You could move the settings app to a less-used home-screen page, or you can remove the settings icon from the home screen entirely.

It's mildly annoying to have to do the swipe-down-and-search to get to settings but it's not an app I use all that often.

I thought the exact same thing. Of course, a key difference is that those of us who choose to pay for an iPhone, use iOS, and often pay for additional services are already giving Apple our money. They're trying to extract more and more from us and it's honestly insulting. I give techradar credit for providing us their user-hostile experience for free.

Yep, I had trouble reading this article because it was entirely covered in ads.

You are free to use an adblocker or the "reader" view in your browser.

This is a solved problem and you are not utilizing the solutions.

You can use ublockorigin on firefox to solve the problem. You can do nothing about system ads on iphone

Tech radar has to keep the lights on somehow because they’re giving the article away for free.

Apple you paid a lot of money to already.

I set a do not disturb that runs 24x7 to turn that off

John Ternus says Apple has 'so much' opportunity to expand services | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47924814 | https://9to5mac.com/2026/04/27/john-ternus-says-apple-has-so...

Ternus to potentially squeeze more out of App Store | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589193 | https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/09/06/gurman-schiller...

(Apple put "Ads" under the "Services"-umbrella)

best bet is currently GrapheneOS and that is still Adroid and will likely have to fight an up-hill battle in coming years

there are some (decent & serious) Efforts to make Linux apps/UI tools phone format compatible

but for various reasons (mostly hardware) stuff like e.g. the Libre phone feel more like toys for enthusiast and very committed people then things a "average" person can just use.

The biggest problem in the future seems to be the regulatory capture/lobby induced "well meant but bad done" laws, wrt. to misguided device attestation laws which "happen" to in effect require you to have a Google Android or iPhone in practice even through that not actually being needed for the law to work.

Reach out to Fulu, this should be a project.

https://www.fulu.org/contact-us

They show a notification for that, which is super annoying.

No, it’s not fine.

Apple Maps now has ads... er, sorry, "preferred listings".

The App Store app is filled with ads. The search in particular shows 2 full screen height ads now before results.

The least crap of the crap is not a laudable position. I’m a big Apple fan but they need to stop this shit with advertising. The amount of advertising built in to a $1,000+ device, including ads for the device maker’s own services, should be exactly zero.