{"id":28159,"date":"2020-02-17T17:02:22","date_gmt":"2020-02-17T22:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=28159"},"modified":"2023-09-04T14:58:54","modified_gmt":"2023-09-04T18:58:54","slug":"the-paywalled-garden-ios-is-adware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/02\/17\/the-paywalled-garden-ios-is-adware\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steve Streza<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million<\/a> this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots<\/em> of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.<\/p>\n

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack<\/a>-style design comes at the expense of the user experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

M.G. Siegler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Wow, this is... aggressive. An almost full-screen self-ad on launch of the Apple Wallet app...<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Oliver Haslam<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Emails, I don’t mind. It’s the location of the ad that’s the issue. The Wallet app is no place for an ad.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Neither is the Music app, but it’s often an Apple Music ad.<\/p>\n

Same will happen to the TV app for TV+. They’ve already compromised Wallet (Card), App Store (Arcade), News (News+), and notifications.<\/p>\n

The system UI doesn’t purely serve us anymore — it’s Apple’s upselling machine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Daan Odinot<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Apple leveraging the shit out of the fact that they control the platform. They must know that they’re playing with fire here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Are they? What can we really do about it?<\/p>\n

Apple first let other apps turn our phones into marketing machines by non-enforcement of their rule against marketing\/promotional push notifications.<\/p>\n

Then they started routinely violating it themselves.<\/p>\n

Actions speak: they don’t care.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Kyle Howells<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Apple’s services push is ruining the company.<\/p>\n

Apple’s high quality and user focused design wasn’t inherently built into the company. It was a result of the companies incentives being to please their customers so they buy more hardware.<\/p>\n

Once you switch to selling services the incentives switch too and so the quality disappears<\/p>\n

This was completely predictable, and immensely disappointing.<\/p>\n

Apple is destroying all the premium, high quality things we liked about them in pursuit of the myth of infinite growth modern companies have blinded themselves into believing in.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

David Chartier<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Have we talked about how the TV app in tvOS 13 now just displays a bunch of ads for shows we haven’t heard of or don’t care about?<\/p>\n

It used to display our most recently watched shows and films, making it super easy to get back to them.<\/p>\n

This is an awful change.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Really though I’m pretty unhappy Apple’s TV+ service is going to debut in an app with mixed free\/streaming and paid\/rental movies, especially with Family Sharing where everything is linked to my credit card. I can’t stand that it mixes both kinds of content in recommendations<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Josh Centers<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Apple TV app on the Apple TV is currently the bane of my existence. In theory, it should be a tidy way to manage everything you watch, bringing together content from Apple, Disney+, HBO, Hulu, and other streaming services (but still not Netflix, for some reason), plus live news and even sports. It sort of does that, but over time, Apple has started using the app to push the company’s own paid content, especially its Apple TV+ service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Michael Rockwell<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

It’s becoming clear that Apple is more than happy promoting their services through apps like Apple TV. And because of this, I’ve slowly moved away from using Apple’s apps and services toward alternatives. =<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Besides the blatant ads that we’re seeing more frequently in the UI, the issue that’s perhaps even more egregious is that entire app UIs are designed as ads.<\/p>\n

They like to refer to it as “curation” but that’s really just another word for “advertisements”.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave<\/a> (Reddit<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

The reason this was controversial is that unlike the Up Next items, which were useful in showing you what’s on deck, the new full screen previews served no functional purpose and were essentially advertisements for content to watch. Firstly, this is a problem because it frequently suggests content you don’t even have access to without paying extra. But even more importantly, this speaks to a much bigger issue that has spread across the tech world — curation is destroying the user interface.<\/p>\n

This may be the single biggest design problem in the tech world today.<\/p>\n

I mean that sincerely. There is this ubiquitous tendency where “recommendation” has become another word for “advertisement”. Entire UIs are designed around how curators (both human and algorithmic) can suggest content for you.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Streza<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Apple News app is an obscene unending ad for News+ and it makes me want to yeet the app clean off every device it’s on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Thom Holwerda<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The weird reality nobody wants to talk about: Apple, claiming not to be an ad company, puts tons of ads on its devices, while Google, definitely an ad company, puts effectively zero ads on Android.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Streza<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

More of the adware that permeates every corner of iOS. If you search for something in the Music app, it shows you an ad for Apple Music with no option to buy. Then if you go to the iTunes Store, it shows you... another ad for Apple Music.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Corbin Dunn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Apple’s full size ad for News+ in the News “Mac” app. I don’t want to see any News+ stuff. How do I disable this?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Marco Arment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

After installing Catalina, EVERY app on my Mac had to re-ask for notification permission, even those I’d granted before.<\/p>\n

Except fucking Apple News, which I never granted notification permission to, and enables itself for banners and sounds by default.<\/p>\n

Zero respect for users.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Daniel J. Wilson<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Third-party apps have to be granted explicit permission to display notifications (even if they were already in use on your Mac), but Apple can display a marketing message for their browser when rival Chrome is launched for the first time on Catalina. Cool.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

David Chapman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

iOS 13 has crippled the Health app and turned it into an ad platform.<\/p>\n

Yes, I will probably buy a $3 app from the store in order to get the functionality back, so Apple will get $1 now. It will lose ~$100 in lifetime customer value by making me less likely to buy Apple products.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Ryan Jones<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Apple’s email receipts are killing me \/ customer support.<\/p>\n

They don’t even have the app’s name, but an Apple Card ad made the cut! 🙄<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Ben Szymanski<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I can’t believe that this is what the first party Mac software looks like now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Ruffin Bailey<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I continually get bombarded now with what amount to advertisements asking for me to either buy more space now or, the other button says, “Not now”, implying, “Sure, I’ll do this later”. There is no, “I realize I’m out of space and I’ll handle it on my own danged time, thanks,” option. There was a time a week or two ago where, no lie, I was getting notifications about being out of space every 10-15 minutes on my iPhone.<\/p>

[…]<\/p>

That is, the only solution Apple provides for you when you’re out of iCloud space is for you to buy more iCloud space. That’s broken. That’s the wrong attitude. What is that space being used for? Are there smart ways to do these things another way?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

rth.wtf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The new push for services revenue feels totally off-brand for Apple. Or at least the old Apple. Maybe we’ve entered a new era for the company where growth-at-all-costs is the chief motivator for how they’re going to treat customers going forward.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a> (tweet<\/a>):<\/p>\n

\n

But I worry that with its services push, Apple is turning into an advertising company too. It’s just advertising its own services. In iOS 13 they put an ad for AppleCare at the very top of Settings<\/a>. They use push notifications to ask you to sign up for Apple Pay and Apple Card, and subscribe to Apple Music, TV, and Arcade. The free tier of Apple News is now a non-stop barrage of ads for Apple News+ subscriptions. Are we at the “hellscape” stage with Apple? No, not even close. But it’s a slippery slope. What made Apple Apple is this mindset: “Ship great products and the profits will follow<\/em>” — not “Ship products that will generate great profits<\/em>”.<\/p>\n

It is essential that product people remain in charge of these decisions at Apple, not services people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n