$10 Off at Fandango
🤮
In case you forgot after F1 got multiple sections of the keynote at Apple’s developer conference.
This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor’s new movie.
Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone’s opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all?
Oh wait, that’s already what happens.
You can’t opt out because the Wallet app also shows notifications that are actually important.
And non-notification ads are mixed in everywhere now: the services apps, System Settings, etc. (I also got the F1 ad as a banner within the Wallet app.) You could make that case that people don’t know about the different services and the content that they offer and so this is helpful onboarding. But this has been going on for years with no way to opt out. We’re long past the point where key system apps have become nagware. I need extra taps/clicks to get through the ad and just play my music. Screen space is wasted showing thumbnails for movies and articles that are not available to me instead of the ones that actually are.
Previously:
- WWDC 2025 Keynote
- iOS Announcements and Offers
- The Enshittification of All Things
- Get Rid of the Apple Pay Setup Badge
- App Store Ads in Today and App Pages
- The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough
- New App Store Guidelines for Push Notifications and More
- The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware
- More Push Notification Spam From Apple
Update (2025-06-25): Dave Wood:
Carrot on top of it as always!
Some of the iPhone users who received the push notification have complained about it across the MacRumors Forums, Reddit, X, and other online discussion platforms.
“As far as I can tell, Apple is now just sending me ads to my screen now as push notifications, something I hate with an absolute passion and disable across the board in every app that tries this,” said one person who received the notification.
Some people are especially upset about receiving a push notification ad through the Wallet app because it is a very important app for personal finances, so simply turning off notifications for the entire app is not a feasible solution.
Worse, Apple seems to be ignoring the guidelines that apply to App Store apps.
There’s a wallet notifications setting to disable offers and promotions. 🙃
This is only in iOS 26, and it’s hidden behind the ··· menu—lately I’ve been seeing this called the meatballs menu, I guess as a take off the hamburger menu—rather than in the notification settings.
Granted there aren’t too many who lust for the ever increasing onslaught of advertising and marketing pitches we’re bombarded with hourly. I’m certainly not one who does. But advertising and marketing, as overused and overwrought as it has become, in and of itself isn’t enshittification, no matter how fast it grows like weeds rapidly enveloping every corner of our Internet usage.
Look Apple, we get it. You really, really, really, really want F1 to be a hit. And after a series of feature film flops, you really need it to be to maintain any level of credibility in the space. The Apple TV+ shows have been, for the most part, great. The movies, prettymuchtheopposite. That’s obviously somewhat subjective, but it also matters for things like word-of-mouth. And that matters more than it normally would for Apple’s movies because they’ve inexplicably been so bad at marketing them.
[…]
This is not the first time Apple has dabbled in promotion for Apple Pay and their partners, of course. But it is the first time they’re hitting this trifecta: using their device to push their service and their movie. It’s a bit much. But it’s also just a push notification (and a notice in the Wallet app), you can just shoo it away, right? Sure, but there’s also clearly a reason why this backlash keeps bubbling up.
As I wrote last night (referencing the most famous linewritten by Jonathan Nolan): You either die ranting against inserting ads or live long enough to start inserting ads.
[…]
But again, the problem is their previous rhetoric against this general business. One imagines that they’ll try to use the “intrusive” and “personal data” distinction, but those are semantic lines that will fade eventually. If Apple does indeed keep pushing more into ads, they’ll also keep doing things to make those ads more effective. They already failed in the space once with ‘iAd’, and much as with F1 itself, they can’t afford to fail again. If and when Tim Cook is no longer CEO, that could be the perfect timing to fully revisit previously precious stances…
For now, we just have the scent of hypocrisy and the appearance of greed with these ads. Again, I’m not sure it’s the latter – I think they just really, really, really want and need F1 to be a hit and are pulling out every advertising stop that they can, including on their own properties. But it’s no less hypocritical.
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Supposedly, and I have no way of verifying this, but someone at MacRumors said they had Wallet app notifications disabled and they still got this ad.
This might explain why Tim Cook was quoted recently as saying he doesn't consider whether running Apple TV+ will help him sell iPhones. Because he's already aware that after stunts like this, no, it won't.
This is why I don't want to update to the latest macOS or iOS. The more I do, the more crap like this happens.
I am also becoming increasingly tempted to, with SIP fully disabled, hack Notification Center and figure out how to actually disable notifications I don't want to see. I'm crazy enough to do it! (Probably better to just switch to Linux, though.)
Is there a reason to have the Fandango app installed? Is it better than the web site? I don’t have the app and didn’t get the notification.
> I don’t have the app and didn’t get the notification.
Assuming that makes a difference, which I hope it doesn’t given Apple likes to talk about how they don’t snoop on you like other advertisers, I’m going to be uninstalling a lot of apps where the website works okay.
@Rob I don’t think the notification is related to having the Fandango app installed. I don’t have it, either.
Of all the things Apple keeps copying from Android, one they've never attempted are Notification Channels. Now I understand why: because they don't want you to be able to opt out of just the ads.
@cglong on Android it didn't help, because the type of companies that do this don't separate their ads into a different channel. I remember Starbucks specifically had "order notifications and offers" on the same toggle.
This is just another symptom of the enshittification of our world. It's considered standard practice now to interrupt the user (aka the money bag, the consumer, the test subject, etc) with popups, push notifications, full screen inescapable takeovers, etc etc.
Computers are the bicycle for the mind, they amplify what people already do. And apparently, people are assholes. The computers aren't the problem, people are purposefully making them this way.
This was a choice someone made.
Just call it what it is: an advertisement. Apple’s Wallet app is now powered by advertisements. Then ask yourself: do you want to use a wallet application that is powered by advertisements?
Hurray, I'm an adult. Windows primarily with a bit of Linux for 7 years.
Mac primarily with a bit of Windows and Linux for 10 years. Upset with first party Apple apps, eventually move away from all of them. Start with an iPhone 4.
Reluctant Mac user for 5 years. Upset about the state of the Mac Pro, macOS getting worse. iPhone XS is pretty good.
Want new Mac hardware for 5 years. Life and work changes and can't justify the expense. Storage/memory tax unavoidable now. Slowly and reluctantly move back to Windows since I have more current machines there. Hey, this isn't terrible. Debloat scripts actually work and I can run old apps without hassle. iPhone 15 Pro is still pretty good. Concerned about iOS getting worse like macOS.
Should I buy a cheap Mac Mini just to have a recent Mac around? Mine are vintage now. I have a lot of DMGs and the encryption makes portability to other systems difficult. All my creative and dev software runs on Windows and some Linux. I can manage iPhone things with iMazing for some cost that is less than a new Mac.
Should I continue buying iPhones? iOS spammed me about Apple Music with the latest upgrade, and now other things, too. Does it not realize I have never used any Apple services and plan to keep it that way? It also thinks I'm not an adult, or at least has a grammar issue with "I'm an adult" (blue underline "an"). Siri is still Clippy, so I only use it for setting alarms (OK) and reminders (often frustrating), haven completely given up on trying to get it to play music properly, much less answer simple questions or perform simple unit conversions without offering web results. Apple Intelligence isn't intelligent enough to stop turning itself on. Wow, this list is longer than I thought it would be.
Okay, so Windows has been working mostly okay. Linux is looking more viable every day, for my current needs. Oh god, we're seriously thinking about Android because Apple doesn't have it together on multiple fronts.
Tahoe and iOS drop with a usability nightmare of a UI. I don't even care for the aesthetic. Ads. ADS! What the...? Should I buy a Mac Mini now, for compatibility's sake, and never upgrade it?
Apple TV was looking like an option for privacy/usability/respect, but that does not seem to be the direction this company is heading these days. So now Apple TV feels like a gamble because of... reputational damage?
So Apple makes amazing (and expensive) hardware, but Apple software design and respect for the user has truly fallen. The user is underlined in blue twice, like Siri doesn't even know who that is. The broader ecosystem is not compelling, at least for me. The ever more frequent disrespectful nags to pay for services have only cemented the decision not to pay for new hardware, software notwithstanding.
I guess I'm out. I'm not going to try to fight any of it anymore. Like most things in life, it happens slowly, then all at once.
I just received this advertisement and put it in the folder in Photos of all the other screenshots of ads my phone and iPad have pushed at me. Lots of Messi’s face.
I don’t know who I’m keeping this evidence for, Apple doesn’t care. They don’t even have Wallet as a subject on the feedback form. Guess how I know.
Not that it matters, I could have a face to face meeting with Tim Cook and it wouldn’t change a thing. He only cares about money.
Tim Cook has to go. My only fear is that someone even worse will take over. Apple clearly looked around and realized that the bar was so low they could sink to a lower level themselves.
If Apple doesn’t care about UI/UX, who is left?
I absolutely hate this, but let's not pretend this is the first time that Apple has been abusing their push notification privileges for advertising their own slop. I've received unwanted ads for basically every Apple "service" they offer, from Apple Music ads, Apple Arcade ads, Apple Card ads, Apple TV+ ads, Apple News+ ads, Apple Fitness+, you name it, and if it potentially boosts their Services revenue and makes AAPL shareholders happy, it'll pester you.
This abusing-of-notification-privilege behavior has also been adopted by Uber, Doordash, and many other apps that require you have notifications enabled for updates, but then abuse those notifications to push you ads.
My iPhone is starting to feel like that old "kill the pop-ups" Flash game, circa 2002 (which nearly the entirety of the web has also turned back into again, but that's a separate complaint).
Apple is quickly losing the class and tact that defined them as a corporation for the majority of their existence.
