Posted by ksec 3 hours ago
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.
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.
Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
That's default firefox behavior.
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.
I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
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
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.
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.
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?
That's fine, ads should be downright forbidden and get no "freedom of speech".
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
No.
But for mega-tech CEO salary, I’d probably do exactly the same.
Same thing that killed Intel, Microslop, pretty much every american company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A whole new generation has never known an App Store without ads.
To them this is the norm.
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.
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
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.
If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly
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.
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.
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 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.
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
Seems like this is just plain old greed...
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.
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.
a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.
You can't tell family to search for things in the app store anymore, I always provide direct links. It's just to dangerous otherwise.
