This is what basically everyone else has done over the past decade. Google used to put a different background behind ads in its search (https://www.fsedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Google...). It made it really easy to tell what was an ad and skip over it quickly. Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't.
Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen.
If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products.
It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
More and more evidence that the a-holes with spreadsheets are taking over at Apple and they’re completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.
I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.
Apple is having its Ballmer moment. Google did too before AI lit the fire under their feet.
Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella? Steve Jobs was the original.
Can we use "ensheetification" to describe this phenomeon? (sure I'm not the first to use this word)
That description really excels
I think the other replies are missing your 'sheet' pun, from my knowledge and a quick search, I think you coined it
For a second I thought it meant the novel sheets UI Steve Jobs showed off in the original Mac OS X.
I hate to quote an AI but I got this....
>Ensheetification is a newly coined, informal term, likely from Hacker News, describing the trend where web/app interfaces become dominated by large, card-like "sheets" or panels that slide up, covering content, similar to how apps like Google Maps, Instagram, and Apple's iOS use full-screen or partial-screen overlays, effectively "sheeting over" previous views to present new information or actions.
I propose MSDS in stead, short for My Sheet Don't Stink.
Seriously reads like a hallucination
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I hope this takes off
Yeah, I love this :)
What does it imply that the other term does not? Enshitification is the inevitable result of the tendency of profit to revert to zero. This is basic schumpeter (not to mention marx).
One is the result the other is the process.
It happens because Data People look at Numbers on Sheets and justify business decisions based on what happens with the numbers.
The alternative business decision making framework is the Jobs method: Do the thing that you know is good, because of your pure human sentiment.
Enshittification puts the focus on the users of the product as the product gets worse.
Ensheetification puts the focus on what's happening within the business to cause this.
That is what's expected when you put a glorified accountant in charge and he decides Wall St. is the real customer and the stock price is the real product and users and consumer technology are an afterthought.
He’s been in charge for a while, even during some good times. I dunno. It definitely seems like the company is trending in a bad direction, though—maybe he was able to extrapolate from the good points well enough. But now that they are far past those points, the higher order terms are going bad…
Big ships are hard to turn, even in the backwards direction.
I could not agree more.
It probably doesn't help that I just spend an hour trying to figure out how to update to 18.7.3 on my iphone. It turns out you can't. The only way to get security updates now is to upgrade to iOS 26. Apple no longer supports security updates to old major versions if the device is capable of running the new major release. Apple is no longer making choices that benefit customers, but ones that benefit project managers.
Wow, I just checked and looks like I'm stuck on 18.7 for the rest of the life of this iPhone I guess. That being said it looks like I can opt into ios 18 beta. I wonder if that would include security patches? Actually maybe I don't want security patches. It would be nice to have a jailbroken iphone again one day...
It won’t.
If in the past it has, it was precisely to reach the present situation. It's naive to expect these companies to be pro-costumers. They would rape your mother if they could - the only reason they don't is because that would make you not buy their product and falsehoods.
> It's naive to expect these companies to be pro-costumers.
For the last 20 years this is exaclty what Apple fans have believed. Its refreshing to see people finally realise that they are just a normal company, making money at the expense of their customers. Its just they dont hide it as well anymore.
> the only reason they don't is because that would make you not buy their product and falsehoods.
I’ve seen enough people defend these companies and their billionaire CEOs often and fervently enough, even in response to news that unilaterally fuck customers, that I’m not convinced people would stop buying even in your scenario.
18.7.3 is still available for download via a paid developer account, not sure about a free one.
Thanks, I gave it a try. I see the download, but it isn't signed for newer iphones. Only ones that don't support iOS 26. So frustrating. I'm on a 12 mini and people report that 26 runs horribly on it.
Does switching to the public beta no longer work?
Google was killed when Pichai took over - in his first speech, he said: Everything is AI now.
From moment on, Google search tanked: from a userexperience perspective and a useracquisition-vehicle perspective. Lots of companies could have been built only Google worked 15years ago the way that Google did work. Lots of companies today do not have the same lane anymore, so spending more and more on advertising....
> completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.
Maybe I’m too old, but if Apple fixed every single bug and added absolutely zero features until the day of my death, I would still be a satisfied customer.
The problem is not lack of innovation, the problem is that everything barely works.
There are obvious exceptions, like for example updating certificates, but otherwise I’m with you. Or I was, for many years, until the release of Liquid Glass. Now fixing bugs is no longer enough, the OS has become an abomination. I’ll avoid “upgrading” for as long as possible, then I’ll probably have to abandon Apple platforms forever.
Doing your job and doing your job well are two different things, of course. The innovation is going to have to be in how to return to the latter when they’ve lost their way. Or, perhaps more accurately, been led astray by conflicting priorities.
They’ve done it recently with their hardware. Past time for the other side of the house to refocus.
I'm still waiting on the iphone to get the macbook pro treatment: a return to thickness, more ports, and of course touchID.
I have slowly but steadily made myself not rely on Apple anymore: files moved to NextCloud, mail and calendars moved to Fastmail, etc.
Platform agnostic choices, because clearly Apple is not to be trusted anymore as the guardian of good taste, and also not anymore as the guardian of acceptable morals (i.e. the insane sucking up to the Great Orange leader).
There are still some services I need to move (mainly, music and reminders) but once achieved I am ready to jump to another platform without it impacting my daily life.
That's the way. I just badly wish we had more than iOS and Android. We need more competition.
Linux phones are just not a realistic thing yet.
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> Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella? Steve Jobs was the original.
Nadella is a budget Larry Ellison.
> they’re completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.
Nah, they're full of ideas. Mostly around sucking out every dollar from anyone foolish enough to build on their OS.
They've seen which way the wind is blowing and their extortionate payment processing fees are going to get limited by most governments. The plan flatly is to extort companies for money in the app store to make up for it.
eg allowing companies to advertise against other companies' names: just like google, they plan to extort companies on navigation (ie direct product/company name) queries.
imo the Apple that we all grew to love or hate, died when Jobs died. Its been nothing but a shell of itself since.
I think you are giving executives too much credit. All the people you cited are just business managers. Multi-billion dollar public companies are not startups, decisions are the result of comities, shareholder meetings, and consequences of choices made a decade later. Who is at the head now matters, but to a limited extent. Steve Jobs may be an exception, but mostly because he was a founder, so he led the company when it was small enough to support a true dictator.
As for Ballmer vs Nadella, what did Microsoft do under Nadella that wasn't started under Ballmer? The big things: 365 and Azure were both started under Ballmer. Bing, the only real competitor to Google search, which is also profitable, was made under Ballmer too. Essentially, Nadella continued Ballmer's job, as expected from a MBA CEO to another MBA CEO. The shift from Windows-first to cloud-first was already in the making when Nadella took over.
a-holes with spreadsheets = MBA
Same thing that killed Intel, Microslop, pretty much every american company.
The MBA was designed for those who did not want to study or could not master economics.(/jk or isn't)
So what if it is? A Master's in Economics gets you diddly squat in the job market whereas an MBA opens doors everywhere. You could get a PhD in Economics and still only work at a university, your country's central bank or at a stretch, the IMF or the World Bank, which are hardly held up as the pinnacle of professional development. And even then they'd only take you if you studied monetary economics.
They're not criticizing someone for seeing the appeal of an MBA, they're criticizing that an MBA has those factors in the first place. It shouldn't be the degree you pick to open doors.
I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.
Fadell might also be a good choice. Either way it should be someone currently outside Apple. The company needs an external eye to review its processes and cruft that built up under Cook (nothing negative against the guy, but what worked 5-10 years ago won’t necessarily work 5-10 years down the road).
Has Nadella had one original thought? He simply passes through whatever the board orders.
Nadella turned Microsoft completely around. Before Nadella, for about 2 decades, Microsoft’s entire purpose seemed to be to stuff Windows into everything. Changing this was a massive undertaking that was largely unimaginable within MS.
Unfortunately now under Nadella AI is taking the role Windows used to play, but even there he understood the importance of AI before most of his competitors did which is what allowed Microsoft to gain such a substantial footing in OpenAI.
And in the process alieanted most of the Windows developers, only game devs care (hence Proton), and now it is a QA mess.
Also it is quite clear for us old timers, that since the AI obssession started in Redmond, the old rotten Microsoft culture is back, it probably never left but it was tamed in the early Satya years.
Does he?
Remember Nadella doesn't read emails (he gets AI to summarise them all), he doesn't pay attention in meetings (he claims to get the minutes and then AI summerise them), what makes you think he even really knows the nuances of what the board want?
> Has Nadella had one original thought? He simply passes through whatever the board orders.
No.
But for mega-tech CEO salary, I’d probably do exactly the same.
It takes a person with massive personality disorder to do this kind of stuff. I'm glad I'm not doing it, whatever the amounts of money in play.
Forstall is an interesting thought experiment, but probably pure nostalgia
What has Nadella done for Windows users? It appears to me that Windows is becoming every bit as enshittified as macOS, if not more so. And isn't Microsoft experimenting with advertisements in Windows?
Microsoft doesn’t care about Windows. It’s been clear for years that their focus is on Azure, Office, and enterprise sales.
The enterprise is going to choose Windows regardless for the masses and even if consumers make a mass exodus to Apple (not going to happen because of price) or Linux (even less likely) they are out of $30 they charge OEMs.
So, yea, the latest IOS and MacOS are pretty terrible and user hostile, but they are miles from the issues with the latest Windows OS.
Only WSL and Terminal, but that is questionable.
I had VMWare Workstation before, and it isn't as if there were not Terminal alternatives already.
Other than that the whole UAP/UWP/WinUI/WinAppSDK, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT has been a mess. They may shout to the winds it is the future, yet it is mostly crickets and endless list of bugs on the Github repos and related VS tooling.
How is MacOS as enshittified as Windows? It doesn't have ads, doesn't push AI on you, their online services are trivial to ignore once and never think about again, etc. I haven't tried Tahoe, and sure, its new glass UI is shit, but merely incompetent UI design is not "enshittification" and is not in any way equivalent to what Microsoft does in Windows.
macOS absolutely, definitely, 100% has ads.
Buy a new Apple Watch and notice that the settings app with have a [1] badge trying to upsell you to buy AppleCare+. They obscure dismissing these by clicking the "Add AppleCare Coverage" button and then having a button that says actually no.
The undissmissable badges in settings irk me to no end. Using language like “finish setting up” in iOS to describe me opting out of Apple Intelligence by choice as leaving MY device in some sort of “unfinished state” is user hostile too. With the amount of effort it takes me to push back constantly on these dark patterns, I know for a fact all my less tech savvy friends and family just aren’t bothering and that’s what they count on.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
This, on top of the nonstop onslaught of advertisements for F1. It seemed like every one of Apple's services were pushing for that movie. They even put it into maps, wallets, into CarPlay (while people were driving!) It was surprisingly shameless.
It's certainly not as bad _right now_ as what you'll see on Windows 11, but this is something that will almost certainly only get worse over time.
Windows has third party ads and it’s so trash
Didn't know that was possible (not a mac user).
Agreed. And don't press the play/pause button on your Bluetooth headset, or Apple Music will fire up and ask you to agree to their terms.
> their online services are trivial to ignore once and never think about again
The workarounds to get rid of the nag to log into your icloud account on macOS are far more difficult than the workarounds to avoid using an MS account in Windows.
It's this thing I'm talking about, where I've got a permanent notification bubble on the System Preferences app on the Mac where I'm not logged into an Apple ID: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/344278/how-can-i-d...
I've been getting intrusive first-party ads in Apple's OSes for at least the past 3 major OS releases. News+, Fitness+, Music, Apple TV+, etc etc.
Surely we can distinguish MacOS – the operating system – from the online services provided by Apple that happen to have a native app?
If you are choosing to use Apple online services, sure, you'll get upsells I guess, as with any other online service. I don't use any of Apple's online services, and never see those ads.
News+ also has a ton of articles behind paywalls, even if paying for the premium version. It’s an ugly experience, probably the worst one.
macOS does have ads, their online services are worse than Windows, and installing basic software like Homebrew and Git is like having teeth pulled.
Windows is absolutely miserable, but with WSL installed it's far and away the better dev environment. I say that as someone who dailies Linux and hates all three OSes.
While macOS has gown down over time, installing Homebrew and Git on macOS is trivial, a 30 second affair.
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Forstall was an enshittefier too. Apple Maps was exactly what we are talking about.
Apple Maps from day one was skating to where the puck was going to be. They had vector based maps when that stuff was brand new. Possibly before Google deployed it widespread (but I'm not sure on this fact).
But the problem with Apple Maps was easy to see (and can only be fixex over time)... data. Google and others had a decade+ head start on Apple when it came to collecting data for maps. Judge Apple Maps 5 years old vs Google Maps 5 years old. Not Apple Maps brand new vs Google Maps 10 years later.
Forstall is the one that pushed to make iOS based on macOS/Unix. He was definitely a lightning rod but had product sense.
From my reading, Forstall was one of the few who actually refused to partake in performative corporate culture, and decided to quit rather than bend over
>when Apple issued a formal apology for the errors in Maps, Forstall refused to sign it
It's obvious that apple maps would never be able to be a perfect replacement for google maps at launch, and it's possible Forstall in fact voiced these exact concerns but was overruled before launch, only to then be used as cannon fodder when he turned out to be right. Given all the clearly empty corporate-style "we take full responsibility" stuff you see today, someone actually _refusing_ to play those games when it wasn't his fault is a very positive sign for authenticity.
(He also did work on Siri, but given that he was booted right after its launch, I don't think it's fair to attribute their present incompetence on that front to him.)
I find this take interesting, but it does hinge on "well maybe the bad part was actually someone else's fault" being true.
Apple Maps launched much too early. It's certainly plausible that someone else forced Forstall to launch it, but I don't think we actually have reason to believe that, do we?
Strange take. Apple Maps was a new product. It's expected it would be behind Google Maps, maybe even forever given all the headstart and resources Google gives it.
In any case, Apple Maps (a NEW then product, in an entirely new space for Apple) being bad, is not at all related to "enshittification".
Apple Maps is absolutely the wrong thing to judge Forstall on.
Not to mention that its main problem is coverage i.e. data quality. Regarding software engineering it's fine, even better than Google Maps in lots of aspects.
I mean, we had gps nav that worked and Apple maps would instead tell people to go down railroads but okay downvote me.
This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app other than for the occasional airline.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
The same thing is happening on the Android side.
If you've made a game, it doesn't matter how high quality it is, how many awards it has won, etc.
The only thing that matters is that it's live service, that it doesn't "have an end", that it can drive engagement and perpetual revenue.
Quite a few testimonies from game devs: according to them, Google representatives pretty much told them this.
See also: the requirements to constantly update your app/game even if it's a "finished product" that does not inherently require any updates.
I see a parallel to how Google search created incentives for SEO and social network feeds created incentive for attention grabbing slop. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both upstream and downstream.
Is there any platform that does not use these dark patterns? I hope the agent era will allow users to bypass the crappy search responses and slop on feeds. But by the looks of it OpenAI is moving in the same conflict of interest direction to its users.
Of course they are. It was obvious from day one that ads were going to be shoved in. At first they’ll be obvious and clearly separated, then they’ll influence the responses you get without you even knowing. I can’t fathom why anyone ever believed that wouldn’t be the case.
Not a full platform, but F-Droid is the only app-store I know that feels customer first and isn't predatory.
Yeah, I miss those days, I would actively browse the "Top 50" of the different categories and find cool new stuff (especially games). I really miss that time period of when I got the 3GS and this stuff was all new and _actually good_. Since then, more and more cool apps and games have come out, but everything around those has become crappier and more exploitative, and far less pleasant to use :\
> that costs $5/wk
Allowing weekly subscriptions is so comically evil.
It only exists to trick people into overpaying since 99.99% of subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, so hopefully you don't notice that it says "wk" instead of "mo".
> This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app
consumer manipulation en masse does impact you even if YOU don't fall for it.
yep. if it didn't work they wouldn't implement it
We are a dying breed.
A whole new generation has never known an App Store without ads.
To them this is the norm.
The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal. Like OP I haven’t browsed the iPhone App Store for over a decade. Occasionally a web page will send me to their app directly and if I want it (very rare) I’ll get it, same with installing specific apps - Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp etc.
Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.
> The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal.
The iOS App Store was introduced in 2008. Ads in it began in 2016. We’re in 2026. The App Store has had ads for longer than it didn’t, but the early period was not “very minimal”, it was almost half its current life time.
> Did ads on search appear in 2016?
Yes.
https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/06/ads-appearing-app-store...
https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/6/13184346/apple-app-store-...
That cutoff doesn’t matter at all for the reality of the situation, and your math is off. The moment smart phone use becomes a majority does not mean the majority of people have only started experiencing something at that point. And we’re talking specifically about the iOS App Store ads, and you’re ignoring the iPod Touch and iPad…
Subscriptions changed the psychology completely. Even when an app is objectively good, you're forced to evaluate it like a service contract
It’s because no one bothers with pay once apps anymore the only way to get customers is free app and tricking them into a subscription. Entire system raced the price people would pay for iOS software to 0
I’m building a pay-once app, but as mentioned in another comment, the business advisors don’t believe in that model.
Since I’m unemployed, I need them to approve my financial plan, and they’re really pressuring me into a subscription model. It’s crazy how many spreadsheet folk don’t think of anything but recurring revenue with a captive customer base.
Yep. I wish they would just completely get rid of the concept of a self-serve App Store and go fully into the video game console model where there’s a much smaller library of much more strongly vetted third party software available. It would drastically increase the average user’s experience with iPhone software quality, and it might even help them with all the complaints about not allowing side loaded apps (notice how video game consoles rarely seem to deal with that complaint).
I agree, and my experience is the same as yours. However…
> This makes no difference
It makes no difference to us personally, but it does make a large difference to other people, many of whom may be friends and/or family we support. And it is another step in the shit road Apple is walking on, which will continue to affect us.
I get where you're coming from and your examples are egregiously expensive, but do we really want to live in a world where software is valued at a $2 one-time payment? We shouldn't be engaging in a race to the bottom like that.
I have a few app subscriptions that are under $5/yr, like Parcel, and always purchase the latest release of Acorn for around $20/yr. I use those apps frequently and hope those rates are supporting the independent developers who make them. I would gladly pay more for tools I use to make a living.
A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.
On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.
I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.
No, but I want to live in a world where software can be 'done.' With very occasional security updates perhaps. I don't want to justify why my pomodoro timer needs a subscription model with constant updates.
Apple is not good with backwards compatibility to my knowledge. If you buy a 'done' app it's basically a subscription (albeit much cheaper) for maybe 2-3 years because a yearly iOS update will most likely introduce breaking changes, as someone below me already outlined.
It’s still cheaper to buy the same $2, hell, $20 app again once the compatibility breaks than keeping all the subscriptions going on forever.
Except that in that world they cannot force apps to adopt new APIs and have to keep supporting the old ones, thus the forced upgrades.
No it doesn't, do you need examples?
Well, in this present world where it isn't valued at a one-time payment, OP is no longer a customer. Myself as well. Likewise probably a lot of people on HN. Like OP, I don't scroll through the app store anymore. I used to actually do that for fun! So the developer of that would be $2 app is getting nothing today. They release their app and get no one downloading it because it is comingled with the bullshit. Best they can hope for is a 6 year old steals their parents CC and signs them up for a recurring subscription they miss between the rest of their bills. This is the world we live in instead of the $2 software world.
> This makes no difference
Every step in the wrong direction makes a difference, and IMO it makes sense to keep saying that it's wrong. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "oh well, we're fucked anyways" doesn't help either.
No one likes it that you can't distinguish an ad from an organic result. Regulation to make ads more visually distinct would be widely welcomed. It can be done, why the hopelessness?
The search results in the App Store are ridiculous. Sometimes I search for an app by name and have to scroll through dozens of other apps before finding the one I had searched for.
App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
Amen. App-store search is an offense sham, wasting users' time and stealing from developers.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
In spotlight search, you can hold down cmd to show the path of the selected file. And cmd + enter will open the containing folder in finder.
Thanks, but the point is to see the locations IN the result list, so you can eliminate hits that you know are irrelevant (like ones on backup volumes that aren't current, or whatever). Having to click on every hit, one at a time, and hold a secret hotkey is not just undiscoverable but absurdly cumbersome.
The Finder issue can be alleviated if you include the path bar in your Finder window, at least it is so before Tahoe. So you highlight a search result and the path bar shows you where it is.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Thanks, but right-clicking on every hit, one at a time, and invoking a context menu option to see where it resides would take longer than searching for, downloading, and installing a competent file-search utility like EasyFind.
I never actually thought to try such an obvious and definitely-not-ridiculous approach, and I can (happily?) confirm it works, so thanks for that. Apple are certainly leaning into Think Different with this.
Thanks, but having to click on every single result one at a time and peer at a path bar somewhere is far from acceptable. This prevents you from sorting results by location, and skipping hits on volumes you know to be irrelevant.
Finder has always been the weakest part of Mac OS for some reason. The one UI that Windows beat them on.
Yes, Finder has always sucked. We were promised a "ground-up rewrite" years ago... don't know what happened there.
Microsoft has degraded Explorer, though. For example, you used to be able tell which directories were empty by simply noting whether there was a + symbol next to them. Clever and time-saving.
Now, not only did MS replace the universally-understood + sign with a stupid triangle, but it now HIDES all the triangles unless you happen to roll the cursor into the left pane. WTF, WHY?
Oh, and if you select multiple files in Explorer and right-click to say "Open with..." NOPE! Microsoft inexplicably removes "open with" if you select multiple files, even files of identical type (PNGs, for example).
The opening of multiple files was fully functional 30 years ago. WTF?
I remember Google got sued for this once. It was something about linking trademarked names to an ad - Google allowed a competitor to display an ad when someone searched for the trademarked name on Google. They lost the case or settled (can't remember). Perhaps someone should test this on Apple too, by trademarking the app name and defending it in court. Since there's precedent, Apple is likely to settle or lose and payout.
Or make 100 the same apps.
You should see what Google has done with the latest version of the Phone app. You used to be able to click on contacts and that would show you.. your contacts. Now it shows recent calls with a search bar for contacts. Say I want to call a friend named Dave. As soon as I start typing, search results begin populating, but none of the names it offers start with "D", they just contain "D" somewhere. It could be the middle of a last name. And I can't figure out why they'd fuck this up. There are no ads to be injected into my attempts to find a contact, so I have to wonder if this is just the beginning of a push to ruin every convenience so users will turn to Gemini for everything.
It's not as bad as you say. If you search in the Phone app, a single letter search returns contacts with a name field (and then a company field, and then a notes field) starting with that letter. It works reasonably well.
The Contacts app is worse and returns anything with a string anywhere in the contact details starting with that letter.
Yeah that was very visible when HBO Max launched here in Austria and Germany. The top result was HBO Max FYC (which by itself is a very bad name, but it's not for normal customers), then came other results with even other streaming services and only after scrolling a bit you got the normal HBO Max app. Didn't matter if you searched for "hbo" or the full name "hbo max".
I was shocked by the App Store yesterday. I was searching for a well known app made by a huge f500 company. Now, this app is by some distance the most used app in its category but they had CHANGED the name of the app to the name of the second largest app of that kind. That’s crazy!
A near fraud from the company and real failure of curation from Apple.
Works as intended.
Makes you scroll past shit with a 0.001% chance you will download it on the way to the app you are really looking for.
> Works as intended
Every single time you read "search is broken" you should parse it as "search has been exhaustively optimised and tuned to maximize revenue for the company providing it".
Search is never broken. It's just not doing what you think it should be doing.
Google and Youtube as well seem to have this problem. I find myself searching with "Quotation marks" a lot.
But Apple must take 30% of your revenue to maintain this level of quality. Don't you know that your parents using an Android would get scam infested phones because having unlocked app distribution prevents this kind of quality experience.
> App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
That means App Store search is not broken by malice but by incompetence. Apple just don't know how to implement search.
What they want is the app to pay for ads placement for their own app, to have to out-bid the competition.
what's your problem with mail search? works pretty well for me. it definitely can't beat gmail web search as I remember it from years ago:)
gmail is now such that I don't even understand the inbox.
It recently occurred to me that it’s been years since it was possible to find some new and interesting app just by browsing the App Store, like it used to be when iPhone and Android were first introduced. Now I open the store knowing in advance what exactly I’m looking for and take care not to accidentally click on a lookalike.
It's a mature market. Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over? I know I've pretty much settled into a small set of apps that I use on my iPhone, ThinkPad, and iPad and probably haven't installed anything new (ie not upgrades) for five or ten years now.
The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.
I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.
>Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over?
it's a shame it really feels this way! i discovered some fun social apps recently like Bump and Retro that are a refreshing break from the big algoscrollers, but all my friends are either too locked into the existing big social apps or are determined to not mess with any social apps at all.
Try to find a slideshow app that just plays photos as a slideshow. The first 10 results are all the same app with different skins. You try to make a slideshow and after adding 10 photos it wants you to upgrade to a $10/month SUBSCRIPTION to MAKE SLIDESHOWS.
Only a problem because apple removed the ability to change your slideshow speed. Tried showing my fam a trip recently and it flies through at mach 5
Discovery is social
If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly
Then whats all this "Appstore Optimization" about? :-D ;-)
Not only that, it’s dangerous too specially if you have a family account with a single credit card.
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
Yes. My wife’s mother keeps buying crap in game using my card and I have no reasonable way of blocking her from doing so if I want to keep app purchase sharing.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
I’m sure Apple realizes how many senile in-laws can make them money.
I think you could convert her account to a child account. That way, you have to approve the purchases first.
Can you not just make her a separate account and make her put her own card on there?
That's fair, I must have missed that
Regardless, there has to be a breaking point. The value of sharing those will be exceeded by the microtransactions at some point
I still do this but with F-Droid (or one of the nice frontends like Droidify).
Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.
I've had success finding games in the Apple Arcade by just browsing. The bonus is that the games are all included with Apple+ and don't have any ads or microtransactions.
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
Same on Android.
Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.
This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.
This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.
At least in Android you can use F-Droid which is Play Store for open-source apps.
I installed a regex powered notification blocker yesterday. Works as a charm.
For now, and only but a tiny fraction of you.
99.99% of users never visit the settings. For those that do, they won't get past scare wall #1 of enabling APKs and scare walls #2, #3, and #4 of downloading, installing, and enabling the app.
Google knows this.
Tyranny of defaults, trained user behaviors, ecosystem, scare tactics, and even SERPs manipulation to make this nigh undiscoverable.
But they weren't content with some number of you slipping through the cracks! They're starting to close the ability to release unsigned and self-signed code. You can only imagine what's after that.
Agreed. Far from enough. But at least there's an option for tech savvy folks.
It's only getting worse with the amount of AI Slop being poured into the store.
I'm relatively new to the space, but it feels like more and more of the time of indie devs / bootstrappers needs to get allocated towards marketing.
Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable. It's rumored that they'll add ads to maps as soon as next year.
Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music, Books.app is like reading in a Barnes and Noble while someone from marketing looks over your shoulder and their TV app features their own shows to an overbearing degree — everything else is becoming more of an afterthought.
> Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music,
If you use iTunes Match or load your own MP3s every time you open the app the search field is set to “Apple Music” and the search fails until you toggle it, every time.
Been like that for 2+ years
Buried in settings there's a way to turn off Apple Music (the subscription) and limit to only your own mp3s.
I tried to run both my music library and Apple Music subscription together, but found that when I let my subscription lapse, all my playlists got deleted, even the ones that just used my own music. Now I'm staying FAR away from apple music the subscription.
It’s been like that ever since Apple Music became a thing. I remember fiddling with this on an iPhone 6.
> Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable.
As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.
My family has made it clear that I need to be available on iMessage or I'd be right there with you.
Why? There is literally no difference. imessage is seamless with sms and mms.
I'm in group chats with android users and it works fine. "10729287 liked $message" is about the only difference as far as I can tell.
iPhones default to sending plain old texts to non-Apple devices so it's hardly an issue unless you don't have a phone number.
By "degrade the experience" you mean you get a text that says "TheDong liked $message." The horror! Maybe people will go back to just sending a thumbs up emoji.
Then use a vendor-agnostic platform instead for group chats like Signal or Matrix.
> inescapable. It's rumored that they'll add ads to maps
If you move to the EU you can change the default navigation app on iOS and never see apple maps.
A plan to display ads would explain why they region locked that setting.
I'd much prefer the EU to the current situation in the US, but it's not in the cards at the moment.
You can remove the maps app in the US too.
You can remove the default navigation app, but you can't set the default navigation app to something else. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/MapKit/preparing-y...
This is very unfortunate. To me Apple was the last corporate standing that is not doing ads nefariously. If this is changing what is next? I’m aware it is a slippery slope argument, but this has to do with trust. Apple’s advertised stance on privacy and security and ads always has been believable (to me) because of their business model and that they made it the distinguishing feature.
Now, what is left? iPads are great, MacBook with Apple silicon are unmatched in refinement, iPhones are awesome but getting a bit stale. Apple Watch is awesome, but for sports Garmin are better. It is the integrated ecosystem with iCloud that makes the total system powerful.
Where to go? I love Linux with CachyOS on my desktop. Anything similar for tablets and laptops? I think KDE has something like connect that aims to do what iCloud does.
As with security and privacy, the only real solution is user choice. On Android, if you don't like the app store(s) that came with the device, you can use another one or none at all. On iOS, you have to get apps from the App Store.
This will probably end with "certified android devices" https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
This only holds if you don’t need/want/care for banking apps or things like Netflix. More apps are requiring hardware and software attestation like my sibling mentioned.
Attestation just requires an attestation service, not a store, and apps installed outside the Play Store can use Play Services.
Wont make a difference. People are already in the Walled Prison and moms/teens/lower-middle class people are shamed for not being able to afford the $50/mo to buy an iphone. They had numerous privacy and security issues that caused literal deaths of VIPs. Their quality is always 2nd best if we are being generous.
If they haven't switched yet, its not going to happen. Apple knows this. Late users are always punished like my parents who still have a landline and cable tv.
Quality is 2nd best to what? And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS.
Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.
It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.
> And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS
Agree. Even GrapheneOS is hell to use. I tried both PixelOS and GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 and ended up returning it. If I was not homeless I would switch to a flip phone and just use a Linux desktop.
> Even GrapheneOS is hell to use.
This is not my experience. GrapheneOS is great and has absolutely zero bloatware/malware. The base system is just a couple of basic apps like the phone, messages app, and a Web browser. That's it. All the rest is up to the user to set up. You can be completely Google-free if you don't install sandboxed Google Play Services and other GApps.
Without GApps, the setup is extremely private and ideal to use with self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Home Assistant as substitutes for the typical commercial malware found on most "smart" phones.
> The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.
Is it? I feel like that would only be tragic if you expected the App Store monopoly company to care about users instead of profits.
For most of us on the sidelines this is a real "told you so" moment.
The company cares about neither. People inside the company will care about a great many things. The people who care about users either don't have the power to act or no longer care enough to do so.
If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.
This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.
I am switching next week when my new phone gets in. Between Siri, vanilla bugs, ios 26, and questionable design decisions, I'm going to try Android. I will say my 13 Pro is a beautiful piece of hardware but the software shortcomings are beginning to pile.
there are already regulations in the EU which say
- ADs need to be clearly recognizable as such
- bunch of other things related to deceiving users and customer protection
- the risk this enables in combination with target ads to trick a user into installing a look alike malware makes such designs IMHO negligent, and in the EU you are responsible for (your) negligence no matter what you put in some TOS
so why do we tolerate sites systematically blending the lines between ads and content in a way which makes it unclear what is and isn't an ad and is designed to deceive the user into clicking on an ad instead of the content they are looking for. Which to make it worse also has lead to absurd market practices where competitors can semi-hide your product by buying ads which puts their look alike products above your product every time a user looks for your product.
> so why do we tolerate sites systematically blending the lines between ads and content
Precisely because it has started to be regulated.
Pre regulation, companies were tiptoeing forward, creating a new market and seeing what they could get away with with their customers. Now there is regulation they have a line drawn in the sand for them, and they know exactly what they can and cant do to screw consumers. Therefore they all now toe that line, and push as close to it as they can without crossing it.
What follows is a never ending cat and mouse game of companies finding loopholes in the regulation and regulators rushing to catch up and close the holes.
> cat and mouse game of companies finding loopholes in the regulation and regulators rushing to
but here is the thing, most "loop holes" in this kind of law technically aren't loop holes in this kind of laws (but loop holes in enforcement; Because laws normally aren't based on specific technical solutions, so don't care how "clever" you solution is.)
the main problem is hesitant, slow and ineffective enforcement which moves things from "you can't do that and if you do you get increasingly higher penalties the longer you insist to not comply" to a broken "you can do that at a cost lower then your benefit and a bunch of annoying law suite dragging out for years"
best example is GDPR, it's relative clear cut and not vague and most "loop holes" are relatively clear cut not allowed. That is until judges made decisions which where clearly not in line with the text of the law because it was politically very inconvenient that the main business model of all the local news papers doesn't work anymore. Or humoring nonsensical arguments from meta in court instead of just shutting them down the moment meta brings them up. So now companies often don't try to comply with GDPR but instead try to guess "what degree of non compliance is widely allowed" and that is where GDPR compliance becomes complicated and legally unclear.
> so why do we tolerate
Regular people outside tech couldn't care less. They scroll endless influencers pushing goods and services they were "invited", "collaborated with" with no advertising disclaimers, and they lap it up leaving streams of positive comments.
I know plenty of “regular” people saying “f this, it’s all ads, can’t even find anything anymore!”
Services business is a slippery slope, everyone succumbs to the YoY revenue growth push and they all gravitate towards the same dirty tactics. They even tried turning the hardware into a subscription model but I guess it didn’t gain much traction.
Ah! The illusion of predictability (for the organisation, of course, because that's what only counts nowadays). Then users get tired/upset of the crap and walk away.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024. Apple annual gross profit for 2024 was $180.683B, a 6.82% increase from 2023. Apple annual gross profit for 2023 was $169.148B, a 0.96% decline from 2022.
Seems like this is just plain old greed...
It seems a significant amount of that revenue is now from services (App Store, in-app purchases, subscriptions,…).
Yes! And these are very easy to boycott! I don’t understand why this didn’t happen after Tim Cook shove that gold bar right up Trump’s ass.
A beer company had 10% of their value go away because they dared to acknowledge the legitimacy and humanity of one trans person.
Boycotts work great. People just don't do them for anything it seems.
It's crazy to think that even if you buy the phone with the highest price premium your are still forced to navigate between ads for basic feature and have a shitty experience.
Despite Apple not needing more money has they have already can reserves more then they can know how to use it
Two things - browsing appstore is not a "basic feature". It's an entertainment and folks gotta pay for it. I have never browsed Appstore in my life - all i got were either direct links or search by title.
On the "highest price premium" - they can charge it simply because there is no alternative. I have tried android several times and it was was a huge eye opener how shitty and unworkable it is, even in 2025. Boy, they can't even get notifications working properly. So yea, apple charge because they can, can't they?
What you say doesn't make any sense.
The ad appears in search result. So "search by title". Not like having fun "wandering randomly" in the app store...
Probably not the best place to troll iphone vs android, but you are probably mind fucked by apple coolaid because so far there are both good and bad sides of both android and iOS. But iOS has a lot of things really fucked and missing or broken features compared to Android.
Just recently you had this nice "liquid glass" making apps unreadable/unusable with semi transparent buttons on top of random UI elements...
Still they clearly can charge whatever they want, that is not the question, the point is that nowadays you can buy the product with the highest margin and still not expect an experience without ad and fucked up interface dark patterns.
In the same way, whatever price you pay for a tv set, it is becoming harder and harder to get one from a major brand that we not screw you with hidden telemetry or forced ads or unwanted features...
It still says AD in big blue letters on the new version. Not really a big deal from my point of view.
Still there does seem to be a pattern of ignoring their hardcore fanbase: using Gemini, making ads less obvious, making free apps part of paid bundles. I suspect Apple are getting a lot of pressure from shareholders, given their recent growth has been far lower than e.g. Google.
This is not a trend I like and I'm definitely looking for a Linux boat to jump on, to future proof app distribution, but there just doesn't seem to be an obvious candidate right now.
> It still says AD in big blue letters on the new version. Not really a big deal from my point of view.
Sure, but it'll be small next letters after this. Then small grey letters. Then small grey letters on the details page. Then small grey letters in an accordion on the details page. Then ...
That 'Ad' text is literally the smallest text in the entire app listing UI
It's not. Just glimpsing the top of the article will reveal this is a patently false statement.
Something I don't get about Apple haters is they just spout absolute bllx for no apparent reason. I don't feel the need to defend Apple, I just want a reasoned discussion. I just don't get this attitude.
I share your frustration. I’m an Apple user and absolutely dislike everything about their direction regarding software. I have nothing but criticism for Tim Cook. Yet I see myself having to correct batshit lies people make about Apple to have a proper discussion. There’s no need to make shit up (and doing so gives Apple the opportunity to outright dismiss those as haters), Apple makes a lot of crappy decisions we can criticise in good faith.
I find that's the case already. They also force you to go through their ad-splattered gauntlet, every time you reopen the app.
It's pretty much worthless, to me. I always use direct app links, from the developers' sites.
I shudder to think of it getting worse.
Every now and then, normally while I’m bored before departing on a plane, I’ll scroll the App Store. It’s all ads at this point. Lists and lists of “top [x]” most of which are clearly just paid lists.
I never visit the App Store outside of that. If I need an app, I search for it and go directly to its listing page (yes, technically the App Store) or install it directly from my Home Screen.
This is what happens when companies start selling advertising. Inevitably the incentives for making that advertising "succeed" infect the quality of the other products they sell.
I can remember, or perhaps imagine a time when the FTC would knowingly not look kindly on a situation like this, so Apple with its huge market share and revenue wouldn’t consider it. I imagine now it’s likely not a concern for the agency, and if it were, a political contribution would go a long way towards resolving any concerns.
With stuff like this, this is just a really bad idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323041
You can't tell family to search for things in the app store anymore, I always provide direct links. It's just to dangerous otherwise.
>it probably helps increase click-through rates which ultimately boosts Apple’s revenue in its ads business
I assume that means it increases the number of times users install the wrong app (possibly with serious consequences)?
Why should Apple give a shit? Companies like Apple are sociopathic profit-maximizers, and users are cattle to be milked and slaughtered.
They still don't want users to leave. Yeah they can get away with stuff like removing the jack or being slightly annoying about iCloud, but things would be way worse if they didn't care at all.
the change is more subtle than I expected but this does seem like a step in the wrong direction
a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.
Oh, so the Google playstore since... forever. Or at least as long as I can remember. If you have a "search" feature on your <anything app> it should filter down to exactly what you would expect, no sponsored positions, no irrelevant apps as ads, etc.
Shame apple is going towards the dark pattern of ads as results.
This sounds horrible for user experience. That used to be Apple's claimed Raison d'être. It's sad how far they are willing to debase themselves to chase a few extra nickels. They are already one of the richest companies in the world.
Surely they should focus on improving the actual quality of their products (particularly software), and developer experience and documentation, rather than further watering down their quality.
This is going to leave a black stain on Tim Cook's legacy. Sure apple may be more profitable and bigger than ever, but its betrayed its legacy, and its users.
When the shareholders want infinite growth no matter the cost, this is what you get
History tends to remember outcomes more than tradeoffs
In related news, 10% of Meta ads are malicious, and they have Meta seems to have little incentive to stop it.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
Today a friend of mine literally got an ad for a prostitute on Instagram. They've just completely given up about even pretending to care.
I feel these practices contribute to the post-truth society where a user looks for a fact and gets a paid-for opinion shoved in the face instead. It should be easy for the user to discern the factual relevance of search query results, and it does not bode well if the provider of the search functionality is in on the deceit.
> It should be easy for the user to discern the factual relevance of search query results
Is it even possible to structure incentives in such way that this happens? _Without totalitarian dictatorship methods_ if possible please.
The only reason that these company mark ads at all are due to consumer protection laws about undisclosed sponsored content.
If stronger consumer protection laws are "totalitarian dictatorship methods", then no, there is no path. If we aren't allowed to have laws and regulation, only unregulated capitalism, by definition capital makes right, and so apple having more money than you means you have no recourse.
Any way to structure incentives (like "we will all agree to only buy from companies that don't act unfairly") is the same as creating an ad-hoc government regulation.
Put a sticky ad banner to the bottom instead of mixing it with the results?
How about: zero ads permitted at all?
The most insulting aspect of these kinds of changes is the fact that Apple is generally sold as the "premium" brand. You are still paying a premium price, but you are getting the "freemium" experience anyways. And don't forget the additional 30% they take on every sale on the app store.
Etsy is probably the worst I have seen. Almost impossible to see. Doubt it is even legal in EU. https://imgur.com/a/ntnNVZF
Have you reported this to a consumer protection agency? What did they say?
Liquid Glass was always about blurring the line.
Does anyone know when it started to be "ok" to disguise ads as search results? And I don't mean making them look more similar, but including them at all, even as the top results. I'm genuinely wondering how this started because it feels like such a bad idea, but everyone is now doing it anyway because we got used to it by adding it to our list of noise to filter out when interacting with anything connected to the internet.
It happened at the same time enough users trained themselves to mentally skip over the ads.
It mostly seems like this was a response to the complex world of SEO. My perception is that SEO was seen as this pay-to-play 3rd party service that was offered by "experts" which allowed you to get the leg up on your competition. Search engines saw this as value being externally captured so they offered ads. Want to buy your way to the top? Quit paying 3rd parties to play the game and pay directly.
Google had sponsored links for as long as I knew about it, at least 2000. That section was at the top back then and is like that today, but there were times it was only on the right side.
Wow, how much greed will we all tolerate?
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.
And still, they feel they can do this? I have never seen a better sign of a monopoly in my life.
There is no where to go to, if you still want to use a smartphone. They all do this.
Regulation is the way to go!
Do people actually browse the App Store to discover what’s new? I personally only open it when I already know exactly what I want to download, for example Obsidian or Firefox. I search, install, and I am done. I never scroll around or browse for inspiration.
I am genuinely curious how others use it. Is App Store browsing a real behavior, or is discovery mostly being forced because search no longer reliably gets you to the thing you already know you want?
How do you test for ad effectiveness vs annoyance? Especially so for a captive audience where they can’t leave and go elsewhere?
It seems like every market leader that gets ads eventually “optimises” towards making them look like not ads. Obviously they will be more effective if people don’t realise what they are, so how do they account for annoyance (and the other negatives a user experiences) while doing these a/b tests?
>How do you test for ad effectiveness vs annoyance?
In a walled garden like apple? You simply don't, just make the test gradual and long enough until people get used to it.
That’s the way it appears, sure. But my question is how would you do it if you did care. What metric would there be you could measure if they have no choice but to use the product.
Why would you care about annoyance when you captured your audience?
It is a question asking how you would do that if you cared. I.e how do you measure/quantify that annoyance as a metric when they are captive and have no choice to leave.
Traditionally you would be able to measure annoyance by reduced usage, but that’s not the case in a captive market, so how do you measure it?
At a glance I don’t really see how this is meaningfully worse at differentiating.
If you saw more than 2 apps on the screen at a time the blue background might serve to distinguish ads from organic results, but when it’s the only thing in your screen-view with a few pixels of the next result peeking out from the bottom, then it just looks like they’re alternating colors from one row to the next.
Apple's app-store "results" have long been absolute bullshit. Apple lied to judges, developers, and the public about the app store. I wrote an application for a popular company; and even if you searched for the company's exact name, the application didn't show up in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up scrolling).
Instead, Apple delivered results with misspellings of the company name or applications that didn't contain any portion or variant of the search string AT ALL. Not in the app name, description, publisher name... anywhere.
I complained to Apple and got a boilerplate bullshit response. Then I raised a threat of legal action for Apple's hijacking and perversion of our trademark in their search results. This at least provoked a specific response, where Apple claimed that publisher name is "one of the top three" criteria for app-store search.
BULLSHIT.
Apple have enough customer behaviour data at hand to fully understand that there is very little they can't get away with.
So why not maximize profit?
App Store's UX has always been a show of excrement, and its search is wonky as hell. I can't imagine myself use that to discover apps, after having been shoved tons of dreck results up my behind the last time I've tried it.
I'd rather ask for app recommendations on 4chan or Reddit than browse App Store.
En-something-ification…
En-adification. Or just adification. Can also use adified.
Google Play - at least on tablets - makes ads vs not ads much clearer and, if you're searching for one app very obviously (like "Kindle") puts that above the ads.
Companies good at selling and distributing ads have the confidence to not be annoying about them.
To be be honest, the worst Google-like thing about the before and after is how you have to scroll down to see actual results. On my iPhone, I get half of an app showing below the full sponsored app.
Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.
This will always be a thing, the click metrics dictate it and to justify the costs to the company advertising and the low # of clicks, something has to be done to save the new revenue Ads give. They might as well add modal (psudeo popup) ads, because they will be there in 15yrs.
We really need more competition in the smartphone space. I think everyone hates this stuff.
This is an interesting left hand vs right hand thing. Apple is making it more difficult for find a particular app while coding assistance is making it easier to build one. At some point those curves intersect and the App Store becomes irrelevant.
Not as long as Apple requires you to manually re-sign your apps every 7 days without a $99/year developer account.
This is funny, since clear separation of ads and not ads is one of the requirements of apps that are admitted to AppStore. If there is no clear separation, the app is rejected.
I download new apps maybe once or twice per year. Every time I already know the app I want to download. I haven't browsed an app store casually in almost a decade.
This feels like a conversation about irrelevant matters the App Store ad design at the advent of AI integration? I see the future being AI suggesting or responding with an app or extension to add specific abilities or features based on stated objectives, i.e., just a package manager behind the scenes. I don’t see myself going to some App Store. I haven’t even “browsed” one in years because they all seem extremely static, having reached a peak saturation and static state.
Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.
App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.
These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
The next obvious step is to shrink the 'Ad' label, remove its background altogether and make the text a faded gray, or completely transparent "glass."
"Blurs the line" between ads and results is generous. In 5 years from now, showing up high on the app store will require big $$$ 99 times out of 100, IMO.
Ah, great, they're copying the worst part of the Play Store. I use Android, and avoid opening the Play Store unless I already know exactly what I'm looking for, it has been enshitified to within a centimeter of its life.
I would actually spend more money through the Play Store if it wasn't such an awful user experience.
Ffs. Alright, what’s the best way for me to run Silverblue on Mac hardware these days with a full GPU-accelerated desktop experience? Is UTM any good? Any alternatives? I used to run Win 10 in Parallels on MacOS and it was excellent - that’s the level of virtualisation polish I’m going for.
After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.
I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.
Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
I think the issue ends up being the Linux desktop experience makes one need to fix their own shit after a long day of fixing other people's shit.
That's one thing about MacOS, I can leave the driving to someone else. Increasingly, that driving is to places I dislike, but I'm still not driving.
Why must Apple do this?
They're already rolling in profits that dwarf the national budgets of most countries. And I say this as a shameless Apple fanboy.
Maybe it's time to stop being shameless. The App Store monopoly has a direct impact on the quality of first-party services you consume.
It's a bit silly to call it a monopoly.
No one is forced to choose an iPhone over the many many Android alternatives.
But when you're forced to choose the App Store over the many many alternative .ipa distributors, it's perfectly logical and fair?
Android is a hardware alternative - Apple needs upward pressure to make their services competitive. If you use a Mac this is already obvious, you can't buy industry-standard software on the App Store. They all avoid it like the plague when given the opportunity, and Apple deliberately closes this escape hatch on iOS. Apple has known the App Store isn't good enough for over a decade.
It is an arbitrary and deliberate protectionist monopoly of app distribution. How many trophies does Tim Apple need to give Trump before people get the hint?
And when Android follows Apple's lead, then what?
The consumer harm is obvious. Whether you call it a "monopoly" or something else, it is a problem that needs to be addressed.
> The App Store is an integrated component of the iPhone experience.
It's an App Store. The .IPA is an integrated component of the iPhone experience, the App Store is an optional storefront. Again, look at the Mac.
You're repeating the same limp defenses that Apple has already watched get torn down by the EU and Japanese courts. We've solidly moved onto the "beg Trump for help" phase, which is miles worse than the humiliation of allowing sideloading.
Do you still want to know why they're putting ads into the only integrated storefront on iOS? It's real simple from where I'm standing.
They have to due to shareholders. So it’s not really up to them.
They are based in a capitalist country. Capitalism demands constant growth, otherwise you are classed as an unsuccessful company.
The old App Store is already terrible.
If this is the blueprint for their planned platform endhittification I may as well go back to Android.
Apple’s Ads business is around 8-10 billion dollars in revenue. Thats a tiny fraction of their overall revenue.
Exactly so if they really cared about their customer experience they could easily ditch this dark practice ad stuff in their app store and make it much easier for their customers to navigate safely, all with only taking a tiny hit to their bottom line.
So why dont they?
The lines where pretty blurred already. If you search for the exact name of an app, I think that needs to go first in the results, the ads can be the third or forth. Having ads show up before the "correct" app is incredibly dangerous in a world where so much of our digital life is in various apps. Often the people see is actively trying to trick people into installing the wrong thing, making the ad less visible is going to get a lot of people scammed.
How the hell Apple does not see this is beyond me. All of their fancy security in iOS is worthless if they allow people to be tricked into installing scam-ware.
I read the title then looked at the screenshots and thought what? It still says "ad."
Paragraph two of the article is:
> This means the only differentiator between organic results and the promoted ad is the presence of the small ‘Ad’ banner next to the app icon.
If it's that easy to fail to notice a paragraph, how much easier would it be to miss just the word 'Ad'?
I wasn't there to read the text, the screenshots say everything. Thought I was looking at the wrong pic cause it seemed obvious.
> I wasn't there to read the text, the screenshots say everything.
That's the exact kind of attitude that will make people miss an "obvious" marker.
And I wouldn't call that tiny thing on the third row of text obvious. Even knowing it said 'ad' somewhere, it took me several tries to find it.
> Apparently not though, I saw it said ad.
It's not like it's a guarantee. And being the "kind" of attitude doesn't mean you miss the exact same things in each situation. It didn't bite you here but it's a risk elsewhere.
> Maybe you missed it because you were focused on the wall of text instead of the UI.
I was looking at the ads the whole time, but I was intuitively focusing edges and the corners and the fine print at the bottom but the actual marker was tucked into the middle very small.
It is kinda interesting how like every company seems to go through this flow of highlighting that something is an ad (usually even with some differing background color like what Google used to do!), and then they just pull back differentiators more and more until it really is the smallest minimal marker possible
They are inching forward closer and closer to the regulators lines to see what they can get away with without rousing the bear.
For sure it seems intentional. I wonder if they used to be more afraid of the FTC.
But it was easier to distinguish with the blue background, don't you agree?
So why remove the blue background then? It just feels deceptive, does it not feel deceptive to you?
What if we all Venmo'd Tim Apple 5 bucks so he wouldn't be forced to do this?
Apple wouldn’t exactly go broke without this, maximising profits is the only goal and any ‘good’ behaviours and ethos will erode over time.
Apple might take user privacy seriously now, but don’t assume that will be the case forever.
> Apple might take user privacy seriously now
They dont and never have, its all marketing.
How do you think those app store adds are displayed to you? They profile you like any other ad company to figure out which ads you are most likely to click on to generate them more revenue.
Feels short sighted. Every such change gets me closer to ditching the ecosystem altogether.
I remember when it was a news headline that Apple showed ads _at all_ in App Store. It's sad that they're straying even further into scummy ways to nickel-and-dime every ounce of profit they can get out of everyone using their products and services.
(Check out nice and simple it was in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8 )
Google does the same where an ad is the first result. :(
This is the Apple I've always worried would emerge.
You mean the same Apple who will remove an app like Tumblr for a little consensual nudity posted by people and is too afraid of what Trump might say to remove X which is allowing none consensual undressing of women just by posting a picture and telling Grok to remove clothes - including CSAM?
It's been like this for a while, the top results for a lot of known apps are scam impersonators.
So much for the so called "safety" of the appstore.
In fact, they had so many ChatGPT fake apps showing as top results that they had to do something as users couldn't find the real one and it reached the news.
> In fact, they had so many ChatGPT fake apps showing as top results that they had to do something as users couldn't find the real one and it reached the news.
This is after claiming for many years that the walled garden is a necessity to protect users, and their app store is a safely curated utopia which justifies the 30% fee cut.
Capitalism pretty much demands it. Some companies can delay it for awhile, but the numbers must go up and eventually expansion because of a better product reaches it's natural limit.
Corporations always operate at the lowest morality level of any member of the company. Lots of executives can say no to dark patterns, but it only takes one to say yes. Then that exec gets to report the successful revenue boosting metrics. They will tend to get promoted and soon the entire leadership team is filled with people with the lowest ethical standards.
> Lots of executives can say no to dark patterns, but it only takes one to say yes.
I think the situation is a lot more stark than this. Unless they're desperate, the board of directors of corporations will install an MBA as CEO. In most cases, the only time this doesn't happen is at the founding of the company, when a founder is CEO. But if the founder doesn't maintain controlling interest, the founder can be replaced.
The promotion of Steve Jobs to interim CEO of Apple in 1997 was a rare exception. Apple fired its CEO, and the company was in danger of bankruptcy. They were running out of options and feeling the aforemention desperation. Note how the situation was very different in 1985, when the board of directors chose John Sculley over Steve Jobs in a power struggle. At the time, they weren't financially desperate.
Basically, yes.
With compensation so completely tied to "did our stock go up since you joined?", it's a whole thing.
26.3 ß 2 still shows the blue background on my iPad.
Apple, do you want to lose customers? Because that's how you lose customers.
But seriously, one of the reasons why I got iPhone for my parents to replace their Androids is it's relatively safer environment. But this change increases potential spam and attack surface.
It's impossible that they will loose more money from gone customers than make money from this change
Do people actually use the app store? Are we not all just searching in spotlight and clicking the first app that comes up (as long as it has 100K/1mil+ downloads) ?
if that was the norm, there wouldn't be ads in AppStore
I'm sure you're right. I'm out of touch because I can't remember the last time I actually had a need to browse (or search) the app store for something. Does it go like this for most people, really?
Open app store > search "food delivery app" > Read and compare the reviews of Doordash, ubereats, jimmyjohns app, pizzahut app, shawarma city app, scam app > Make a decision > download the app ???
They've been blurring a lot lately
Is anyone really surprised over this?
If an iPhone is going to be as bad as an Android like that then what's the point. The "premium" feeling is eroded like this.
Normal hn post: 50 comments
A hn post about Apple: the entire clergy and the clandestine cell network of Apple devotees emerges to hug hn to death.
Alright. Directly into the bin.
What cant i search for paid apps
One of the reasons ChatGPT is taking over google searches for a lot of people is that they also did this kind of shit.
These companies are overconfident.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
They already blurred the line between bad design and utter insanity with liquid glass. This feels like the natural progression.
Wow! They force you to use their app store, and now they have the gall to trick users into installing ads—and there will be multiple ads.
but HN told me apple isn't a advertisement company?
One of the main reasons I used to like Macs instead of Windows machines was because Apple did not do this kind of bullshit lol. Although showing ads on the app store above your searches at all is terrible behavior that both iOS and Android are guilty. They already get a cut of all the sales.
i don't remember last time i was in the app store.
Seriously? Already the only thing that makes ads distinguishable from results is that you search for "microsoft authenticator" and the first result is ... something else.
They do have an unnoticeable "this is an ad" tiny text somewhere. Are they talking about removing even that?
Why such outrage? Businesses need to make money afterall.
Sighs,
points to Best Books of 2025 table,
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittificatio...
This feels like the same old dark-pattern playbook, just dressed up more subtly. When the only difference between an ad and an organic result is a tiny "Ad" label, you're no longer informing users
Apple's App Store has been a stinking dumpster fire for many years now, and I've been avoiding it like the plague. I'm not surprised that Apple works on making it even worse.
Enshittification, the sequel.
Enshittification of Apple has been sad to watch.
Honestly, I use iOS purely as anti-Facebook guardrails
I trust there's granular permissions so that Zuckerberg can't scrape contacts
I understand there's corruption, and that annoys me. I wish Apple remained pure. But you still have to do this. Zuck is malicious as hell and we need sandboxes
This is also very easy to do on Android. IOS devices are not magic in their ability to block Facebook tracking.
Perhaps, though Apple outright revoked FB's certificate after the Onavo nonsense, that counts for something
Yeah and why did they do that?
People think its because Apple are looking after you.
In reality its because it allowed Facebook to target Ads at Apple users. Something Apple fiercly guards the privilage of doing only for itself.
Yep, thats exactly what Apple wants you to think.
They spun the whole thing to turn it into a Facebook is the bad guy story, when in reality what they did was eliminate a competitor from their platform without any backlash.
Very clever.
Just a reminder that paid for gaming of the search results on Amazon is around a $60bn business for them.
I think selling products is their fifth largest profit center, with AWS and Ads being the top two.
Enshitification
Anyone who has used the most ios or macos updates knows Apple has run out of good ideas
Enshittification of Apple continues. I was quite dedicated to Apple for years but I'm glad I just bought Google Pixel (degoogled with GrapheneOS).
the enshitification continues
[dead]
It’s the final stage of 'Search Enshittification'.
The core utility of a search engine is Relevance (finding the best match for user intent). The core utility of an Ad engine is Yield (finding the highest bidder).
When you blur the visual distinction between the two, you aren't just 'optimizing monetization', you are actively degrading the product's primary function.
From a UX perspective, this trains users to develop 'banner blindness' for the entire top half of the viewport. They stop trusting that the first result is the best result. It’s a short-term revenue extraction hack that burns long-term trust in the platform's neutrality.
Apple must be aiming for innovations in the renewables sector. They're trying to get Steve Jobs spinning fast enough to harness the energy.
/s
The masters of UI design are showing us how to build an app store. /s
I'm a pretty liberal guy, I like democracy I like captialism but its stuff like this that is blackpilling me on private enterprise. No matter how much they have they continue to push the boundary and squeeze the customer. My cope at the moment is that its only americans and its due to a failure of culture. But im starting to the same greed in companies in my own country. I dont think worker owned enterprise is any better as they still have the same incentives.
Not obvious to me that this is worse or as user-hostile as many seem to presume.
Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.
Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.
Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
> Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
Deceptive UI is the issue. By removing distinctions between ads and normal results, you're going from a frying pan situation straight into the fire.
>It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
They sell a walled garden. If shit gets inside the walls, we might as well come out.
I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Let the ad sellers pay if they’re the main costumers.
I’d like to revisit and see if in 6 months time you’ve actually left or if you just were angry.
Great point! If he is smartphonized, he will not get out of his addiction without losing job, life etc.
I meant to apple specifically… pretty sure you don’t lose your job switching devices usually
> I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer.
Problem here is that when you decide you no longer wish to pay the tax and want to exit the walled garden, you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go, and add complexity and cost to your setup.
I actively avoided relying on iCloud even when it was the sane option, but many people that will feel like the walled garden is no longer suiting them will have to figure out ways to move files, emails, and (crucially) communication channels out of the ecosystem.
I think a large number of them will decide that it's not worth the hassle, and remain walled in. Which is the idea to begin with.
Sure, this is HN, and many will say "screw it, I'll Nextcloud my way out", but the genpop will remain within the gilded cage.
Other than blue bubbles, you aren't leaving behind much nowadays. Apple is now lagging in general usability vs competitors, Siri as one glaring example.
I wasn't aware of that, that's pretty awful
>you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go,
Cloud storage of pictures is not an issue as I do regular backups (we all should, we’re a false positive account termination away from crying otherwise).
What’s else is there? I’m not American so no iMessage, I struggle to find some other blocker.
>you discover that there's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go, and add complexity and cost to your setup.
Which is?
Every time I got an Apple product, it felt like a step back. They were late to widgets, late to AI. Their security is historically poor.
> For the desktop Mac, the base OS is essentially UNIX. It is much more secure by default than Microsoft Windows
Citation needed.
>it's not a bad thing to be late to AI. Most of it has shown to be a complete waste of time, money and resources.
This is just cognitive bias. If Apple was doing well with AI, you'd be praising it.
I've been having gemini look at my screen and add events to my calendar in 2 clicks.
Not to mention... I don't really have lots of faith in the people who don't see the value in AI. Its halved my programming costs if not more.
>As for poor security - this has got to be a joke, right? If anything, it's the Windows world that has a piss poor track record when it comes to security. Apple meanwhile, unless you're a terrorist or drug kingpin, no way the police can access a properly protected device.
You do you then. I need my device secured. I won't explain because it makes myself a target.
> here's a heap of functionality and convenience you'll have to let go
That's a very outdated point of view. All mobile ecosystems have practical feature parity. Convenience - that's a tricky one. With Apple stuff, you only have convenience if you're one of the bubble people who has their entire family and close friends in the Apple ecosystem. The reality outside that is that for every 1 iOS person, there are ~2 non iOS people they need to collaborate with and share stuff. Convenience has left the room a long time ago.
Oh how I wish that was universally true. Unfortunately ive experienced strong discrimination for green checks especially amongst boutique SMB servicers
Oh no I lost my conveniences! Cry me a river. Are people really so weak we can't even give up little things to show these fucking tech companies we don't like what they are doing?
I want to see a movement of people using dumbphones or no phones at all. Anything you do on a smartphone can be done later on a desktop computer and a landline phone.
your (and many others') argument is basically a "there are no atheists in foxholes" "I know, better than you, what you think" argument.
to me, no idea what you are talking about, i find the iphone/Apple experience to be a huge pita, all the time. i love unix for the swiss army knife of general purpose tools, not the many different garden walls with no garden inside.
the reason fsckboy doesn't leave is that all his bitches expect it, otherwise, gone in 60 seconds.
This feels inevitable for any 'unique' company that lives long enough for leadership to retire and starts hiring replacement c-levels externally.
Those external people are going to run Apple just like whatever other companies they were running before. You need to keep the vision alive and promote people internally who understand that vision to keep running the company.
Being publicly traded probably doesn't help either.
It’s still better than the alternatives
Once we grow up as a nation and legalize competing app stores on native Android and iOS you can try to make this point
However, the alternatives are currently illegal, so your point doesn't hold
technically jailbreak stores count, but not practically comparable
I think that may depend a lot on just what you're used to.
Having never been in there, I can't imagine buying in now.
In what ways? Apple, IMHO, has been jumping on every proverbial band wagon. And some of its 'better intended' changes like ATT seem only to have been to stifle competition while they set up their own solution.
There are ways to have full featured smartphones without Google, like Graphene OS.
I am not aware of any alternatives that exist for Apple devices though
Only if you hate digital freedom
What’s interesting to me is that no matter how “hidden” the AD indicator may be, my brain always seems to very quickly train itself to swiftly skip such posts when scrolling/browsing.
Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.
If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do, they'd either not do that or step up a notch and make them even harder to spot. The reality is that these dark patterns do work for a large part of the users. We're the lucky few who can stay away though it is taxing and tiring.
Or at least we’re arrogant enough to think it doesn’t affect us.
It does affect us quite a bit. This situation makes us have to think hard, makes us be very wary of what we click on or read and sometimes bites us as well. I personally find ads extremely tiring such that I mostly avoid add riddled products/sites and always use ad blockers. Quite on the contrary, the vast majority of users aren't even bothered by ads, they've been accustomed to them. My main point of the comment wasn't to be arrogant but to say that most users don't care.
> If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do
People definitely do this. When I worked for a large social media company, we almost always had ads in position 2. People noticeably (in the aggregate data) spent less time with this position in the viewport.
But honestly, most people are just extra impressions/revenue for most advertisers, there's a much smaller number of people who drive ~all of the conversions.
The sickening truth is that most normals don't turn their attention in another way even when they recognize an ad for what it is.
In that scenario I can understand paying attention to ads, even though I personally don't. But normals will stay tuned in and eyes glued even for television ads pitching things they have no interest in. Hypnotized by the machine, indifferent to the commercial propaganda. Even asking them to mute the ads is met with puzzlement.
When you pay for an advertised product you're also paying for their advertising budget hence most likely not the best price/quality. Sure, not 100% true all the time, sometimes there's a liquidation of stock or something like that.
Yeah. Its going to be easy to skip the first result in an app store search, not because its highlighted, but additionally because it isn't ever what i was searching for. The app store search has been broken like this for years and any change they make short of adding or removing the ad won't change my habits.
in every search ive done on the app store in the last several years, I'm looking for a specific app. That app is never the ad result at the top, its always the second result down.
Right now i did a search for several different popular social media apps. TikTok was the top 'ad' result for all of them. Then i did a search for TikTok and got some random app i've never heard of as the 'ad' result. Its like it doesn't want the same app to fill both of the top two slots, but there is always an ad. So what you are looking for is always second on the list. Never first.
Because of this, why would i ever click the ad? If i search something less-specific like "flashcard app" the best result will fill the second slot. Something else goes in the ad slot.
Shouldn't be too difficult to train a DL network on it, as well. I'm waiting for a pi-hole like device that works on the HDMI level and simply replaces ads by blank space (or art, or whatever the user chooses).
Normal users do not do this. We break Google Ads' links at the office (yours should too, malicious linkjacking in ads is prevalent) and I am told "Google doesn't work" all the time. People have to be taught not to click the ads and usually that's only effective if you ensure the ads don't work.
Amazon has gotten "good" at it. If I search for, say, AirPods, I get ads from Apple followed by the regular listings that look identical sans gray "sponsored" text. It helps that in this rare case the ads are actually relevant.
The problem with this, I've found, is that you end up skipping a lot of things, and then find out later on that features were introduced years ago that you've wished, throughout the interim, existed. It's hard to keep up.
I wish there was regulation enforcing background colors for ads.
We should just have an <advertisement> tag in HTML, regulation could then require it.
It's not an ad, it's a paid message from a sponsor. Completely different. :-)
Any ideas? I'm struggling to come up how they could circumvent this
The solution to the plague of ads is to just stop buying so much shit. Most the stuff we buy shouldn’t even exist in the first place.
For example: most small, plastic toys should not exist, regardless of how many people might want them. They’re essentially mass-manufactured pollution that harms the global environment. Sure, you can find positive effects of them, but I argue those effects are not worth the downsides.
There are many other things that would be a net positive of they didn’t exist.
Just because something can exist, just because some people might want it to exist, doesn’t mean we’re better off. Honestly I think the Amish and their measured approach to technology is correct (though my rubric would be different than theirs).
> The problem with this, I've found, is that you end up skipping a lot of things
The solution is to stop caring so much about what you miss. Whatever it is, it’s not worth the unrelenting assault on your senses.
Replace your FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) with JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out).
I'm okay with missing things. As I got older, I cared less and less about being aware of everything out there, and I was glad I got the thing done I needed so I could spend time with my family.
I do this automatically too. But then I wonder if that matters. Are the results that have the best SEO actually going to be any better than the sites that pay the most to be displayed for my search? I have no idea.
"I can always tell when someone is lying to me."
Yet when Apple adopts the same patterns, it feels less like "catching up" and more like quietly abandoning a standard they once benefited from
Amazon is particularly wild because you can use the site without realizing %70 of your results are ads.
I‘d argue it‘s often 100% unless you are looking for things so extremely specific no one paid ad/placement money for it.
Not even then, because search wants to show you something and it will just randomly grab ad placements to make up the difference.
Yeah I'll often look for something specific and I'll see listings that have nothing to do with what I'm looking for. Like I think I was looking for wide mouth nipples for baby bottles, a specific brand and model, and I was seeing baby toys. Like ok, they surmised I have a baby... But don't show it to me as a result for a query for something completely different.
I can’t confirm that exact percentage, but yes—“prime” placements on Amazon are driven by Amazon Ads.
the Sponsored Brands banner at the top of the search results page, and the Top of Search Sponsored Products slots.
[1] https://advertising.amazon.com/lp/build-your-business-with-a...
>I can’t confirm that exact percentage, but yes—“prime” placements on Amazon are driven by Amazon Ads.
It's a quip, anecdata, not quantitative analysis————why would you need to "confirm that exact percentage"?
I think it was a polite way of saying "I think that is an exaggeration" and instead focusing on the part they agreed on.
I'm not trying to excuse Amazon but you do know what like, super markets, best buy etc, take ad money (promotional money?) from suppliers who pay for placement. That Samsung TV at the front being pushed at you, that's effectively ad money Samsung paid to have their TVs put at the front of the store. Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there.
I'm not saying it's good or that therefore Amazon or Apple should be excused. I'm just saying, the naieve me thought Coke was on the end of the isle because the store thought it's what customers wanted. No, it's what Coke wanted, and paid for. And it's the same with Amazon and now Apple.
When I owned a liquor store, the cigarette sales reps would all fall over themselves givings us free stuff, including straight cash, to place their cigarettes more prominently than the other brands. This would last for about a week or two until the other brand's rep would notice and up the ante.
> Those cans of Coke stacked at the end of the isle or piled up near the entrance at your super market? Coke paid to have them placed there.
Often, though endcaps are also used to move product that wasn't selling well and you want gone. But in any case, as a consumer you're usually better off ignoring products on the endcaps.
Someone's gotta explain why the tortillas are always on the end caps...
Off-topic but I hate it when stuff I'm looking for is ONLY at the end caps and not even on the end cap of an aisle that makes sense (like a particular soda at the end of the bread aisle).
I am suddenly realizing how silly it is that I have put up with this for decades. Are GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites? I am thinking I should be able to run my own styling to make the ads nearly invisible. Or do the big players do all sorts of tricks to make identifying the ad content so dynamic that it would require constant vigilance to maintain? I have heard that Facebook does insane rendering tricks to prevent people from scraping their sites, not impossible to imagine some companies obfuscate the ad selection.
Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
Yes, Greasemonkey still exists. Also there are ad blockers, you know? Such as the oft recommended uBlock Origin[0].
[0]: https://ublockorigin.com/
I use the Stylus extension for site-specific CSS in Chrome. Usually end up with a big comma-separated list of selectors getting the { display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important } treatment.
ublock origin does wonders. I use it to give HN a dark mode
Sure enough, this looks great. Found a blog post where someone did the exact same thing. Unlike the Firefox mechanism of usercontent.css which requires a reboot after every change(?) this works dynamically on a page reload. Now trivial to restyle some content which would otherwise not hit a blocklist.
https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/
Similar boat, so the no-novel extensions bit is an enormous win.
Use an adblocker, like the FBI recommends.
It's more important even than anti-virus since advertising, nowadays, is so ubiquitous and regularly-enough the actual vector for a virus infection.
> GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites
That's default firefox behavior.
Funny enough, even iOS Safari has a “hide distracting items” button you can sorta use for this kind of thing. I guess it won’t work on the App Store though.
I like how, the way you've described it, it sounds as if, with the effort they go to to make ads as difficult to identify as possible, they're trying to hide their shame.
It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful.
Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.
There’s no shame. They want money, ad clicks make money, and users avoid things they know are ads, so content providers obscure the ads identification signal. Stop anthropomorphizing corporations. They hate that.
On amazon.ie at least, the sponsored products are so hilariously out of place it's dead easy to spot them, and banner blindness kicks in.
E.g. I search for "nuk baby bottle warmer" and the first result is a window washing squeegee and the second is a bathroom grime scrubber.
Works as intended. If you’re looking for a baby bottle it’s reasonable to assume that your house is in disarray from the whole new baby in the house thing, and it’s above average probability that you’ll buy completely unrelated products during your search.
Except a portion of the population has been accustomed to not buying crap that’s been pitched infomercial-style.
Apple not adopting these kinds of user hostile designs is why a lot of us were happy to a premium for their products. I guess Cook is just too stupid to understand that.
What it must be like to be an Apple hardware engineer these days, designing the most beautiful physical devices in personal computing, then handing it over to the bosses where they load it up with this schlock.
Yeah, we need a law that these are very much visually distinguished and in the same color so we can learn to ignore them. So much of the web is completely anti-consumer.
I used to look for stuff on Poshmark but now when you search it is almost impossible to find your search results as everything is "Promoted". So I just gave up and stop using their product.
Found a series of Google screenshots over time, although some of the search terms are questionable. :p
https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads
Ironically, as I scrolled a few pages down that site, the content was blocked by a popup and I closed the tab.
The internet is over. Pack it up.
This is the end goal of having apps instead of browsers.
On an app I have to see the ad.
On a website I can use Firefox + ublock origin and I won't see an advert.
Apple's whole selling point is they aren't pulling the same crap that the everyone else is. It's not a defense of Apple to say they're just doing what everyone else has already been doing. Think different?
Yes, this is part of what is supposed to justify the premium prices, is that they can have a different business model.
But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
If they ever actually manage to make Siri competitive you can bet it will be another subscription and bundled with Apple One.
Even the CPU. Windows users lose probably 25% of their machine power to ads, telemetry and OEM spyware and spamware, back to Oracle’s Ask Bar in 2005.
It was ahead of its time, now we have people shipping Electron all over the place.
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that.
Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.
Absolutely this. I can’t agree with this more. Having been using apple macs for 2 decades now I’m wondering whether my next machine will be apple. There’s even a setting for the adverts in the system settings. This is disguising.
Wait for the spin, i.e. "It's not a simple Ad, we are recommending a service valuable to you based on the interests of your anonymized persona."
(aka a personalized Ad)
>Either way, it erodes away some of the trust
Lets say you compete in a market with 3 players.
You have a 95% trust rating.
Your other competitors have a 55% and 35% trust rating.
Modern capitalism would tell you that you have a 40% trust margin you can burn to make more profit with.
What is shocking is that deception is the common. Accepted, argued for by some. Loosing trust of the site/app doing the deception is the result. Becoming common, accepted, trend, and then loosing trust in the whole industry is the result.
Yeah, it's bad enough for capable users, but it's a nightmare for old people and the unaware. The online space is full of scams, and there's no real safe haven.
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
That's the demand for GROWTH.
They've hit the limits of iPhone sales - and upgrade cycles are slowing. Hardware products in general are "streaky" - ie. demand and sales drop in the period after a new product is released, so how often can you produce a new version and what happens if that new version isn't a hit?
Whereas subscriptions provide recurring revenue. And services, in general, can bring in more money without an equivalent increase in costs.
I recently read "Apple in China" and one of the things I hadn't realised is how many people at Apple came from IBM under Tim Cook's reign. What he's done for Apple is turn them into a predictable, consistent, revenue machine.
Green bubbles. Or was it blue? Either way.
Conspicuous consumption? Like always?
You don’t think the hardware and software ecosystem are superior to the competition?
Not OP, but I think they still have the lead in hardware. However, I'm using an iPhone 14 which apparently released 4 years ago now, and it's still plenty fast enough for all my needs. If it lasts another 4 years, I won't update. That's probably their problem.
Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape.
But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege.
Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but how's an S22 ultra a "medium range Android"?
If you need a sub-free gym app check out Strive Gym Log
What software ecosystem?
Due to the previous idiot's brilliant idea of not allowing major version paid upgrades, everything is either a subscription or an IAP fest.
The "App Store" should be called the "Gacha Store".
This new idiot it just ruining whatever was left to be ruined, software wise.
Too bad about the hardware.
I’m not the person you asked, but what I’d say is that comparing two turds isn’t really meaningful. Sure, maybe one of the turds doesn’t have such a strong smell or has fewer flies, but it’s still a turd.
Their cheapest iPhone in my country is 719€, the cheapest Google pixel is 399€, the cheapest Samsung Galaxy is 149€. I can install firefox with addons from the play store. I can still for now install whatever software I want on my android phone. If I'm not happy with an android brand I can switch with minimal effort to another brand next time. So no, iPhone are not superior to the competition on all situations
Not at all. Bought and promptly returned an iPad last year when I realized they were going to force me to see ads with their safari wrapper for every 'browser alternative.'
Great ecosystem for my aging parents, but not for me.
One of the ways its superior is the lack of adverts trying to double-dip.
> If they become as bad as the other,
See, instead of leaving a lot of cash on the table to be way better than the other, they'll pocket that cash and become just a little bit better than the other
> I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
No choice. Most Apple users usually defend by telling... they are not as bad a Google or now it is impossible to escape ecosystem.
This is the eventual evolution of any platform that sells ads or sponsored content. Who is paying the bills? App developers and their desire to bring on customers...
> just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere
And often, the only reason they do that is due to legal requirements.
Amazon is so bad it's getting difficult to find the actual search results
It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.
Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.
Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.
Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.
Amazon isn't blameless here, either.
So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.
Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.
Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark
Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.
Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.
What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?
Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.
I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
Advertising alternatives to trademarked names is completely legal in every sense. It's known as comparative advertising and is established for more than a century.
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
> You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business
Some fraction of consumers are duped. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many knockoffs.
If I enter Acme Orbital Thrusters into a search engine, the exact match, their actual website, must be the top hit. Otherwise it's a racket, not a search engine.
What if Acme Orbital Thrusters is a long-running, covered-up fraudster? Why should they get to automatically outrank sites exposing their crimes?
Or what about when there are multiple trademarks for different goods and services from different companies that are all exact matches for the search terms?
You worried Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple will cease to exist if they stop tricking their audience?
Trademarks differentiate products. App Store is full of shady clones with near identical icons, screenshots and names that differ from the original by a few letters.
> It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.
I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
>This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech,
That's fine, ads should be downright forbidden and get no "freedom of speech".
It wouldn't impinge on freedom of speech. Nothing would be prohibited from being said.
It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).
That is pro-transparency and ethics, not anti-speech.
Ha! You are correct, that you were correct.
Thanks. I misread a sentence, missed your nuance, and then off to the races.
You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. Why should Google? They're taking advantage of every trademark to make money.
Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode.
If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
During a sale aren’t allowed to lie about digimon being pikachu, even if it’s hard to enforce.
Let’s remember it’s not new: Back in 2005, gannies (and 20yo non-nerds too) would install all sorts of viruses by clicking on popups thinking it’s the real thing. I personally switched to Firefox then Mac which didn’t have this problem. It’s like browsing a torrent website without an adblocker: There is absolutely no way to hit the right button, it’s URL changes between mousedown and mouseup.
Putting adblock in my moms browser was basically the end of weekly support calls.
If I search for a product or service I want to see their competitors too.
You could search for "{trademark} competitors", "{trademark} reviews", "{trademark} vs ...", etc.
For bare trademark searches, we could write laws that allow competitors, but restrict taxing and bidding off the reserved mark above the trademark owner's result.
I vehemently disagree.
There used to be plenty of ways to get in touch with the owner of a brand directly. Now they're all being camped by rent extractors.
Google is chief amongst those taxing businesses. They are not government anointed to perform this role. Google should not be allowed to do this.
As a business gets more successful, Google extracts more money from them. Simply trying to access the business will send revenue to Google.
Google took the standard URL bar and turned in into a rent extraction product. This should have been illegal, but our regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google adds costs to every business, every product, every entrepreneur. They should stick to servicing user inquiries, not stuffing ads in front of simple trademark lookup.
It's time to knock on their doors of regulatory bodies, both in the US and abroad. No more trademark camping from the "URL bar".
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
Is it a coincidence that they started exploring this once they've been forbidden from collecting the "Apple Tax"? This is exactly why I've been arguing against preventing Apple from collecting money from developers: the laws of capitalism will force them to collect money somewhere else, and putting ads in their app store is the obvious next step.
It's not a trick; it's the closest they can get away with lying with plausible deniability.
To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.
[dead]
> Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't.
Everything in the app store is an ad - all the content is produced to get people to download Apps. It's just that some is 'promoted'.
I'd be interested in hearing from any HN readers that use the App store to actually discover apps - don't people do Web/Reddit searches to see what people are using and rate and then search by name? Even an LLM can provide an overview of what's available and summarise features, drawbacks, and reviews.