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.
    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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