Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
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Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
AnonC · · focus · HN ↗
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads <a href="https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-want-ads" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
On the flip side, imagine having another product made for people who can afford $2k phones... Well you'd probably pay a lot to advertise to that market.
I think trying to balance between these 2 is going to be tough, and your luxury market could evaporate if a significant competitor came along. And by competitor, we're probably just talking about AI in your pocket or on your face that replaces the traditional phone interface. I also think it's a real slippery slope to short term profits once you start taking ad revenue.
cousinbryce · · focus · HN ↗
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
Motorola really seems to be going for a luxury look [1] and there will be Motorola devices with GrapheneOS installed out of the box.
[1] <a href="https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119#m" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2102040650606891119...
<a href="https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806#m" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.miningtcup.me/Moto/status/2100933254249627806...
Pantone and some sound partnership.
readthenotes1 · · focus · HN ↗
Likewise, no Android Auto
Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
klardotsh · · focus · HN ↗
IRL I do use it on occasion but everything I use it for, I could just fall back to the contactless chips in my physical plastic CCs - just like I did for all those years on a deGoogled Android phone with no Google Wallet support. The unique value add of Apple Pay in the physical world is nearly zero to me, other than acting as a market force that made US point of sale systems finally catch up to Canada years late and offer tap to pay.
4chandaily · · focus · HN ↗
readthenotes1 · · focus · HN ↗
4chandaily · · focus · HN ↗
In any case, it is a fantastic OS with many of the annoyances of Android removed. (Scoped file permissions are fantastic, for example) If you are on the fence, I'd suggest giving it a shot. Replacing a phone OS might seem scary, but it is really pretty similar to use.
drnick1 · · focus · HN ↗
Cash is much better for privacy. The government, banking system, and countless intermediaries should not know how I spend my money.
So the lack of contactless payment on GrapheneOS may be inconvenient, but is it consistent with a privacy stance.
Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
microtonal · · focus · HN ↗
I would say it often feels more like a luxury product than an iPhone or Google-certified Android phone because it's not full of cheesy stuff.
armadyl · · focus · HN ↗
I also don’t think there will be Motorola devices with GOS out of the box, they’re just meeting the requirements to be able install it.
Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
armadyl · · focus · HN ↗
Cider9986 · · focus · HN ↗
cyberax · · focus · HN ↗
Even AOSP is head-and-shoulders better than iOS.
armadyl · · focus · HN ↗
cyberax · · focus · HN ↗
Melatonic · · focus · HN ↗
cyberax · · focus · HN ↗
duskdozer · · focus · HN ↗
microtonal · · focus · HN ↗
Sorry, but no.
I also have an iPhone for $REASONS. Both my prior iPhone Air and my new iPhone 18 Pro still frequently stutters. Even scrolling some settings screens (which are very simple), I can often see frames getting dropped. Apple apps like the App Store are one huge frame-dropfest (even if you let it preload all assets).
My P10P with GrapheneOS, which only has a midrange SoC by modern standards (don't believe what Google tells you) and it is buttery smooth.
iOS got even more terrible with Liquid Glass, so many things are badly readable, even with the slider set to completely opaque in iOS 27.
iOS used to be premium compared to Android. But Apple enshittified iOS over the last few years. Even most Apple pundits agree.
TheDong · · focus · HN ↗
For iOS, they could simply charge an extra $600/mo as a "iCloud ad-free premium" fee to remove the ads, and I think that would make everyone happy.
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think people want to pay a large sticker price and then an additional monthly fee on top of it to enable features or disable ads... but I honestly don't know. I just know I sure af won't lol.
TheDong · · focus · HN ↗
I have no clue how popular it is though overall, presumably not super popular.
I also don't think the $300-$2000/mo "ad-free iOS subscription" would be super popular if it existed, but idk, I know at least a few people that would go for it.
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
This isn't comparable, because the base product is free. We're talking about paying an upfront fee for a premium product (like $2k for a phone) and then being shown ads. Youtube would be a vastly different product if everyone had to pay a one time $2k to use it (and then purchase premium to unlock ad-free). It's also noticeable that a lot of the "premium" media services go from being ad-free to ad-light... so we're back to cable... but that's a different discussion.
gloosx · · focus · HN ↗
It's not very popular because you can remove ALL ads from youtube using a free browser extension
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
gloosx · · focus · HN ↗
SoftTalker · · focus · HN ↗
delta_p_delta_x · · focus · HN ↗
Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
It's a bad idea to pay someone to remove a problem they created for you. That's literally racketeering. They make you pay them to solve a problem that only exists because they put it there to make you pay them to solve it. They can increase the amount of ads at any time to punish holdouts and can increase how much "protection money" they extract from you whenever they want as well. "Nice $2,000 phone you just got buddy, it'd sure be a shame if it was filled with ads wouldn't it?"
rapind · · focus · HN ↗
Worth noting that this is what most of the live service gaming industry is doing.
bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
daveidol · · focus · HN ↗
You could always pay the one time fee for heated seats like in the past. It was just an option if you don’t want to pay upfront.
genxy · · focus · HN ↗
techdmn · · focus · HN ↗
tavavex · · focus · HN ↗
bix6 · · focus · HN ↗
Lio · · focus · HN ↗
They’ve really MBA’d the crap out of that brand and it serves them right now it’s going down the tube.
alentred · · focus · HN ↗
Pun intended?
dmux · · focus · HN ↗
alentred · · focus · HN ↗
akudha · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
It's not about the cost of the phone. If it were they'd stop pushing ads the moment they'd earned back the full cost of the discounted phone you bought. It's purely about greed. Companies push ads so they can stuff more cash in their pockets over and over again for years, if not decades, after the money they got from your initial purchase. It doesn't matter if the phone was $100 or $2000 because ads increase their profits in either case, and money is literally the only thing they care about.
MichaelZuo · · focus · HN ↗
GolfPopper · · focus · HN ↗
"We have a large, loyal consumer base and can count on a steady return for many years," is no longer sufficient. So corporations cannabalize, turning long-term strengths into short term profits.
It's what we're doing to our entire civilization. Why should Apple do anything different?
kleene_op · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
Apple is counting on the fact that apple users aren't going to switch to andriod devices just because the company starts pushing ads in their face. In addition to all the customers who don't stop buying apple products because they are filled with ads, a percentage of them will start paying for more Apple products and services because of the ads. The obvious next step from here is to increase the amount of ads until that's no longer the case. Get used to seeing ads iphone users. It's only going to get worse.
TheOtherHobbes · · focus · HN ↗
Jobs had to be the smartest and most tasteful person in the room, even when he pretended otherwise. He was desperate for adulation from customers who loved him for his taste, inventiveness, risk-taking, and style.
The motivation was questionable and arguably toxic, but the results were spectacular.
Cook was more of a nickel and dime guy. So far Ternus is looking disappointingly similar.
The share price is all. Customers are the farm animals who Make Number Go Up, and Make Number Go Up is Rule Number One.
The kind of customer focus that drove Jobs is fading into background noise.
lostlogin · · focus · HN ↗
Some MBA poisoned it?
CyberDildonics · · focus · HN ↗
asdff · · focus · HN ↗
theendisney · · focus · HN ↗
The more we can isolate consumers the less they will care about others and the less of a point complaining.
serial_dev · · focus · HN ↗
But I agree, I wish more leaders in the product development space would just stand up and say: "it's garbage, it's hostile towards our users, so we won't do it, because it compromises our values for a quick buck"
kakacik · · focus · HN ↗
Wait, you thought apple, unlike every other company, is not out there for maximal profit for owners but some sort of higher mission? Or where does the misunderstanding comes from? The era of respectful companies having long term utmost moral standing and behavior thinking decades ahead is thing of the past. At least for big boys thats pretty clear.
theendisney · · focus · HN ↗
someguyiguess · · focus · HN ↗
qwerpy · · focus · HN ↗
leftnode · · focus · HN ↗
Unfortunately, not true. Very, very, very few people are going to abandon the years of work they've put into using iOS and macOS because of a few pesky ads. Sure, they'll complain about it, but they won't actually switch.
merlindru · · focus · HN ↗
if it could wver be quantified, i bet it's a net $ loss. and apples esteemed image is ostensibly very important to them. why the hell do apple execs think different?
GolfPopper · · focus · HN ↗
lotsofpulp · · focus · HN ↗
Designing and producing a new smartphone with an equivalent feature set and performance and power efficiency is about as big of a moat as you can get.
disqard · · focus · HN ↗
Great reference! Agree, it's a "last straw" situation -- you can foist all these indignities upon your "captive" user base, right up until you can't.
thewebguyd · · focus · HN ↗
I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).
phforms · · focus · HN ↗
merlindru · · focus · HN ↗
and yet you have to restrain yourself from ever capitalizing on that, because not advertising to that market is what got you that market in the first place
JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
You lose customers to those products. I’ve switched to CoMaps. Some of my friends went back to Google Maps—the differentiator for Apple was privacy and that seems to have been lost in kind even if not yet in magnitude.
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
Yup. If the main differentiator is gone, you move to the next marginal thing that matters, which in this case is working as a map.
Lio · · focus · HN ↗
A number of times I’ve been set to the wrong place by Apple Maps.
If you’re going to be served ads either way you might as well pick the more reliable tool.
For maps Apple has a lower quality product, that lets me down when I really need it, and has no privacy advantage.
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
I've been hearing this kind of thing a lot, but if a customer is paying for a luxury product, and part of that luxury is not having ads (or being an ad)... advertising to them because of it breaches the trust, erases the luxury, and alienates that valuable customer.
At some point, customers price themselves out of advertising. We see this in fashion. Designer brands have their consumer level lines with logos all over them, then they usually have a luxury line where those logos go away. With Ralph Lauren, for example, Polo gets you a logo on almost everything[0], while Purple is nearly logo free[1].
[0] <a href="https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/r/polo-ralph-lauren" rel="nofollow">https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
[1] <a href="https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/r/purple-label" rel="nofollow">https://www.ralphlauren.com/men-clothing-button-down-shirts/...
deathanatos · · focus · HN ↗
Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt? (Most people would say that about the $130 shirt!) Then that principle, applied across my entire set of life expenses, just to get a company to not take advantage of me?
¹… and that's tossing the $3,000 shirt on that page, too…
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
Apple was a company that allowed fairly normal people to have a luxury experience without the 10x price tag, and they're ruining it. People still make "Apple tax" comments, but when looking at their competitors, they really aren't outlandish, like these shirts are.
robocat · · focus · HN ↗
Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.
Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?
If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?
It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.
Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.
rrr_oh_man · · focus · HN ↗
You can get shirts tailored (bespoke, not MTM!) for well under $100 in Istanbul, around $150 in Hongkong, and about $200 in Mexico City.
So why pay to be a walking advertisement for some European brand conglomerate?
threetonesun · · focus · HN ↗
al_borland · · focus · HN ↗
2OEH8eoCRo0 · · focus · HN ↗
No way- look at the users on this site simping for every Apple product. If we don't stand up to it then why would the normies?
unrented7977 · · focus · HN ↗
And where are those customers going to go? The only other option is Android, which is even more bloated and ad infested. Even if Apple is worse now than they were before, there still isn't a better option available.
You can't lose customers if there's no alternative. In the modern era, the average person can't simply not have a phone. It's a necessity, and when a product is necessary for daily life, you lose your options.
No, nothing will come of this. People will be mad and hate Apple more, but consequence is not possible here.
jjordan · · focus · HN ↗
skupig · · focus · HN ↗
Since when? I never see any ads at all on my Android phone. I can use uBlock Origin in my browser and I can install 3rd party ad-free clients for apps like YouTube and Twitch.
microtonal · · focus · HN ↗
asdff · · focus · HN ↗
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