I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
It's worse than that. App names must be unique, but if you search for the exact (unique!) name, the exact hit isn't even rated on top! I have the app "Bit" on the app store and you have to do quite a bit of scrolling, even if you don't count the ads.
I've always found it crazy that if you search for a brand name / trademarked name that it's legal for the search provider to shove a bunch of vaguely related shit above the results unless that brand pays for ad placement to be the top result. Sure, fine, put whatever ad pays the most at the top of the search for "best iOS game" - but when someone searches "Wordle" - that you can't rely on Wordle being the top result is a indictment of the whole ad-supported internet. (Sub 'Claude' or 'Discord' or whatever other search term and it's the same issue)
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
I just got my kid a cheap flip phone that isn't as dumb as I wanted, because it's got KaiOS, a FireFox OS offshoot. An undiscovered country with just a few thousand apps in their store, and a web framework to make your own. If HN would get into it like it's an e-ink display, we could have all the little apps we need, and no ads or distractions.
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
> I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints.
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
> Sorry I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
HDMI out works great on M1 and M2 chips, and DP alt mode output is nearly ready, and works if you compile an experimental kernel. I daily drive an Asahi Linux ALARM M1 Pro macbook, and I have almost zero complaints.
There's the experimental Fairydust Branch which lets you connect a monitor via USB-C. However if you want to use more than one external monitor DisplayLink is currently the only option that works reasonably well. Unless you have a Mac with an HDMI port in which case you can use it.
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Agreed, I swapped to iPhone about 4 years ago, because I couldn't find a phone for myself from a tons of options(one company did that, another did something else, etc..).
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I honestly miss my Windows Phone, solid performance and battery life. The platform was never big enough for there to be much issue with third party apps and I could write what ever software I wanted and load it onto the phone without too much pain.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
There have been third party app stores on Android pretty much forever.
Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).
It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).
Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.
Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
Me too. Android for the most part has much better UI.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
I have no loyalty, I've switched back and forth several times. I haven't concluded that either is better than the other, just different (and these days, not really -that- different). Though I do appreciate the tight integration between the iPhone and my MBP, that is definitely a sticky feature.
right now I have the same feeling; some time ago I felt that entering the iPhone "mindset" made sense as you could gain in ease of use by sacrificing some "control".
Wild take. I use both and iOS (other than settings menu which is absolute garbage) makes much more sensible design decisions than Google. And even Androids good design decisions are just variations on things they took from iOS. OG android was better. Now they’re just trying to be iOS+
Same here. Owned every initial iPhone but went to Pixel a little while back and it's a much better experience.
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
this is a fair point. I am referring to more "objective" things, if anything can be, in design. Let's take as an example the alt+tab behaviour with multiple virtual desktops. In GNOME, as it is in Windows too by the way, alt+tab cycles inside the virtual desktop you're in, allowing for efficient matrix-like navigation, and allowing to split tasks between desktops. On Mac OS, alt+tab cycles on all your open programs, making you jump between desktops. To me, this is rather unintuitive. It could be habit, but there is a clear difference in result regardless of habits, and I think the most productive choice is the GNOME-Windows one, and the more "intuitive" one in the sense of what a user might expect out of a virtual desktop, that is, creating a new desktop with its own apps. Of course this is my impression and I am well free not to buy a Mac :)
You can do that same thing just a little different way. Say you want to go through all open apps in one desktop. On my mac its 3 fingers scroll up on trackpad then all windows are exposed. Basically the same function as what you want. Yes technically you are clicking on a window not the application icon but who cares.
Yeah, Apple's OS is clearly not designed for keyboard/mouse users. Triggering this on a standard keyboard requires using both hands (Ctrl-up arrow) and then switching to the mouse. Super annoying.
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
“Requires” is a strong word. Apple does have an extremely easy mouse-only solution for this and it dates back over a decade: map the fan-out selector (I forget what they call it these days, maybe Mission Control?) to a “hot corner”.
Debian Trixie Gnome 48 or so. In Settings | Multitasking right down the bottom there is App Switching with two options: 'Include Apps from all workspaces' and 'Include Apps from the current workspace only'. Debian has the all workspaces option set by default. Gnome Tweaks is installed, and the extensions to have minimise and maximise buttons on the right of windows are switched on by default.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app, i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the sensibility, really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! why knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom one after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
My experience was the same. GNOME is by and far imo the best DE on Linux when it comes to consistency and being the most accessible to non-technical users. However it’s far, far behind macOS’ UX.
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
Something to keep in mind is that you don't have to use GNOME. There are a ton of window managers that run on Linux, and you can find one that works better for you.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
It's linux, you can do everything in the terminal. I've never understood what purpose a "desktop" serves.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
> Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
These days I can say the same, I used to enjoy trying to minimize my mouse usage and fiddling with tiling window managers but now I just can't be bothered.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
That’s a good way of putting it. CLI skills are specialized skills that I’m not going to use for anything else, whereas using a desktop environment is re-using skills I already have for other purposes.
Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.
If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.
Do you adjust audio settings in the terminal? I've been moving away from using my mouse but anything related to audio or display settings intimidates me.
Mostly yeah. The DE does manage the browser's windows and notifications if you use those. The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox, there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
> The point is, you're going to use the mouse with Firefox
I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.
> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).
Mac is just a different philosophy. Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management. That is possible for you. There are several tools for this, e.g. Amethyst.
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
I spend time in the digital realm because I hate paper. Paper is a horrible analogue with real world limitations we should have left behind in the 90s.
interesting point, but in a real desktop, or multi-desktop setup, you can have different things on each one and look at them one by one, by table. The alt+tab default behaviour on MacOS is not that. This is my problem with their design choice.
> Yes there are window managers for mac if you really want to replicate linux window management.
Not really. None of the "window managers" for macOS actually play the role of compositors on Wayland or window managers on X11. macOS has exactly one window manager, plus a bunch of apps that run automation against it and sometimes call themselves "window manager".
> This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Most window managers (and the vast majority of the popular ones) on Linux are also like this. It's called a "floating window manager". Tiling window managers are cool but they're marginal even on Linux.
There's such thing as one DE being less convenient than other, but it's far less important than it being reliable and easy to get help with.
Same with X11 vs Wayland. I don't care which, I just want the one that works, and want to never hear about the other one again. Linux Mint comes with X11. It didn't work on my PC.
My favorite part of GNOME is how the Windows 8 start screen wannabe truncates the names of apps, and provides absolutely no way to see their full name.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how that was deemed acceptable for so long.
Debian Trixie so Gnome 48 or so. Yes, program names truncated in the overview but when I hold mouse pointer over the icon, the full name appears. Not ideal, but I'm assuming borderline acceptable for discovery of applications by examining their icons.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
GNOME devs have a fixation on putting too much whitespace in every UI. Because they also conform so eagerly to the "Free Software UI" essay (https://ometer.com/preferences.html)---particularly the section, "Standing Up To User Pressure"---they find it easy to defend not fixing poorly presented frontends.
(My own app menu on a 24" monitor at 100% scale has: "LibreOffic..." as well as "LibreOffic..." and the very useful, underrated "LibreOffic...". I also often use "KiCad G...", "KiCad P...", and "KiCad S..." but usually never "KiCad I..." or "KiCad P...")
The whole GNOME 2 being replaced with Unity thing turned me away from desktop Linux entirely. I don't care if KDE or whatever exists now, I just want there to be one clearly most popular DE that does something reasonable.
Okay, I guess, but that's a social wish about the preferences of others. It makes about at much sense as me wishing you just liked KDE. And at any rate it's not a technical or design wish that any software developer or team thereof can fix per se.
I have nothing against KDE other than it being yet another fragment. If they made KDE the default thing, great. If anyone wants to make Linux a mass alternative to Windows, they need to agree on basic things like this, and then stop randomly changing it.
There are some people who could make it happen. Torvalds could publish an official desktop Linux and people would probably use it. He isn't interested in doing that.
- macOS doesn't natively support "alt tab"-like behaviour (Cmd-Tab and Cmd+` are not analogous). You need something like alt-tab.app.
- You can't have the trackpad use "natural scrolling" and an external mouse use "normal scrolling" at the same time. The setting applies to all devices at once, so you need an external app (like LinearMouse) to use it.
That said, it's not like OSs and DEs don't have annoying things you need to fix (eg adding plugins to fix GNOME weirdness).
It bothers me so much that Gnome is like this. The Gnome ecosystem has several programs and workflows that are, at least as far as I can see it, solved. Other than minor upkeep and and a new feature once a blue moon, they're done, and in an elegant manner. But I can't actually use Gnome itself, because the larger experience is nonsense to my brain, with questions like yours coming up every time I try to use it, which makes actually using it willingly a complete non-starter.
It's as if an alien made it, and they nailed certain subtasks, just because the requirements are simple and the path to something that works well is straight and clear, but the larger experience doesn't have many concrete requirements, and thus the road leads to something that does technically work, but which nobody* would want to use.
*Obviously some people like Gnome. Their brains don't seem to work the way mine does though.
To me, the worst part is when GTK introduced what's known as "client-side decorations"[0], because that means that I can't use my normal window manager decorations.
If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird.
For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina.
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form.
They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchase, and if I want to keep my 2 esim slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
> Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
>Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities,
The whole iOS and Android keep copying each other and without someone like Steve being the editor they became pretty similar.
I want an iOS that is SIMPLE. And the software Apple is offering right now is anything but simple. Homescreen is now clustered mess. And for every banks, resturatnts all want an App for themselves, either you skip all the discounts and functions or now you have more clutter to deal with.
This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
Because the iPhone has some ads for Apple services baked in, which is what the article is about. But it's really minor. The people complaining about this don't actually have iPhones, haha.
I think I agree with the idea that it is better to turn the smartphone into the phone you want, but I think it might require a bit more work than just not installing TikTok :)
>My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience.
Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!
As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.
You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!
The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "account@icloud.com". Continue"
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
I just installed Google maps after 4 years and man it is shitty with cosntant recommendations and nags too. I just want a map and search and directions. But Apple maps is sooooo shitty at those...
I find Apple is better at turn-by-turn navigation, while Google is better at business and POI data. I will usually look stuff up on Google Maps, but use Apple Maps in the car for navigation. Google's navigation is (last I used it) bad at telling me what's next. I'll turn, it will say nothing, then wait until I'm right on top of something to tell me to do it... I find it stressful.
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
CoMaps works really well as a wrapper of OpenStreetMaps. It even has seemingly-accurate hours for a few businesses near me! And if you are willing to dig into accessibility settings on the iPhone you can choose a good quality voice for navigation.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
I never noticed that with google myself. I will say between apple maps and google maps that google maps is far more accurate for traffic estimates. You may be tempted to go with apple maps sitting them side by side when apple says its 6 mins faster than google. That is not apple maps finding some magic route. That is apple maps being dumb.
My unpleasant introduction to Apple Maps ads recently was opening it to look for nearby restaurants, and seeing an ad for a domestic violence lawyer nearby. Apple has now lost all credibility when it comes to respecting the user, not that they had much left at this point.
What I don't understand is that all of our data is being gathered everywhere for decades now, but the ads are still not targeted with any degree of precision.
Apple is not at Google’s level of surveillance-based adware. With these new changes to Maps, they now have new incentives to eventually catch up, but their targeting is bad because they suck at targeting, because they built their business around not collecting all that data & displaying targeted ads.
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.
Disclaimer: I haven't used it for about a year, I simply don't drive enough at the moment - I doubt it has declined in quality.
TomTom is an extremely good paid ($6/mo) nav app - if you appreciate not being a product. It seems to now be named "TomTom Go Expert: Truck GPS" but does still have car mode. You _have_ to download maps, it's fundamentally offline. Routing is fantastic. They've been around since car nav was devices that you purchased.
The only area where it falls behind is finding businesses, but Google and Apple will probably always be rulers there.
Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.
I have a script to add an /etc/hosts entry for `127.0.0.1 gdmf.apple.com` and that seems to eliminate any nagging, just remove when it's time to update.
Sounds like an unauthorized access of my computer - a fine of a dollar per byte, per person, should make Apple turn the hell around. 15 billion dollars times how many Apple users that have been wronged in this manner? Apple would be dead instantly.
I think you'll find that you agreed to it somewhere in their voluminous terms of service.
I looked it up and indeed, it's in section 1, paragraph C:
Your Device will periodically check with Apple for Apple Software Changes. If a change is available, the change may automatically download and install onto your Device
and, if applicable, your peripheral devices. By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic Apple Software Changes onto your Device and your peripheral devices.
IMO the notion that such one-sided agreements are not made under duress needs to die in a fire. I wish there were a viable grassroots political movement to remove the corporate boot from our neck; until that point, fuck these terms of servitude and every abuse they enable.
He said it's "unauthorized access of his computer", even though he implicitly authorized it by clicking through the agreement (apparently without reading it).
If people actually read these clickthrough agreements and started sending devices back when they don't agree, it would encourage the industry to change.
No one "needs" an iPhone, they can support one of the open source phones with far less onerous terms.
You can still consider it unauthorized, if you do not consider the authorization to be valid in the first place. I can also get people to sign away their life on a contract, that's not going to mean anything, because signing away your life is not possible in the first place.
> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements
I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).
Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.
Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.
The nagging notifications are only a small part. Apple has far more effective ways of forcing updates on you. On iPhones, for instance, the Unicode tables ship with the OS version, so unless you update, you cannot render newly added emoji codepoints. Given how central emojis have become to pop culture - and how determined the Unicode Consortium seems to keep adding more of them - the whole situation almost looks like a conspiracy, if you squint. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.
But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.
This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.
I never heard of that. Is this documented anywhere? Also doesn't Apple Store usually replace the whole device for a repair, rather than individual hardware components?
I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
Imagine spending $2k on a phone only to be presented with ads. Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
On the flip side, imagine having another product mage for people who can afford $2k phones... well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
> They could do what Amazon did for the kindles: pay extra to remove the ads (
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
Your callout just gave me a great idea: the iPhone Duo has three screens. Depending on orientation, the front screen could be used to show ads to others!
Why is it tough to balance? There are ridiculously cheap ad ridden phones sold in Asia - it makes sense because ads subsidize those phones. How does it make sense to show ads in a $2000 phone, especially from a company that prides themselves for "taste", "courage" and a bunch of other buzzwords? And a company that is already far, far ahead of its competitors when it comes to profit margins in the smartphone business? I don't understand.
apple crowd is highly uncritical, I struggle to use word objective towards their approach to their beloved brand. So corporation is testing how much more they can milk customers before they stand up and go to competition. Their ad business has been growing steadily in past years, its not coming from nowhere and it has been discussed here (with strong disdain) ad nausea.
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
It's a thermocline of trust issue. Apple can abuse their customers for profit for a while, but eventually all the little insults add up and they'll lose them in bulk. And when it happens, Apple won't understand why.
Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
Maybe. But at least some (like me) will become more hesitant to buy newer products or update to the latest system (I am still on Sequoia because of all this crap lately). And we will also become more hesitant to recommend Apple products. If this is hurting them enough to stop is another question…
> Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
> imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
Fashion is a weird analogy because I can get stuff even from well known designers from places like Uniqlo with no logos on them. A better example is cars, where people are often happy to show off their status symbol logos, and will buy other things that go along with their car.
The car analogy doesn’t land for me. I was trying to show an example where people paid to opt out of advertising. The car example, is the exact thing the person I was replying to was talking about… a brand sells the customer something expensive, then keeps advertising to them in hopes that they will keep buying more nonsense to go with it… selling to the captive audience. This is exactly what I don’t want.
> Quick way to lose your luxury and loyal customers IMO.
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
In my mind, if I truely was in this luxury/premium market, I'd increase the price of the phone to include the other services, so there would be no need for these "ads" to be shown.
> Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
I would also guess they practically never use the App Store. In fact I would guess there's virtually no dogfooding of it at all internally, because they have 100k+ employees but need blogs to tell them when a sanctioned Russian bank's stealth submission is topping the free charts.
Does anyone use the App Store other than to search for an already known app name? I probably have not in over a decade, and I can't see a reason I ever would.
Best part of searching the App Store for something you know is that even though the hamming distance between the search term and the thing you want is 0, the thing you want will not be at the top of results anyway.
This causes me so many issues. Rolling out multi-factor authentication and having some no-name random app show up as the first result for "microsoft authenticator" is downright malicious behavior on the part of the app store.
I used to. In the "golden days" of "there's an app for that", I would peruse the App Store looking for new games. I spend hundreds of dollars on games doing that. Now, the only games you see really are shovelware or subscription garbage.
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
Exits to where? I personally I dialed down my phone use to a minimum. I still use Iphone just because I see no better alternative for my sporadic use. I use few apps minimally and install almost nothing, i can't remember when I last visited the app store.
Well you took the exit to "using my phone less", which is good for you, bad for Apple (less service revenue, probably less frequent hardware sales from you)
No, hardening has nothing to do with it. They have a feature flag system deeply embedded in their software. And such systems can totally distribute different flags to different people. And that's how you could easily create VIP accounts with different behaviors than the rest of the world, like all ad festures turned off.
I guess it was simply too close to reality. That's why I didn't register that as humor. Text also doesn't carry tone of voice well, which makes confusion more likely
It's not a root account issue, it's that they have already bought all the services there are to buy. One would assume that once you buy a service, they would stop prompting you to buy it.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
I haven’t worked for Apple but you’re definitely correct. Just compare what Jobs said about using a stylus with how happy the company was to announce that you could use Apple Pencil with the iPhone duo. It is self-evident. It’s far from the company Jobs once ran.
You’re misunderstanding that quote. “If you saw a stylus they blew it!” referred to requiring a stylus to interact with the touch display. Having one optional, mainly for drawing, isn’t quite the same thing.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
Yes, and it makes sense to add the stylus/pencil after app developers had to learn how to deal with finger taps only. Apple did the same thing with the original Mac. There were no arrow keys on the first model, so that developers were forced to accommodate the mouse.
I like being able to use Procreate or other image editing software on my iPad, and the only reason I’d consider a foldable in the first place is because I’d like to use it like I use my iPad. What’s so bad about having the option to use a stylus? Who cares what a dead tech oligarch once thought of styluses? Especially when the state of the technology wasn’t where it’s at now. If you could ask Jobs now, maybe he would have changed his mind.
Steve Jobs also repeatedly dissed the idea of an iPod that played video as late as one year before they started selling the iPod Video. I wouldn't take any of his stated opinions as gospel.
Jobs has long been vocal about protecting the user experience. Not 100% sure if it's true, but I heard Jobs was originally opposed to custom apps running on the iPhone (the App Store), because he 'didn't want to turn iPhone in Windows'.
Jobs was right. Apps are so shitty now I don't even bother. Everything has a subscription now and there's so much noise its hard to actually find signal on the appstore.
It wouldn't have died - most apps are still just a thin UI over a corresponding online service, and most of the data and services proprietary APIs provide ended up achievable in a browser too. It is really just the internet that makes apps and smartphones useful.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
Early on it was different with a lot more stuff actually running locally vs cloud service era. App store predated that for a little bit actually. There weren't microtransactions initially either. What you'd call a AAA game for that platform back then would actually be $9.99 one time payment.
Indeed. That’s what resulted in Apple beingn different than competition. Too bad Apple engineers were reprimanded and publicly humiliated, sometimes with no fault. But Jobs had a vision that’s been long gone from Apple and it really shows. Sometimes I wonder if Jobs himself would be corrupted by Apple’s success but I’ll never know the answer to that…
That's not a given. Visionary people sometimes go mildly insane over time. Source: worked at VKontakte and Telegram and watched it slowly happen to Durov.
Questionable features like being able to delete anything in the conversation on both sides. Tacky UI choices like liquid glass on Android or the excessive use of Lottie animations every-damn-where. All while being completely deaf to feedback, both from within the team and from the public. The way he treats his employees isn't exactly good either.
But you can no longer trust Telegram that things you had in your chat will still be there tomorrow. This feature feels like someone has hacked into your device and deleted files they didn't like.
"Your" chat consists of other people's messages too and they own those. You can also delete your messages on Discord or Slack – it's quite normal as a feature.
Firstly, I'm talking about PMs, not group chats. Group chats have different requirements because they have to be moderated.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
Don’t mix apples with oranges Steve was The Apple those guys are CE—replaceable-O-ranges. If board and shareholders want ads there is no one to tell them get lost anymore.
Wow, I read it as "John Temu", which seems to be what Apple is being turned into.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
> I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
Sorry. For some reason got him moxed up with Steve Lemay lol.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye ir Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was hust picked up randomly out of the box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to * checks notes* lead all of Apple.
It is because of things like that that i'm using Android. I feel like one of these boomers having no clue about tech whenever i am handed an iphone: everything feels like a trick, a set of secret gestures and recipes that everybody has mastered but me.
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
I got a Pixel 10, installed GrapheneOS. Then Google Play (which is sandboxed). I have 99,9% of all apps and a barebones launcher and some barebones fossify apps. Its pretty good, ugly if you let it but not bad
Can't say I agree - I honestly tried using an iPhone for a few weeks, and I still couldn't reliably get where I wanted, because there's a good chance some input on the way would suddenly result in a totally different effect.
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
It's true of android too, you're just used to it. Even Graphene eliminated the back button, and makes you swipe left from the right side instead, and the app switcher and home buttons, and makes you swipe up-right from the bottom.
No, I genuinely have not encountered the same reliability issues on any Android devices, even on my very first one.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
“iAd offers advertisers the emotion of TV with the interactivity of the web, and offers users a new way to explore ads without being hijacked out of their favorite apps,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iAds will reach millions of iPhone and iPod touch users—a highly desirable demographic for advertisers—and provide developers a new way to earn money so they can continue developing free and low cost applications.”
Search on the app store sucks too. I haven't been able to find either a way to search for only apps that charge for downloads (I don't want to watch an ad for features, or nickel and dimed on IAP), or some kind of "minimum price" slider I can use.
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
I knew we were cooked when Costco started upselling its cookies at the self-checkout food court.
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
I bet you there is a CEO and friends version that is absolutely add-free.
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
Maybe not. I think a lot of people just aren't as militantly against the adtech industry as we tend to be on HN. It's not even a lack of knowledge thing; a lot of people straight up don't care about being spied on and their entire lives uploaded to God knows where to be sold on as a commodity. Most people are a bit bemused if anything by my efforts to remove advertising from every feasible area of my life for example, it's like trying to argue smoking is cancerous to an audience of people from the 1950s.
It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation required more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
Look at any recent Apple revenue breakdown. If you pretend that the iPhone doesn't exist, Apple's most profitable market segment is services. Even the iPad and Mac can't dethrone it.
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
Yeah, royalty payments average ~60-70% for services where we can cleanly see the breakdown, and much higher for certain artists that can command it. Assuming the overhead for Apple and Spotify is 10% (big assumption), the margins are 20%, which is small for most SaaS. However, I assume both mostly use it as a loss (well, less-profit) leader as part of wider bundles.
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I also bough Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now.
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
The amount of advertising that has permeated our lives is insane. It’s everywhere, and it’s just getting worse.
I use Apple for nearly everything I can. I have multiple iPhones, Apple TV, I use iCloud, I have multiple MacBooks, Apple Watch, AirPods, an iPad… and yet Apple still thinks that’s not enough. They still shove ads in my face to try and squeeze more out of me. They still repeatedly add more dark patterns to try and trick me to use Siri. And they do so unabashedly.
And it’s not just these products either. Advertising brain has taken hold everywhere. I’d say at least a third of my interactions with coworkers these days are them trying to pitch me to use their shitty vibe coded app.
Advertising is one of the root causes of how shitty every product is becoming.
Nah - Music, TV, Fitness etc all included. All shared with the family (and extended family) so it doesn't have the friction of piecemealing it all together, which I value more than anything.
From the article, many users report being unable to disable them:
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
I've tried clicking them away and they keep coming back. E.g. my current watch is about to hit a year old and doesn't have Apple Care. I clicked away anything about the Apple Card in Wallet and I just had it sitting right at the top when I was trying to get to my boarding pass last week. I have no idea why it keeps telling me about Apple Fitness or Apple Music each time I purchase a new device, I was aware of it the last 6 times it tried to push those.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
People are being intentionally obtuse in order to find something to get mad about.
Obviously offering upgrades to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.
I named five companies that if you search for "$COMPANY_NAME flagship" you will quickly find relevant models.
Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.
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[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 57.5 ms ] threadOften these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
Ah, but see, I'm rocking a vanilla Ubuntu install on a vanilla[1] Raptor Lake Dell I got used on eBay last summer for $220, and I too have no complaints.
"No complaints" is a great way to celebrate worthwhile hardware's value in the age of consumerism. It's death to a business who needs to sell stuff to survive. That M1 Air isn't booking revenue, and to be blunt Apple would have preferred its lifespan to be lower.
[1] Still has 16G though for VM and docker tinkering, something that is hard to get on Apple hardware without springing for a MBP.
And btw my Air has 16 GB of RAM.
Just that "Apple customers use old MacOS devices" is in fact of a piece with "Let's monetize our users" (by stuffing ads into the Settings app in this case). They can't rely on you for upgrade revenue and need to squeeze you in other ways.
No free lunch, basically, unless your software vendor really cooks for free.
I got tired of having to haul a separate HDMI display out for Asahi use.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
iPhone is nice, but it has its quirks and stupidities. Android is nice, but has some other stuff I don't like.
I wish there would be a third option that would take the best of those two worlds.
I’m almost in the market for a new phone and I wish there were more options than Android/iPhone. I’m looking at maybe going for a GrapheneOS phone of some sort though
Including app stores installed out of the box on GMS certified devices like the Samsung Galaxy Store (alongside the Play Store).
It just means they will be easier to install via the Play Store without sideloading (making other commercial stores more attractive but not really my cup of tea), and some minor API changes (although auto updating was added even before the ruling so not sure what else there might be).
Personally I'm not concerned about the changes to sideloading since it's a one time mild inconvenience. So I struggle to understand how going to iOS in protest (which doesn't allow persistent sideloading at all without workarounds) makes any sense whatsoever.
Google's original plan would have been really bad, but the new approach is a complete non-issue for me.
The rotation thingy alone infuriates me on iPhones. The Android implementation is perfect.
Android keyboards are in a different class from iOS. And I use a source available privacy respecting one.
VPNs work much better on Android.
Settings is laid out better.
Haptics are used much more which I appreciate.
lack of back button is a crime.
can't customize home screen launcher.
clock alarms often doesn't work
default apps arent as well implemented as android. Can't change a lot of them which seems anti-competitive. I'm talking about picking which apps open and stuff like messaging app, not the default apps that come with the OS's quality. Apple might get a win there. Apple notes is awesome.
The Android password manager integration is much better at autofilling and detection.
Edit: and rotation
With that said, something Apple does very well is the ecosystem integration between devices across form factors. I miss that, but not enough to switch my phone back.
I am starting to believe that Apple got rid of any UX talent they had, replaced them with interns and spent the saved $ on marketing.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?
On Gnome, super let's you search for application launchers or click on windows immediately; works great for both.
Hot corners suck. They either activate too easily or they feel slow.
(I think that this situation is worth pointing out because there is potential for talking past one another as a result of the default choices made by different Linux distributions).
Having had issues with KDE I decided to give GNOME a try recently. The decision made to remove these buttons absolutely perplexed me beyond belief.
i just came back to GNOME from KDE after messing something with my system (disk space was eaten fully i don't know why) but all your points are mostly invalid... you can literally start GNOME out of the overview with a simple extension install, then you can launch your apps via whatever you f** want! dmenu? custom shortcuts? mouse gestures? a python script that will listen to your voice? based on weather? come ON, you talk like the bash doesn't exist
your max. and min. buttons are just a toggle in Tweaks app, i have a dedicated button on my mouse which toggles the sensibility, really useful for doing digital collage work on GIMP
now the extension critic i found it valid! why knows how far someone can get with AI... personally i had a custom one after 2-3 prompts which informed where i'm with my keyboard layer (running QMK, doing HID communication)
Apple is a big pile of shit with biased design much harder to modify but also: locked down to the point your now eating ads. in your expensive premium aluminum box
Also re: not to mention with extensions they’re single threaded JavaScript applications essentially so when one crashes it literally crashes the entire DE. Just unacceptable.
There's not much choice on Mac unless you install Linux on it.
Want to start Firefox? type "fir<tab>" in your terminal and hit enter.
Want to see your files? Type "ls" and hit enter. Learn just a tiny bit about pipes, wildcards, and utilities and you can leave those mouse-pushers in the dust.
Or I could use a desktop on expend my limited mental energy on things more relevant to me. It’s far easier for me to remember things in a visual or spatial manner.
And the weird thing is that the type of mental effort required is not even a useful one per se, it's more like a strain (to me) than something that makes me sharper.
Still some things are easier in a GUI while others in a CLI, just depends on their nature and how often do you have to engage with them. But after a while navigating windows by Alt+Tab (Alt+`) or the mouse is fine really. I don't care to reach for Super+PgDown/PgUp when I can move my mouse to the corner of the screen and scroll to change the workspace.
Even when I do write code, I spend more time thinking about the code than actually writing so losing time to using my mouse doesn’t matter.
I was imprecise. I am solely talking about using a terminal emulator program on a display server, I wasn't talking about refraining from using anything outside a VTE. That would be pointless, yeah.
> there's no advantage of using the terminal just to open it.
My point is that it is. Typing 'firefox' is way simpler to open the program, than traversing an application list and selecting it. The latter can become faster once you have a shortcut, but then it's equivalent to 'f<TAB>' or '!!' and the like. Language is more versatile, that's why we use it for fast communication. If you want the scissors from someone, you tell them, you don't make gestures or draw a picture, because that's way more work (unless you are mute).
But really mac is less about having every square inch of your monitor filled with a dozen different applications sized perfectly to fit the exact information you want on these screens. You can of course do this if you like but thats not really the philosophy.
The philosophy is that this is a real life desktop. Just like papers on your desk. Do you resize papers various ways and print them to maybe 3 inches across and lay them out on your desk such that you can see every paper at once, no space from one page to the next? No. You have piles. You thumb through piles and pull out stuff you need and lay them loosely next to eachother. Nothing is fixed in any constraints. Stuff can overlap or have space in between.
This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Not really. None of the "window managers" for macOS actually play the role of compositors on Wayland or window managers on X11. macOS has exactly one window manager, plus a bunch of apps that run automation against it and sometimes call themselves "window manager".
> This is exactly how windows management works in macos. It is simply a different philosophy, but it is much closer to how desktop management actually works in real life with a physical desktop and physical papers.
Most window managers (and the vast majority of the popular ones) on Linux are also like this. It's called a "floating window manager". Tiling window managers are cool but they're marginal even on Linux.
Same with X11 vs Wayland. I don't care which, I just want the one that works, and want to never hear about the other one again. Linux Mint comes with X11. It didn't work on my PC.
Don't know if it's still the case on the latest version, but for like a decade, opening it on Ubuntu would greet you with an icon named "Software Upda..." and another one named "Software & Up...". Every time I saw it, I'd have to stop and scratch my head for a minute, wondering how that was deemed acceptable for so long.
The worst: ImageMagick icon shows four lines of wrapped name/comment in brackets, the last line of which is unreadable as it disappears under the icon below in the grid, so very much not ideal! I'd rather the icon title appeared wider and in a solid colour over the nearby icons when moused over. I'm using a largish font on a small screen (1366x768). Most are OK.
(I have to admit to rarely using the 'Show Apps' or 'nine dots' function, I usually just mash the windows/mod4/super key and type a couple of letters of the name then hit enter)
(My own app menu on a 24" monitor at 100% scale has: "LibreOffic..." as well as "LibreOffic..." and the very useful, underrated "LibreOffic...". I also often use "KiCad G...", "KiCad P...", and "KiCad S..." but usually never "KiCad I..." or "KiCad P...")
Peperridge Farm remembers.
Okay, I guess, but that's a social wish about the preferences of others. It makes about at much sense as me wishing you just liked KDE. And at any rate it's not a technical or design wish that any software developer or team thereof can fix per se.
There are some people who could make it happen. Torvalds could publish an official desktop Linux and people would probably use it. He isn't interested in doing that.
Worst case the code sucks but it's fine if I keep them for myself.
- You can't have the trackpad use "natural scrolling" and an external mouse use "normal scrolling" at the same time. The setting applies to all devices at once, so you need an external app (like LinearMouse) to use it.
That said, it's not like OSs and DEs don't have annoying things you need to fix (eg adding plugins to fix GNOME weirdness).
It's as if an alien made it, and they nailed certain subtasks, just because the requirements are simple and the path to something that works well is straight and clear, but the larger experience doesn't have many concrete requirements, and thus the road leads to something that does technically work, but which nobody* would want to use.
*Obviously some people like Gnome. Their brains don't seem to work the way mine does though.
If I force them on with something like gtk3-nocsd[1], then although I get my normal window manager decorations back, sometimes the client-side decorations have actual important widgets in them like menu buttons. When that happens, I end up with windows that have both kinds of decorations, and it looks weird.
For me this means that it's not nice to use apps like Meld and Remmina.
Just let me use my own WM's decorations please!
[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD
[1] https://github.com/PCMan/gtk3-nocsd
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
Simpler than that: money and control.
Marked up replacement parts for and the inability to compete because “not Apple certified” comes with disabled features.
The best part of market capitalism, no market! Pure profits because we make the rules!
Europe has a long tail of MNOs and MVNOs that don't support eSIM well enough. In China, SIM activation requires visiting a store, ID verification etc. so they only recently added eSIMs, and with limits: only Chinese iPhones can install a Chinese eSIM, and foreign eSIMs cannot be installed onto a Chinese iPhone while you're physically in mainland China.
The whole iOS and Android keep copying each other and without someone like Steve being the editor they became pretty similar.
I want an iOS that is SIMPLE. And the software Apple is offering right now is anything but simple. Homescreen is now clustered mess. And for every banks, resturatnts all want an App for themselves, either you skip all the discounts and functions or now you have more clutter to deal with.
In both cases the UX was search and sorted app list. Lean and effective.
> The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze.
So you may be interested in GNU-like Linux phones with UI based on Gnome.
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
I doubt you'd see many ads in the iPhone Assistive Access mode, which can (sort of) turn an iPhone into a feature phone. You might also need to swap out a few Apple apps though. https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
Same with my GrapheneOS phone. FOSS is a jewel to be treasured!
As for ads permeating our spaces, I think it's high time to implement strict ad control; the only place you should see ads is in the Yellow Pages, as listings. No more billboards, backs of receipts, outsides of shopping bags, not in newspapers (except classifieds) or magazines, not on websites, not on entertainment feeds, or anywhere else besides going to a directory and searching for a specific class of service or product. Also directories (stores included) must permit ordering by distance (strict, no algorithm foolery), cost, review count, average reviews, number of sales, and other criteria based on the data they collect; it should be as simple and reliable as sorting in LibreOffice Calc, with zero sponsored manipulation to advantage sponsors in the listings.
You'll go out of business without such Tom-foolery? Great! Your business isn't viable and is frankly a joke; go provide some real value instead you leech!
I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.
I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.
Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.
They somehow manage to threaten you that they'll delete your local photos...
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
I've seen several people in this tread mention CoMaps. I took a quick look, and while I want it like it, I can't help but see significant limitations where it might be nice when it works, but I'd always need a backup. In situations like this, I find the backup always just becomes the go-to.
But yeah it’s offline navigation with all of the limitations that come with that
That said, if that’s the direction they’re going, I don’t need to help encourage them. I deleted Apple Maps off my phone & iPad, & switched back to Google Maps after like 10 years on Apple Maps. The hardware I buy is expensive enough & has profit margins high enough that Apple should never be trying to show me ads—targeted or otherwise—inside the basic functionality of their phones, and Maps is very much marketed as a feature of the hardware they sell. Also Google Maps is just better.
TomTom is an extremely good paid ($6/mo) nav app - if you appreciate not being a product. It seems to now be named "TomTom Go Expert: Truck GPS" but does still have car mode. You _have_ to download maps, it's fundamentally offline. Routing is fantastic. They've been around since car nav was devices that you purchased.
The only area where it falls behind is finding businesses, but Google and Apple will probably always be rulers there.
https://github.com/travisvn/stop-tahoe-update/issues/19#issu...
This was after Apple broke the trick to prevent Tahoe update nags.
I looked it up and indeed, it's in section 1, paragraph C:
Your Device will periodically check with Apple for Apple Software Changes. If a change is available, the change may automatically download and install onto your Device and, if applicable, your peripheral devices. By using the Apple Software, you agree that Apple may download and install automatic Apple Software Changes onto your Device and your peripheral devices.
https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/iOS26_iPadOS26.pdf
If people actually read these clickthrough agreements and started sending devices back when they don't agree, it would encourage the industry to change.
No one "needs" an iPhone, they can support one of the open source phones with far less onerous terms.
> If people actually read these clickthrough agreements
I would live in such a world too, but that is a fairy tale. In a lot of situations, you don't get to see the contract before you have signed it. I had the situation in a bank contract. The bank clerk tells me it's mandatory, to sign that waiver, I tell her it's not. She won't sign the main contract, until I signed that waiver. I tell her that's illegal. Doesn't matter. After I signed it, I get to read the waiver, it clearly states, that it is not mandatory, and whether it gets signed does not have any effect on the main contract, as is required by law (with citation).
Because of these things, the laws says some things can't be established and most other things must be established with informed consent. It's on the company to ensure that this is collected. No, a tick on "I have read and understand the Terms and Conditions" is not informed consent.
Honestly, we don't need any law changes actually, because most of these things the tech companies do is plain illegal in every step.
This is exactly what Stallman and the FSF have been saying forever, but nobody believed them, https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html
This is not to excuse Apple, just a useful trick.
In the App Store, Apple won't let you filter for apps compatible with your iOS version. So sooner or later, you have to manually try installing every search result just to see whether it errors out. There's no explanation for not adding such a trivial filter other than to annoy users on purpose. Without jailbreaking, you also can't install earlier (compatible) versions of a given app. And by the way, updating iOS eventually just turns into buying a new iPhone, once the latest iOS no longer supports your device at all.
But the worst part is how critical software components are bundled with the OS too. On iPhone, that means WebKit. So very soon your Internet browsing experience starts to rot, because the only way to get a version supporting the latest Web standards is to update the whole of iOS. Likewise, on Macs, your runtimes/frameworks are bundled as well, so you can't update them individually. Eventually, the only way to install even non-native apps is to update the whole macOS.
This is what you sign up for when you buy an Apple product. Apple has mastered the art of tempting you without letting you realize what's really going on until it's too late. Apple was, is, and always will be evil. The clue is in their logo.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
On the flip side, imagine having another product mage for people who can afford $2k phones... well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
Worth noting that this is what most of the live service gaming industry is doing.
Pun intended?
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
Presumably, I'd be laughed out of the board room.
There's no chance these guys don't already have the full suite of Apple services (whether or not they use them) tied to their iCloud accounts. They've probably never even seen the nagware.
In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.
I bet they don’t see any ads, because their accounts will have the highest tier (or even a special one above that) of everything.
> internal email from Bill Gates complaining about the usability of some Windows features. It’s old — from 2003
https://www.techdirt.com/2008/06/25/you-thought-you-hated-wi...
I am still not sure if the joke was bad or if everyone takes everything too seriously nowadays.
Though, in my experience, that isn't true with Apple. Even when I tried Apple One, I still saw bugs in the experience that led to ads for things I already subscribed to... particularly in News+ and AppleTV+.
Source - worked at Apple ~2010.
That said I doubt he’d be happy at the current Pencil lineup. It’s a mess.
All apps really offered was a way to gatekeep payments in games that groom impulsive spending habits, they just happened to start making very serious money on Facebook right about the moment Jobs changed his mind.
Of course, I have nothing against being able to delete your own messages for both. A time limit within which you can do that is nice but I can live without one. But Telegram lets you delete every message in any PM conversation, including incoming ones, for both people. Or even the entire conversation, and make it disappear from the other person's list without a trace.
No wonder ad platforms that stay afloat till this day can have up to 30% of income from scam ads.
This whole saga is straight up the standard enshittification playbook by Cory Doctorow. And with no real ownership of the "purchased" hardware is why you all are in this mess.
Glad I'm a Linux user and admin.
Ternus was one of the main people driving these eyesores. He wasn't a nobody.
Everyone keeps blaming just one guy for enshittifying Apple, be it Alan Dye ir Tim Cook. As if literally no other executive or senior manager has any say in anything that happens.
Even here.
Joh Termus was hust picked up randomly out of the box. He never knew what was happening at the company, is entirely new to Apple, and never weighed in on any decision besides hardware. That is why he was picked to * checks notes* lead all of Apple.
where did that come from? he's been at Apple since 2001.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ternus
> tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option
Not criticizing because i can see that many people love Apple products precisely for this reason. Apparently this makes the UX friendly and intuitive. But it didn't click for me.
It feels like 80% of the UI has non-obvious overloads. I must have either skipped the tutorial or been too blind to find it, because otherwise these things are anything but intuitive. I've never struggled as much with any Android device, even with exotic manufacturer UIs.
I'm not a big fan of such gestures (mostly due to discoverability), but the few times I've used an Android without the navbar the gestures still felt reliable, even if I had trouble remembering them.
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-to-Debut-iAds...
That feels like a bog-standard search feature on a marketplace. I can only assume the omission is intentional.
"Apps worth copying, already making money." – https://web.archive.org/web/20260923001345/https://appraven....
"Stop guessing. AppRaven(.app) shows you what people really search for on the App Store, what they complain about in the apps that already exist, and hands you a plan you can start coding today."
I think it really speaks to the situation we've gotten ourselves into. Capitalism requires us to constantly grow but I think the problem is we're myopic and believe we need to grow faster and faster. With the high concentration of power these companies have the easiest lever to pull is by making a service worse and having users pay for a better experience. That's a very different strategy than offering new products and/or features.
I call this myopic because it really only works when there's little to no competition but using it too much causes more backlash and causes people to get pissed enough to become the competition (and not sell out). I think Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy comes into play here. People aren't aligned with the goals of the organization. To be honest, it's hard to think of any company where it's clear the leaders, let alone employees, are dedicated to the goals of the company[0].
It's really sad too, since all these big companies seem to just be a shell of what they used to be. They used to be inspiring and it was exciting to see all the change and innovation. But it just seems to be more and more disappointment lately. Small changes so people can push their small org's status. No one taking any risks to really push things forward. These companies cornered the markets, have trillion dollar evaluations, yet act like they're poor. That boy ain't right...
[0] don't give me that nonsense of "the goal is to make money". The comment is about myopia. If this is your first reaction, you're being myopic and missing my point. You're welcome to disagree, but don't strawman
There are enough examples until the NeXT reverse acquisition, bringing Jobs back, that prove it wasn't always like that.
I had no idea this was possible and was looking for the list of apps with updates available. This is why I always go to the comments first!
The problem is the shareholders getting value from add adds now, while reducing the value of apple shares in the long run, by allowing a new premium producer to emerge.
According to leaked BOMs, the iPhone usually has ~40% profit margins. It's very likely that Apple Music, the App Store and iCloud all turn >90% margins, which is basically free revenue to shareholders.
So that makes it really hard to make a lot of profit - as the royalty costs grow linearly with your revenue.
The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".
Why does it always happen? I also bough Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now.
I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)
I use Apple for nearly everything I can. I have multiple iPhones, Apple TV, I use iCloud, I have multiple MacBooks, Apple Watch, AirPods, an iPad… and yet Apple still thinks that’s not enough. They still shove ads in my face to try and squeeze more out of me. They still repeatedly add more dark patterns to try and trick me to use Siri. And they do so unabashedly.
And it’s not just these products either. Advertising brain has taken hold everywhere. I’d say at least a third of my interactions with coworkers these days are them trying to pitch me to use their shitty vibe coded app.
Advertising is one of the root causes of how shitty every product is becoming.
I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.
But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.
AFAIK you can click them away.
It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.
I'm still getting the ads to upgrade my storage. Can't dismiss it. Why?
> "Infuriatingly for iOS users, the only way to disable these promos is to either let them expire — which in many cases could take weeks or even months, leaving a persistent notification badge on the Settings app in the meantime — or pay for the service being offered. There is not always a “dismiss” button to shoo them away for good, and when there is, some people have reported that it doesn’t seem to work."
> "And unfortunately for users, that means more ads like this on their devices. While they are far from the most obnoxious ads around, the fact that many cannot be dismissed is clearly rubbing users the wrong way — as is the fact that the promos even exist at all in an Apple product.
There is also the possibility that at least some of these adverts are appearing due to a bug. The iCloud+ one in particular has drawn comments from users who are already subscribed to iCloud+ and thus, one would think, should not need to see any ads like this."
Anecdotally I have had this happen in the past, but not currently. I am particularly annoyed by the pattern where after an update it nags me to set up Siri, and the only way to remove the red notification icon is to partially progress through the setup before quitting. If you exit early the notification persists.
That is precisely what an advertisement is, congratulations on identifying the issue.
I don't mind a simple "You might be interested in these other services for your device" during initial setup. I do mind post set-up ads I have to click to disable in different places across my devices multiple times over time. It's just trashy.
Obviously offering upgrades to your own product is not the same as "showing ads" by any common understanding of the term.
Otherwise literally every app that offers a free version or trial with some form of paid upgrade would be considered "showing ads" because there's an upgrade button somewhere in the app.
If you're going to call that "showing ads" then I would argue you've overloaded the definition to the point where it becomes meaningless.
I hate ads, but mentioning other first party services feels very different than selling parts of the system UI like a billboard.
These service upsells should be dismissible but they seem fairly inoffensive. The App Store ads, on the other hand, are just atrocious
1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.
2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.
3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
(But, yeah, I'm reminded that I need to set up a Pi-Hole on the Starlink in the camper. I'm paying by the byte for those TechRadar ads.)
Okay, probably not the Trump phone but all the other's I've listed make some pretty great (and expensive) options.
Now if you are looking for luxury phones, that's a different thing. Something from Vertu would likely qualify. They are expensive and are made from high end materials, but the phones themselves aren't that special.