Thread

Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy

822 points · 601 comments · MC995

AnonC · 1790088825 · focus · HN ↗
I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[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...
1. bluepeter · 1790096924 · focus · HN ↗
  Worth remembering that Steve Jobs championed "iAds"... <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/13/steve-jobs-last-big-failure-iads/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthof/2011/12/13/steve-jobs...
  1. SllX · 1790097034 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah & they veered so hard into tying to make them tasteful & not suck that it failed. Turns out the real money is in spyware.
    bitpush · 1790114956 · focus · HN ↗
    How so? This smells like Apple Distortion Field. "Yeah our ads are better. Its the other guys' ads that are bad".
    The problem with Apple is they make statements that they walk back gleefully at a moments notice.
    - Nobody wants a bigger phone - iPhone Pro Maxes
    - Nobody wants foldables - iPhone Duo
    - We've simplified the product portfolio .. ahem.
    - AI is bad - Ours is called Apple Intelligence. Totally different thing.
    Think Different indeed.
    UqWBcuFx6NV4r · 1790122531 · focus · HN ↗
    What a bad-faith comment. You just wanted to launch into an anti-Apple lecture and it doesn’t sound like you have the slightest clue about this specific topic. Have you watched the iAds presentation? They’re not like any other advertisements I’ve seen before. CERTAINLY not at the time. You can see exactly why advertisers didn’t bite.
    bitpush · 1790136774 · focus · HN ↗
    Honest question. If iAds were so good, why didnt it succeed?
    When something is successful its all Apple. When something fails, its just that others dont get it.
    Do you afford the same benefit to other people/companies? Why is Apple so special?
    sirwhinesalot · 1790150264 · focus · HN ↗
    Because they were good for the customer rather than the advertiser, and the money to Apple came from the advertiser in this case.
    bitpush · 1790151904 · focus · HN ↗
    Ads in Apple Maps. How is it user friendly?
    kalleboo · 1790168083 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    wolvoleo · 1790168346 · focus · HN ↗
    It's probably the single one time where I would actually want ads.
    For example roaming the city at 4am on a Saturday and trying to find some place with hot food. Google failed miserably at this. Eventually I found something but just because I knew it was often open at night. It was also marked open on Google Maps but never came up in searches there. Probably other places paid Google more for a listing despite being closed at that time.
    Not sure how Apple does with this as I don't have any Apple anymore except a work iPad. It's too limited for me in terms of what I can install. But there's certainly some room for improvement in mapping.
    theendisney · 1790208717 · focus · HN ↗
    Hah, that Google experience clicking though closed closed closed... Okay fine, i will accept my stupidity for even considering this approach. Wont happen again.
    maest · 1790216588 · focus · HN ↗
    There's an "open only" button?
    wolvoleo · 1790249399 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh I didn't find it, I have to say I don't use google maps very much. I normally use OSMAnd only. But most businesses don't bother updating their opening hours on openstreetmap.
    theendisney · 1791077557 · focus · HN ↗
    If you dont fill out openings hours or if you dont even claim your business google maps lists it as open.
    sirwhinesalot · 1790184831 · focus · HN ↗
    Not iAd. Different ads
    godelski · 1790123843 · focus · HN ↗
    > Think Different indeed - Make the phone thinner - Make the laptop thinner - Make the iPad thinner
    Extreme innovation
    coldtea · 1790125444 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, and dozens of other innovations every other company copied, conveniently ignored.
    From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI, to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on, to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta, to the first modern touch smartphone, 1 full year before Android came out (and which made Android change its beta design to copy the way iOS worked), to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right, to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip. Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
    Modern "services+ads" Apple sucks to the point that I'm moving away, but to say they didn't innovate is laughable.
    gertop · 1790130879 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with...
    > From shipping a fully certified UNIX with a modern UI
    Ignored because nobody cares or wanted it.
    > to getting all the music player market and influencing how any music player would be from then on
    Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
    > to seamlessly moving between Motorola and Intel and Apple Silicon with the ability to run the older software from a different architecture with Rosetta
    That's a remarkable engineering achievement but that's an implementation detail. Backwards compatibility on the desktop was and still is tablesakes.
    > to the first modern touch smartphone
    Nobody forgot, there's always one of you to remind the class that Apple was first (by your own definition of modern touch smartphone)
    > to getting wireless earpods (and pairing) right
    They were clearly the first to demonstrate that people did indeed want fully wireless despite HN's objections at the time.
    > to designing their own fucking integrated CPU, and even their own broadband chip
    That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
    > Even simple things, like making the best touchpad in the market.
    I don't know anyone who claims otherwise, and for the longest time they didn't make their own touchpads. So much for being conveniently forgotten.
    coldtea · 1790156337 · focus · HN ↗
    >A lot of the things you mention aren't things that have been "conveniently forgotten", they're simply things that mean nothing to most people to begin with... / Anybody born after millennials have only ever known Spotify, they don't know about iTunes and 99c songs. That's like saying Napster has been conveniently forgotten.
    That explains why someone younger might not see the innovation. But that's on them, the innovation doesn't get erased as an innovation because people take it for granted. If the question is "did Apple innovate", then it includes all those cases, whether some moody Gen A cares for them or not.
    Besides, that's not an argument. Apple still has many recent innovations. And we're talking as techies, devs, and products people here, and of various ages. Not just as "people who only ever known Spotify" and never bothered to learn the history of their field. Those wont know what Rosetta or a 5G chip is either anyway.
    >That would be impressive if they were a startup. Every trillion dollar tech companies design their own CPUs.
    A, yes, all those classic Google, Facebook, and MS designed CPUs, that put a fire under Intel/AMD and set the benchmark for future laptop CPUs.
    godelski · 1790136806 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't want to really downplay Apple but there's much better innovation examples that what you listed. One of Apple's great advantages is that it owns the hardware, unlike Linux or Windows. Those have to work in highly heterogeneous environments. I mean Linux runs on everything from a literal potato to a super computer and everything in between.
    To highlight Apple's innovation maybe mention things like the iPhone or iPod. They weren't the first devices of their kind but Apple's magic was always the mixture of the two Steves. Technical but stylish. But modern Apple isn't the same. The magic is gone
    SllX · 1790125140 · focus · HN ↗
    When iAd launched, it was a $1 million minimum spend just to get onto the platform, they wanted large corporate “lifestyle” brands, Apple exerted creative control over how ads were designed so they could enforce a bunch of user experience guardrails & marketers had no means of independently verifying campaign performance themselves. Their only source was whatever Apple told them. It did not do well. A few years later they tried to salvage it by dropping the minimum spend to $50, removing themselves from the process & making it closer to Google’s AdMob—or approximately as much as Apple was able to early last decade—but it was too little too late. They dropped it by 2016.
    When it comes to mobile advertising, Google & Facebook won, & Apple was never even really a player. If it’s unclear to you, I wasn’t complimenting Apple for this endeavor either. Mobile ads suck, & nothing they did with iAd did anything to meaningfully improve them.

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