single time you read "search is broken" you should parse it as "search has been exhaustively optimised and tuned to maximize revenue for the company providing it".
Search is never broken. It's just not doing what you think it should be doing.
That means App Store search is not broken by malice but by incompetence. Apple just don't know how to implement search.
The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.
I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.
it's a shame it really feels this way! i discovered some fun social apps recently like Bump and Retro that are a refreshing break from the big algoscrollers, but all my friends are either too locked into the existing big social apps or are determined to not mess with any social apps at all.
Only a problem because apple removed the ability to change your slideshow speed. Tried showing my fam a trip recently and it flies through at mach 5
If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
Regardless, there has to be a breaking point. The value of sharing those will be exceeded by the microtransactions at some point
Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.
This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.
This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.
I installed a regex powered notification blocker yesterday. Works as a charm.
99.99% of users never visit the settings. For those that do, they won't get past scare wall #1 of enabling APKs and scare walls #2, #3, and #4 of downloading, installing, and enabling the app.
Google knows this.
Tyranny of defaults, trained user behaviors, ecosystem, scare tactics, and even SERPs manipulation to make this nigh undiscoverable.
But they weren't content with some number of you slipping through the cracks! They're starting to close the ability to release unsigned and self-signed code. You can only imagine what's after that.
I'm relatively new to the space, but it feels like more and more of the time of indie devs / bootstrappers needs to get allocated towards marketing.
Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music, Books.app is like reading in a Barnes and Noble while someone from marketing looks over your shoulder and their TV app features their own shows to an overbearing degree — everything else is becoming more of an afterthought.
If you use iTunes Match or load your own MP3s every time you open the app the search field is set to “Apple Music” and the search fails until you toggle it, every time.
Been like that for 2+ years
I tried to run both my music library and Apple Music subscription together, but found that when I let my subscription lapse, all my playlists got deleted, even the ones that just used my own music. Now I'm staying FAR away from apple music the subscription.
As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.
Message is the only thing preventing me to switch of iPhone, as lineage or graphene will require installing WhatsApp, which is a big No.
Android Custom Rom = sms/mms(no group) or Signal (good luck making family adopt it) or Whatsapp (evil).
Most notably, a single non-iMessage member in a group chat will degrade the experience for everyone significantly.
It's very much an issue in the US.
1. Unable to remove members, or change member's phone-numbers without recreating the entire chat and losing continuity / bothering everyone with noise about these changes.
2. Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.
3. Unable to send high quality photos or videos
4. Just plain failure to deliver messages with shocking frequency for a supposedly modern messaging system.
5. RCS still isn't supported by carriers in a bunch of countries, so when one member of the group chat travels, roams to a foreign network that doesn't support RCS, and chats the group chat can split into one for MMS and one for RCS, and then it's a total crapshoot based on network conditions as to which one the messages go to in the future, with messages having now an even higher chance of vanishing into the void.
Basically, it's a subpar experience. Every other group messaging app (signal, whatsapp, etc) works fine on iOS and android, Apple really should be publishing iMessage for Android to solve this. But, due to reason 2 where green bubbles result in becoming a social outcast and being bullied, they of course won't.
Like, signal, a company running on donations iirc, is able to build a messaging app for windows/linux/iOS/android, and yet Apple isn't capable of that? Come on.
Wth, is this even a real thing?
If you move to the EU you can change the default navigation app on iOS and never see apple maps.
A plan to display ads would explain why they region locked that setting.
Now, what is left? iPads are great, MacBook with Apple silicon are unmatched in refinement, iPhones are awesome but getting a bit stale. Apple Watch is awesome, but for sports Garmin are better. It is the integrated ecosystem with iCloud that makes the total system powerful.
Where to go? I love Linux with CachyOS on my desktop. Anything similar for tablets and laptops? I think KDE has something like connect that aims to do what iCloud does.
If they haven't switched yet, its not going to happen. Apple knows this. Late users are always punished like my parents who still have a landline and cable tv.
Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.
It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.
Agree. Even GrapheneOS is hell to use. I tried both PixelOS and GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 and ended up returning it. If I was not homeless I would switch to a flip phone and just use a Linux desktop.
This is not my experience. GrapheneOS is great and has absolutely zero bloatware/malware. The base system is just a couple of basic apps like the phone, messages app, and a Web browser. That's it. All the rest is up to the user to set up. You can be completely Google-free if you don't install sandboxed Google Play Services and other GApps.
Without GApps, the setup is extremely private and ideal to use with self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Home Assistant as substitutes for the typical commercial malware found on most "smart" phones.
Is it? I feel like that would only be tragic if you expected the App Store monopoly company to care about users instead of profits.
For most of us on the sidelines this is a real "told you so" moment.
If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.
This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.
- ADs need to be clearly recognizable as such
- bunch of other things related to deceiving users and customer protection
- the risk this enables in combination with target ads to trick a user into installing a look alike malware makes such designs IMHO negligent, and in the EU you are responsible for (your) negligence no matter what you put in some TOS
so why do we tolerate sites systematically blending the lines between ads and content in a way which makes it unclear what is and isn't an ad and is designed to deceive the user into clicking on an ad instead of the content they are looking for. Which to make it worse also has lead to absurd market practices where competitors can semi-hide your product by buying ads which puts their look alike products above your product every time a user looks for your product.
Precisely because it has started to be regulated.
Pre regulation, companies were tiptoeing forward, creating a new market and seeing what they could get away with with their customers. Now there is regulation they have a line drawn in the sand for them, and they know exactly what they can and cant do to screw consumers. Therefore they all now toe that line, and push as close to it as they can without crossing it.
What follows is a never ending cat and mouse game of companies finding loopholes in the regulation and regulators rushing to catch up and close the holes.
but here is the thing, most "loop holes" in this kind of law technically aren't loop holes in this kind of laws (but loop holes in enforcement; Because laws normally aren't based on specific technical solutions, so don't care how "clever" you solution is.)
the main problem is hesitant, slow and ineffective enforcement which moves things from "you can't do that and if you do you get increasingly higher penalties the longer you insist to not comply" to a broken "you can do that at a cost lower then your benefit and a bunch of annoying law suite dragging out for years"
best example is GDPR, it's relative clear cut and not vague and most "loop holes" are relatively clear cut not allowed. That is until judges made decisions which where clearly not in line with the text of the law because it was politically very inconvenient that the main business model of all the local news papers doesn't work anymore. Or humoring nonsensical arguments from meta in court instead of just shutting them down the moment meta brings them up. So now companies often don't try to comply with GDPR but instead try to guess "what degree of non compliance is widely allowed" and that is where GDPR compliance becomes complicated and legally unclear.
Regular people outside tech couldn't care less. They scroll endless influencers pushing goods and services they were "invited", "collaborated with" with no advertising disclaimers, and they lap it up leaving streams of positive comments.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
Seems like this is just plain old greed...
Boycotts work great. People just don't do them for anything it seems.