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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
(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 ?
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.
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
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
To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.
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.
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".
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.
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
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.
Despite Apple not needing more money has they have already can reserves more then they can know how to use it
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
It's pretty much worthless, to me. I always use direct app links, from the developers' sites.
I shudder to think of it getting worse.
I never visit the App Store outside of that. If I need an app, I search for it and go directly to its listing page (yes, technically the App Store) or install it directly from my Home Screen.
I assume that means it increases the number of times users install the wrong app (possibly with serious consequences)?
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.
Shame apple is going towards the dark pattern of ads as results.
Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.
Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.
Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.
Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
Deceptive UI is the issue. By removing distinctions between ads and normal results, you're going from a frying pan situation straight into the fire.
(Check out nice and simple it was in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8 )
After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.
I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.
Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
How the hell Apple does not see this is beyond me. All of their fancy security in iOS is worthless if they allow people to be tricked into installing scam-ware.
Open app store > search "food delivery app" > Read and compare the reviews of Doordash, ubereats, jimmyjohns app, pizzahut app, shawarma city app, scam app > Make a decision > download the app ???
They do have an unnoticeable "this is an ad" tiny text somewhere. Are they talking about removing even that?
These companies are overconfident.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
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.
I'd rather ask for app recommendations on 4chan or Reddit than browse App Store.
They're already rolling in profits that dwarf the national budgets of most countries. And I say this as a shameless Apple fanboy.
No one is forced to choose an iPhone over the many many Android alternatives.
Android is a hardware alternative - Apple needs upward pressure to make their services competitive. If you use a Mac this is already obvious, you can't buy industry-standard software on the App Store. They all avoid it like the plague when given the opportunity, and Apple deliberately closes this escape hatch on iOS. Apple has known the App Store isn't good enough for over a decade.
It is an arbitrary and deliberate protectionist monopoly of app distribution. How many trophies does Tim Apple need to give Trump before people get the hint?
It's perfectly fine to have different preferences but doesn't mean you get to meddle in the UI/UX of something you didn't create. If you really want to sideload, that's what Android is for.
The consumer harm is obvious. Whether you call it a "monopoly" or something else, it is a problem that needs to be addressed.
It's an App Store. The .IPA is an integrated component of the iPhone experience, the App Store is an optional storefront. Again, look at the Mac.
You're repeating the same limp defenses that Apple has already watched get torn down by the EU and Japanese courts. We've solidly moved onto the "beg Trump for help" phase, which is miles worse than the humiliation of allowing sideloading.
Do you still want to know why they're putting ads into the only integrated storefront on iOS? It's real simple from where I'm standing.
I think the situation is a lot more stark than this. Unless they're desperate, the board of directors of corporations will install an MBA as CEO. In most cases, the only time this doesn't happen is at the founding of the company, when a founder is CEO. But if the founder doesn't maintain controlling interest, the founder can be replaced.
The promotion of Steve Jobs to interim CEO of Apple in 1997 was a rare exception. Apple fired its CEO, and the company was in danger of bankruptcy. They were running out of options and feeling the aforemention desperation. Note how the situation was very different in 1985, when the board of directors chose John Sculley over Steve Jobs in a power struggle. At the time, they weren't financially desperate.
With compensation so completely tied to "did our stock go up since you joined?", it's a whole thing.
So much for the so called "safety" of the appstore.
In fact, they had so many ChatGPT fake apps showing as top results that they had to do something as users couldn't find the real one and it reached the news.
Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.
App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.
These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
