2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
ads.apple.com136 points by punnerud 3 hours ago
136 points by punnerud 3 hours ago
I’m really not a fan of this direction for Apple. One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium. Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience.
Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know the ads themselves aren’t new, but the steady increase is a worrying trend.
I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
THIS. Never promote the idea of "can you please not bother me with ads, there you go there is your extra $100, what, $200? okay sure". That's how mafia operates. Do not promote such.
People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.
And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.
Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.
That seems rather reductionist.
How so? In china, app stores are open to market competition as an eventual consequence of a maoist insurgency.
It's fine if you're personally a coward or you just don't think it's worth it. But not only does it work, it is so far, the only thing that has ever been proven to work.
> and in the long run, we're all dead.
Well gee, when you put it like that all morality is relative huh?
Of course morality is relative. But still, there's no point to compare something to nothing and say "why bother". Comparisons can be useful.
The only way to avoid that is if that $100 buys you actual ownership, like the ability to have your own secure boot keys and modify the software. So long as Apple still owns your phone, they can alter the deal, and there is nothing you can do about it.
If that happens then people will just switch to the less premium, fully ad supported platform, Android, because the platform have just become commodities.
It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Apple Ads+, curated selection of premium ads for 9.99€/month.
Also available as part of Apple One if you buy 2TB of extra iCloud storage.
Apple is just admitting like everyone else that not having ads is just money left on the table. Where are people going to go? So yea they’ll keep adding more ads, keep charging more for their phones and there’s nothing anyone can really do about it.
It’s not just money left on the table, it’s a way to differentiate from the competition. When someone is trying to decide iPhones vs Android for their next purchase, being able to say “our OS doesn’t have ads” is big. I hear people complain about ads more than just about anything else.
I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, they will keep pushing them.
I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.
Well, my Androids do not have ads because I can install Firefox with uBO and Blockada to block ads even inside apps. I don't know if uBO works in Safari and I don't know if iOS allows for something like Blockada. In doubt (and for other reasons,) I'm on Android. However I'm not the typical user. The typical buyers just want an iPhone or do not want one, like they want one brand of shoes or a brand of bags, no technical considerations. Fashion.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted.
Here's a nice ad I ran into recently:
I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is.
If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have to only use external searches to install apps.
You say it's not marked as an ad, but in that image there's a clear blue "Ad" label. Are there cases where that label is not present?
Seriously? I haven't noticed it.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
I'm surprised that this wasn't brought up during trials as an argument against Apple's supposed "curated" walled-garden. There is a bunch of dangerous scammy junk on there.
I think I ran into one of the most dangerous situations without looking for it. What happens if you install the first result and put your microsoft account credentials in...
Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have loads of highly paid people designing and creating beautiful UIs. A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. But that would put most of their employees out of work. So instead they are going to milk and lock in their user base, and hope rivals don't get traction.
Apple spent a lot of time already doing a lot of this with Siri instead of focusing on external knowledge. This didn’t replace their UI people. Voice commands aren’t always appropriate and a UI is still needed.
The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier.
As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off.
Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
> I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours.
In case you didn’t know, there is a medication reminder built into Apple Health that might work better than an alarm.
Apple hasn’t been much of an innovator for decades. They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition.
It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
> They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition.
I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product.
But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
Rhetorical question, though; does Apple execute better? Or do they just sell it better?
Because there are many entirely-feasible things that Apple failed to execute well. Xserve, Airpower, Apple Car, all dead and buried in one way or another. Today, all their tentpole successes are difficult to distinguish from pervasive marketing influence. We can't logically use sales, customer satisfaction or user retention as metrics to measure how successful services iCloud or the App Store are. And, with integrated products like Airpods and Apple Watch, the iPhone nearly reaches similar levels of arbitrary lock-in.
I think it’s a little of both. Sure, they have failures, not no one is perfect.
I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.
Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.
The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.
They innovate in design and user experience.
I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that.
But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
It’s still early. The model for AI that will seem as if it was inevitable in 10 years is likely something we haven’t seen yet. There are a ton of chatbots and they are all in the App Store. Apple brings nothing to the table by doing another chatbot, and their users can still use all of them. I don’t see why everyone seems to harp on that so much.
Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow.
Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
You picked a bad example. The iPod was very innovative (first time you could have all your music with you on the go – instead of having to decide on a tiny selection before you leave home and slowly upload it to your player).
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
The first iPod had 5 GB of storage, less than e.g. the Creative Nomad Jukebox which had 6 GB. If you were around at the time you may remember the (in)famous verdict of CmdrTaco [1]:
. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
[1] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
> Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base
Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!
> A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping.
I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
We've had voice recognition for over a decade, but we have not had “tell your phone what to do”. Heavy structured voice input to a command line is not what we're talking about.
1. Their UIs were never beautiful or really good tbh. The iOS26 is the worst so far, and they really went too far this time. 2. They are no charity, they don't care for giving work to their designers. 3. They won't milk their userbase or long, friends and family are already abandoning their ecosystem due to v26's atrocious UI, I'll be doing so also. Adding more ads to the mix will just speed things up.
I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
Presumably the person who wrote this comment is too young to have used Apple products prior to 2010?
They do have a point though, because you can't continue to use a phone made by Apple in 2010.
On top of this, I find ads on app store search results to be particularly bad. It's a business model that comes with all sorts of perverse incentives. It's so bad for users and legitimate developers.
On android, I love when I search for my bank's app I get a bunch of scam apps taking up all the above the fold results.
If iOS goes that route I really don't know what the differentiator is
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads.
Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Jokes aside, they're not the most valuable company anymore. Nvidia is ahead, I think MS has jockeyed with them on that position a few times and is still on their heels, and Google is ascendant (even ahead of MS as of end of close) after the antitrust clouds started to recede and Gemini started to match Claude and ChatGPT.
They can't sit idly forever if they want to please shareholders, and there aren't many avenues for expansion.
What will happen to nvidia when their market becomes saturated? That seems inevitable.
Maybe just reduce production amount an increase prices? Profit probably continues, but on a lower level, I guess.
HPC is still only a portion of the overall datacenter market. Nvidia is well-equipped to tackle the networking and cheap RISC VPS portions if they set their mind to it.
> Yeah, but what about next quarter?
Point being, why fuck with a strategy that is working? Is being #1 so important that you'll throw it all away because of an unpredictable and outlier event that isn't in competition with you? That seems incredibly irrational and a great way to lost your market advantage. It is incredibly myopic.
> and isn't in direct competition with Apple.
Of course they are, they are on the same stock market.
What, are you one of those that believe competition is still about capturing markets and appeasing customers?
I see many ads and irrelevant results in the App Store regardless. So much so, that at some point said "why don't I turn on personalised ads, since I am seeing all this trash anyway", and it turned out it was already on. So I cannot really imagine how this will change things.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone
You're already paying a huge premium on the phone.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Though lately I feel like Apple is just really bad at being... Apple
It's like they are dumping all the good parts and doubling down on all the bad parts. Things are far from "just working", have more glitches/bugs, but at the same time they're increasing hostility towards developers and walled garden. At least with Android (or linux) I can fix any issues but with Apple it's more "fuck you, deal with it." This was frustrating but passable when it was more streamlined but now? God fucking damnit I swiped one word just fine but when swiping the second word you decide the first word wasn't correct and none of the suggestions are what I'm intending to type but pressing delete deletes both words and now I can't swipe the original word because you already decided I'm not trying to type that word because I pressed delete? This is version of Apple is just rotten... When literally typing on a phone is a daily frustrating experience you know you fucked up. I mean how long have they even failed to capitalize a singular "i"? What the fuck is going on over there?
Side note:
Try searching "Claude" in the iPhone app store. For me I get a half page ad for Gemini, a small result for Claude, and then a larger result for Grok. Literally the thing I searched for, and has an unambiguous result, is the smallest thing on the page! This is some bullshit dark patterns that is very anti-user.
I think that, on the App Store, ads may be the least worse solution.
Currently, some developers try to get into your view by creating multiple similar apps, as that gets them screen space for free.
Given developers the ability to pay to have their app show above the sea of (almost) clones may revert that trend, as such developers would either have to pay for multiple adverts or to put all their money on one horse.
(It wouldn’t make the iOS App Store good, though. One thing it definitely also needs is clearer information on what features you get for free, what you can buy as add-on, and what requires a subscription)
The John Sculley Apple is back, the time of being nice for survival reasons is long gone.
“I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.”
I guarantee you will do both soon
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
I always wonder how apple's marketing team pulled this off.
- If you use any decent browser like Firefox* (or its different clones) one get enhanced privacy, no ads, byepasspaywalls etc. - Even Chromium forks have decent adblocking - Using NewPipe (like revanced opensource) for ad free YouTube
All my iOS friends scroll through so many ads - admittedly - SIM/data is paid for my their employers but it is awful experience.
* -> Don't be pendantic and point out yesterday's Verge article that Mozilla is becoming bad.
AI needs more personal info (like iCloud is not enough yet). Ads provide more insights to user real needs than anything else, and there's inescapable sharing of user behaviour (otherwise ads business model does not work) that allows Apple to collect and process the user behaviour for its own AI training and to sell it to others.
Sitting on a tons of value (even though backed by users trust) gives no rest to Apple's managers who just does not connect the dots between users trust and profits.
Or they think they are a monopoly. Maybe Apple is?
> Ads provide more insights to user real needs than anything else
How?
You can get insights into user behavior without ads, and I'm sure Apple is doing that already.
Doesn't making good products that people want give more insight to user needs? Who wants ads?
This looks like enshittification :(
When a company that sits on enormous reams of cash, and positions itself as a premium brand, goes for a fistful of dollars more per customer by showing them ads, it can mean two things. One is that it's a cold calculated move, another, that it's clueless enthusiastic "brilliant idea". In either case, the company is going to burn a lot of its customers' goodwill, and much of its longer-term prospects, in exchange for some more immediate revenue, and higher stock valuation.
What looks like stupidity in doing such a move is more likely cynicism. The corporate officers who will reap the benefits will have retired by the time when their successors would have to handle the fallout. It's not stupidity, it's rot at the highest echelons.
This would explain the really poor recent software decisions, and the general decline of its quality.
But at least Apple still has amazing, best-in-class hardware! Well, like Nokia did. And like Blackberry did. Like Boeing used to.
Sad :(
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
Yeah, not gonna happen, no ads means ownership of a device. That must be prohibited at all cost. Unless you are one of those pesky grapeneos users that block ads but they'll soon be excluded from any public discourse by eID enforcement.
You vill watch tze Ads and you vill eat tze bugs.
This. If you pay them $100 for no ads, they'll just come back next quarter to ask for another $100, unless you actually own your device, i.e. are able to modify its software to actually enforce your rights.
> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it.
With the average lifetime of a phone these days $100 might not justify it.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
Both have had ads in apps, in app stores and on websites. This was never a differentiator.
Yeah, and no way of using a browser with ad blocker for a decade or to avoid them in apps. If anything, the iOS experience has always been more ad-riddled than Android.
And both have an advertising id built-in into the OS (which I find insane as a concept)
Well if the app creator isn’t going to pay Apple money. You have to pay Apple money. If you don’t like ads. Thank Tim Swineey
Apple has decayed into a bog-standard $$$-maximizing lawnmower. Any products, services, ads, or other performances are merely incidental to that goal.
Ads is just a tool, I hope Apple does it right for UX, as it is planning to do w/ Maps
Ya, they are at the top doing what they are doing. There is little room for growth. So, to continue growing, Apple must now do something different. If ads pull money today, but threaten the brand in 5 or 10 years, then that is a problem for 5 or 10 years from now. With the monopoly in hand, now is the time to squeeze the blood from the stone.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium.
Both app stores always felt like fumbling in the dumpster. Between the ads and the gambling, if you managed to find an app that treated you right it was like finding a baby who was somehow living despite choking in all the ashes
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
Ma'am they literally sell ads through the apps on their app store
How does market capitalism work again? Shareholders what higher ROI each quarter. Where does that come from? Profits.
Where do profits come from? Selling data, innovation, selling hardware, etc.
Biggest profit margins come from selling stuff you have to multiple buyers that costs you nothing to duplicate/produce.
My data can be sold to multiple buyers, multiple times to make that magic profit that shareholders want.
Just wait until everyone on this planet has apple devices, how will apple continue to grow ROI?
I hate to break it to you, but it's been like this for YEARS now. The frog has been boiled. Line must go up and the market is saturated.
I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms. A lot of us iPhone users think that Android phones are like a used car sales lot with bloat apps and you can't delete Facebook and all that.
You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.
iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.
Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.
You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!
Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.
App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.
Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).
As an Android user, it really is depressing to see screenshots of how clean the Android Market used to be. Nowadays even when I search an app name verbatim it's a crapshoot if I'll actually find it
but but but but 'if you're not paying then you are the product'
Turns out that doesn't work, either
Enshittification is Inevitable.
Perhaps, but it exploded in the tech industry as soon as Steve Jobs died.
Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public.
Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty.
Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the time, obviously). And his reputation was such that people listened.
We have a dearth of authority figures today; there's nobody around to shame bad actors.
> Enshittification is Inevitable.
Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
> Only under our current cultural and economic assumptions.
I think we shouldn't hope those changes, that could lead to interesting times.
> Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search
This is misleading - does it mean people are searching for an app that they already know about and want to download - chatgpt, samsung, gmail etc. Or searching for a topic or problem and see what apps are available - LLM, camera, running etc.
I rarely do the latter - using web search to find reviews or asking an LLM to give me a list comparing the features and then search for the apps in the appstore (trying to ignore the ads)
Exactly. This is just a racket so that bad apps can "steal" downloads by getting in the way. The good apps then also need to pay the racket to fight the bad apps.
How long until we get ads in our lockscreens like in certain android devices?
No worries, Apple will execute ads better than others. We will love with it and praise Apple for it.
The App Store is an absolute sh!t hole of an experience. Irrelevant ads, impossible to find anything decent. It’s the internet of 1998 pre google.
Have you browsed Google Play? :) Or Amazon appstore for that matter.
If Apple had always strived to for their products suck as much as others, they would never have gained any traction.
Why? Does Apple allow you to download apps from Google Play or Amazon?
In EU and Japan it would (have to) if Google/Amazon managed to provide iOS binaries.
"Increasing opportunity" what could that even mean when you ignore the fact that they actually mean clicking ads out of an impulse? But if you'd even ignore the truth, what could this even be in a positive sense?
The "increased opportunity" is for advertisers. For users it will mean more ads in their search results. Not sure if they provide users with a switch to turn off the opportunities. Apple doesn't like configuration options too much, i guess users will have to live with more ads and spend extra time to find what they were searching when using the shop search where you go to search for specific apps. Maybe Apple AI will present the user with their desired search result without first scrolling through more ads but i sense that there, too, might be new opportunities.
Thus Apple announces that they're making their already piss-poor, fraudulent app-store search WORSE.
I wrote an app for my company and put it on Apple's app store. It was basically IMPOSSIBLE to find. You could search for the company's exact name (it was the publisher of the app), and it did not appear in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up).
What I caught Apple doing was essentially hijacking the company's (trademarked) name and not showing it, but rather any and every alternate spelling of a similar word... or listings that had no part of the string in their name or description at all. The search string was not present in ANY part of the vast majority of search "hits."
I complained to Apple, and after being blown off once with a bullshit boilerplate response, I mentioned legal action in defense of our trademark. Then they addressed my case with a lie: They claimed that the publisher name is one of the top three search criteria. That is utter bullshit, in practice.
In EU, and freshly Japan, alternative iOS app stores are allowed. Let’s hope they manage to use this to their advantage.
The title should probably mention that this is for search results in the App Store, which already had ads.
Still an unfortunate development though.
Related: How Apple’s ad targetting works https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertisin...
How long until the AppleTV will look like your own in-home billboard? At least on the NVIDIA Shield you could just not install the update that changed the homescreen to incorporate ads (or install an alternative launcher). With the closed eco system of the AppleTV, the options are probably limited if/when Apple decides they need to extract more money from you by blastering ads all over the interface.
Apple is just another runner in the race to the bottom, and they're trying their best to catch up to 'the leaders'.
One thing I've noticed with the Play Store is that top-level advertised app results are, more often than not, totally unrelated to what I searched for, and therefore completely useless as both a suggestion to the user and an 'opportunity' for the app creator. In fact, it usually invokes a 'this app must be a scam' response from me.
Thank you, Apple, for increasing the number of opportunities for getting scammed and manipulated on your platform. I will be telling my friends.
Only time I've ever been successfully phished was the App Store. I have an Android phone but I wanted to try the ChatGPT app on my iPad and naively clicked the first result, which was of course a scummy clone. I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
I guess the bar for user trust has now dropped enough across the board to sell more off without losing customers? Pretty sorry state of affairs.
Your experience illustrates precisely why the ads in the ad store should be worthless. I have never clicked on the ad in the app store. Regardless of how legitimate it looks, I will never click it. The vast majority for ads are clearly either scams or they are at least attempting to piggy back on the popularity of others, and I'll support neither of those cases.
I don't know what it is with Apple, maybe they aren't sufficiently exposed to scams, but they seem to not understand it's an issue, or their metrics are solely based on revenue. Because even if something is a borderline scam, Apple probably gets their 30%.
> torrent search levels of trustworthy
Proper torrent search sites have a comments section that you should check before downloading anything :)
> I have since wised up and understand the App Store search results to be roughly torrent search levels of trustworthy.
join a private tracker friend :)
There are also a lot scummy Microsoft Authenticator clones with near identical icons being advertized ahead of the real one.
Be careful in the App Store!
You can charge a premium for a premium experience, or you can show ads, but not booth. This reinforces my determination to move off macOS and iOS to Linux and GrapheneOS.
The continuing enshittification of Apple software is so unfortunate. It has already gone too far.
Apple was the one vendor you could buy stuff from to be able to look down on the peasants bombarded by ads all the time. Now, when I specifically search for an app in the App Store, the result is barely on the screen because it is filled with an ad for another. You get deeply embedded ads and nudges for iCloud pretty often. It already sucks. It‘s like they hate USPs.
The App Store has one slot at the top of the search listing for a promoted app. This will change to multiple slots.
As an app developer, I used to have to outbid everyone to get the one and only spot. Now I need only outbid the top 3 bidders (or however many slots there are).
I advertised for many months back when App Store ads first started, and it was worth the expense because of higher sales. I no longer advertise because the one and only slot is far outbid what that slot is worth to me, and that I can recoup without spending a lot or raising the price for the app.
So I chose not to advertise and keep the app price lower.
You will be able to win more bids, but you'll be bidding for something significantly less valuable, and the entire experience for users will be worsened.
It's the Amazonification of the App Store. Next it'll morph into more ads than legitimate results. Your app won't show up at all unless you pay your mafia dues.
When I switched to iOS from Android it took me a while to realize why App Store search was so bad compared to the Play store (and f-droid, at least back then). It was because the first option was never wat you wanted. The highlighted app at the top was always an ad, never relevant.
I immediately lost some respect for Apple “so this is the expensive luxury platform people talk about?”
I hate that “we” focus on the second derivative to determine value (not just growth but speed of growth). It’s just for the shareholders, meanwhile us customers are looking at a company that is rich beyond believe thinking: “Seriously??”
Serious question: who still goes on the App Store, and why? Personally, I haven’t searched for anything there except once out of boredom in 5 year
It's literally the only way to download apps.
A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.
He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.
Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.
Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.
This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.
Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.
And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!
>but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade
So what already happens when you ssh into an Ubuntu server to run apt upgrade to manually update it. It turns out people don't care that much.
$SEARCH_ENGINE engine is nowadays copilot or chatgpt, both ad-free if you use a simple ad-blocker.
Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.
Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.
> It's literally the only way to download apps.
Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.
Other than all the scammy & microtransaction BS for the kids I’m always confused about this as well. I can count on one hand how many “new” apps I’ve installed in 2025 - one - the Bambu app for talking to the 3D printer.
I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.
I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…
If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.
Ads in the App Store are filthy and everyone at Apple should be ashamed. The responsible people should be fired.
Imagine paying $100 a year for the privilege to develop apps, only to have your revenue confiscated to the tune of 15% - 30% and for the same entity to spam users who are looking for your apps, on the only place they can look for apps, with ads for your competitors, or with scummy ads that make you look bad by association.
If such a platform can get your business billions of dollars I think they are happy to have access to such a platform. Businesses are free to partner with other platforms if they don't like the agreement.
They are not free to do that when there is a duopoly and in most countries the platforms don't even allow competitors for that market (especially true for Apple).
Seriously, playing the "free market" card in the tech (especially mobile) space is really brave.
It's crazy that a piece of marketing material like this isn't gated behind an advertiser portal. For a company that's been so professional and protective of its brand this is a pretty insane look. Just posting a public article telling its customers that they're getting more ads soon! Could this article not be gated to the paid developer audience?
This would be like if Disney put a press release out bragging about how Mickey Mouse was going to help sell alcohol sales inside their theme parks.
I hate ads with such a gigantic passion it may be a good thing i'm not in any power to block them all over this universe. Oh well, back to blocking as much possible by any means necessary again. Still rule my own home infrastructure, thank Zeus.
I saw someone using an app that's 'ad-supported' recently, and it reminded me of the vastly better internet/device experience I have as a result of my not-insignificant efforts at ad-blocking at various layers.
It took them 20 seconds and a number of very specific button presses (sometimes mis-clicked because the size of the 'correct area' to dismiss the ad is so small and this was an adult male with our sausage-sized fingers) before they could show me the thing they were intending to show me. And that 20 seconds was after the ad had finished playing.
How do people settle for such an experience?