Duolingo Dynamic Island Ads
Language learning app Duolingo has apparently been using the iPhone’s Live Activity feature to display ads on the Lock Screen and the Dynamic Island, which violates Apple’s design guidelines.
According to multiple reports on Reddit, the Duolingo app has been displaying an ad for a “Super offer,” which is Duolingo’s paid subscription option.
Just like with notifications, another guideline that Apple doesn’t enforce. You have to fill out a privacy manifest to justify reading your own preferences file or displaying a timestamp to a user, but there are no such restrictions on Live Activities or notifications, nor even an API to tag them with a type so that users could choose to filter out ads and promotions.
Previously:
- $10 Off at Fandango
- App Review, Never Change
- Privacy Manifests Update
- The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware
- New App Store Guidelines for Push Notifications and More
- More Push Notification Spam From Apple
Update (2026-01-08): Nick Heer:
I saw this, too.
[…]
But the HIG is not the App Store Guidelines, and there is nothing in there expressly prohibiting this behaviour, as far as I can see.
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Even if Apple provided a way to label the type like on Android, these kinds of companies would abuse it anyway just like they do on Android.
The canonical example I remember from well over a decade ago when they were new, is Starbucks having a notification channel called "order notifications and promotions." Purposely, openly bundling them together.
The core problem is that companies like Duolingo as the perfect example are just marketing companies with a very thin layer of actual offering under a whole heap of growth hacking frosting.
Duolingo in particular continues to be an egregious example, because having tried their actual course, it's essentially very low effort compared to all their marketing. Useless even to learn actually useful phrases, much less an entire language. But they put 10x the effort into marketing and promotion etc.
Yeah, some apps abuse this on Android, but of the 100+ apps I have installed, none does. Also, there are apps like DoNotNotify on Android that let me set detailed rules for which notifications should be shown and which should be automatically deleted.
I use the built in notification control thing on android so I get zero notifications from Duolingo. There are four different notifications from Duolingo alone that I can turn on off individually.
But given their spammy ads in between lessons I'm not surprised they resort to notification ads whenever they get the chance. I'm surprised they haven't exploited the streak widget on my home screen for this.
Duoling is interesting as hell. They keep claiming AI is boosting their paid subscriber numbers and I just don't know in what way they're meaning AI is doing that.
"They keep claiming AI is boosting their paid subscriber numbers"
They might be talking about the LLM conversations they offer, which apparently are genuinely helpful when learning new languages:
https://blog.duolingo.com/video-call/
