Apple News Scam Ads
Kirk McElhearn (Bluesky, Hacker News):
I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ – £13 – because, while you get more publications, you still get ads.
And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.
[…]
These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no.
I barely use Apple News, but I see these sorts of ads nearly every time. The other annoying thing it does is that just scrolling an article beyond a certain point will pop up a modal sheet asking me to subscribe. It interrupts my reading to do this. This is in addition to showing two rows of upsell content directly below each article.
Apple promotes News by saying it offers “trusted sources” in an app that is “rewriting the reading experience”. And, when Apple partnered with Taboola, Sara Fischer at Axios reported it would “establish certain levels of [quality] control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps”.
As I was saying, the words are out of sync with the actions these days. I struggle to interpret Tim Cook and other top Apple executives at times. Are they simply not aware of the disconnect? Or did they decide it’s easier and cheaper to keep telling people that they care instead of actually caring? How long can that optimization “work” for?
Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense.
The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator.
It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren’t thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.
Previously:
- The Fallen Apple
- Apple’s Q1 2026 Results
- Blurring App Store Ads and Search Results
- More App Store Ad Spots
- $10 Off at Fandango
- The Tyranny of Apps
- Apple Directly Selling Apple News Ads
- Taboola + Apple News
- Apple News You Can’t Use
- Apple Services Price Hikes
- News Is Not a Normal Mac App
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At this point, Tim Apple has to know quality has gotten significantly worse.
That is, us saying these things likely won’t create change.
What would motivate someone with the power to change things at Apple to make quality important again, or is the emperor not naked but truly and simply dead… and we should stop pretending otherwise? What’s next for people who care about well crafted things? A fork of some Linux distro we develop apps for? (Yes, please.)
(I’d talk about Nietzsche’s madman prematurely announcing the death of god, and how the point of the parable was that god WAS dead, it was just too early to tell everyone b/c there wasn’t enough practical difference yet for anyone to benefit from the knowledge.
But I think it is. Apple is dead. This is one of those “you can’t turn a battleship on a dime” situations, and we’re dealing with one of the top market cap co’s in the world. It’s past saving, and, in fact, is no longer a company whose nature allows it to be saved.)
