In related news, 10% of Meta ads are malicious, and they have Meta seems to have little incentive to stop it.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

I feel these practices contribute to the post-truth society where a user looks for a fact and gets a paid-for opinion shoved in the face instead. It should be easy for the user to discern the factual relevance of search query results, and it does not bode well if the provider of the search functionality is in on the deceit.

The most insulting aspect of these kinds of changes is the fact that Apple is generally sold as the "premium" brand. You are still paying a premium price, but you are getting the "freemium" experience anyways. And don't forget the additional 30% they take on every sale on the app store.

Etsy is probably the worst I have seen. Almost impossible to see. Doubt it is even legal in EU. https://imgur.com/a/ntnNVZF

Liquid Glass was always about blurring the line.

Does anyone know when it started to be "ok" to disguise ads as search results? And I don't mean making them look more similar, but including them at all, even as the top results. I'm genuinely wondering how this started because it feels like such a bad idea, but everyone is now doing it anyway because we got used to it by adding it to our list of noise to filter out when interacting with anything connected to the internet.

Wow, how much greed will we all tolerate?

Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.

And still, they feel they can do this? I have never seen a better sign of a monopoly in my life.

Do people actually browse the App Store to discover what’s new? I personally only open it when I already know exactly what I want to download, for example Obsidian or Firefox. I search, install, and I am done. I never scroll around or browse for inspiration.

I am genuinely curious how others use it. Is App Store browsing a real behavior, or is discovery mostly being forced because search no longer reliably gets you to the thing you already know you want?

How do you test for ad effectiveness vs annoyance? Especially so for a captive audience where they can’t leave and go elsewhere?

It seems like every market leader that gets ads eventually “optimises” towards making them look like not ads. Obviously they will be more effective if people don’t realise what they are, so how do they account for annoyance (and the other negatives a user experiences) while doing these a/b tests?

At a glance I don’t really see how this is meaningfully worse at differentiating.

If you saw more than 2 apps on the screen at a time the blue background might serve to distinguish ads from organic results, but when it’s the only thing in your screen-view with a few pixels of the next result peeking out from the bottom, then it just looks like they’re alternating colors from one row to the next.