The search results in the App Store are ridiculous. Sometimes I search for an app by name and have to scroll through dozens of other apps before finding the one I had searched for.
App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
Amen. App-store search is an offense sham, wasting users' time and stealing from developers.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
A few weeks ago I pruned back a jade plant, and it’s started to sprout new growth. I took a picture to send to my friends, and searched for “jade” so I could reply to an earlier message about it. For some reason, the results included almost every message sent in this group chat in the last 48 hours, before the one single message that actually contained the word “jade”. It’s just astonishingly bad.
I don’t know why I bother syncing and storing years of iMessages when they’re functionally inaccessible to me.
The Finder issue can be alleviated if you include the path bar in your Finder window, at least it is so before Tahoe. So you highlight a search result and the path bar shows you where it is.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
I’m not sure if this still works as everything gets a bit more broken in every new macOS, but context menu ‘Reveal in Finder’ used to be my way to figure out where the search result was.
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Every single time you read "search is broken" you should parse it as "search has been exhaustively optimised and tuned to maximize revenue for the company providing it".
Search is never broken. It's just not doing what you think it should be doing.
This is what basically everyone else has done over the past decade. Google used to put a different background behind ads in its search (https://www.fsedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Google...). It made it really easy to tell what was an ad and skip over it quickly. Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't.
Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen.
If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products.
It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
What’s interesting to me is that no matter how “hidden” the AD indicator may be, my brain always seems to very quickly train itself to swiftly skip such posts when scrolling/browsing.
Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.
If the vast majority of people recognized ads and skipped them as more technically minded people do, they'd either not do that or step up a notch and make them even harder to spot. The reality is that these dark patterns do work for a large part of the users. We're the lucky few who can stay away though it is taxing and tiring.
Yeah. Its going to be easy to skip the first result in an app store search, not because its highlighted, but additionally because it isn't ever what i was searching for. The app store search has been broken like this for years and any change they make short of adding or removing the ad won't change my habits.
in every search ive done on the app store in the last several years, I'm looking for a specific app. That app is never the ad result at the top, its always the second result down.
Right now i did a search for several different popular social media apps. TikTok was the top 'ad' result for all of them. Then i did a search for TikTok and got some random app i've never heard of as the 'ad' result. Its like it doesn't want the same app to fill both of the top two slots, but there is always an ad. So what you are looking for is always second on the list. Never first.
Because of this, why would i ever click the ad? If i search something less-specific like "flashcard app" the best result will fill the second slot. Something else goes in the ad slot.
Shouldn't be too difficult to train a DL network on it, as well. I'm waiting for a pi-hole like device that works on the HDMI level and simply replaces ads by blank space (or art, or whatever the user chooses).
Amazon has gotten "good" at it. If I search for, say, AirPods, I get ads from Apple followed by the regular listings that look identical sans gray "sponsored" text. It helps that in this rare case the ads are actually relevant.
The problem with this, I've found, is that you end up skipping a lot of things, and then find out later on that features were introduced years ago that you've wished, throughout the interim, existed. It's hard to keep up.
I wish there was regulation enforcing background colors for ads.
I'm okay with missing things. As I got older, I cared less and less about being aware of everything out there, and I was glad I got the thing done I needed so I could spend time with my family.
I do this automatically too. But then I wonder if that matters. Are the results that have the best SEO actually going to be any better than the sites that pay the most to be displayed for my search? I have no idea.
Normal users do not do this. We break Google Ads' links at the office (yours should too, malicious linkjacking in ads is prevalent) and I am told "Google doesn't work" all the time. People have to be taught not to click the ads and usually that's only effective if you ensure the ads don't work.
Works as intended. If you’re looking for a baby bottle it’s reasonable to assume that your house is in disarray from the whole new baby in the house thing, and it’s above average probability that you’ll buy completely unrelated products during your search.
I am suddenly realizing how silly it is that I have put up with this for decades. Are GreaseMonkey or similar tools still around that would let me customize the CSS of sites? I am thinking I should be able to run my own styling to make the ads nearly invisible. Or do the big players do all sorts of tricks to make identifying the ad content so dynamic that it would require constant vigilance to maintain? I have heard that Facebook does insane rendering tricks to prevent people from scraping their sites, not impossible to imagine some companies obfuscate the ad selection.
Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
I use the Stylus extension for site-specific CSS in Chrome. Usually end up with a big comma-separated list of selectors getting the { display: none !important; visibility: hidden !important } treatment.
Funny enough, even iOS Safari has a “hide distracting items” button you can sorta use for this kind of thing. I guess it won’t work on the App Store though.
Sure enough, this looks great. Found a blog post where someone did the exact same thing. Unlike the Firefox mechanism of usercontent.css which requires a reboot after every change(?) this works dynamically on a page reload. Now trivial to restyle some content which would otherwise not hit a blocklist.
I like how, the way you've described it, it sounds as if, with the effort they go to to make ads as difficult to identify as possible, they're trying to hide their shame.
It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful.
Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.
> It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that.
Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.
Absolutely this. I can’t agree with this more. Having been using apple macs for 2 decades now I’m wondering whether my next machine will be apple. There’s even a setting for the adverts in the system settings. This is disguising.
Not OP, but I think they still have the lead in hardware. However, I'm using an iPhone 14 which apparently released 4 years ago now, and it's still plenty fast enough for all my needs. If it lasts another 4 years, I won't update. That's probably their problem.
Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape.
But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege.
Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
Not at all. Bought and promptly returned an iPad last year when I realized they were going to force me to see ads with their safari wrapper for every 'browser alternative.'
Great ecosystem for my aging parents, but not for me.
See, instead of leaving a lot of cash on the table to be way better than the other, they'll pocket that cash and become just a little bit better than the other
Apple's whole selling point is they aren't pulling the same crap that the everyone else is. It's not a defense of Apple to say they're just doing what everyone else has already been doing. Think different?
Yes, this is part of what is supposed to justify the premium prices, is that they can have a different business model.
But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
What is shocking is that deception is the common. Accepted, argued for by some. Loosing trust of the site/app doing the deception is the result. Becoming common, accepted, trend, and then loosing trust in the whole industry is the result.
It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.
Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.
Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.
Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.
Amazon isn't blameless here, either.
So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.
Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.
Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark
Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.
Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.
What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?
Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.
I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
> It ought to be illegal to host ads for registered trademarks (+/- some edit distance).
This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.
I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
It wouldn't impinge on freedom of speech. Nothing would be prohibited from being said.
It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).
That is pro-transparency and ethics, not anti-speech.
> It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).
That's specifically what I'm proposing in the post you replied to?
Let’s remember it’s not new: Back in 2005, gannies (and 20yo non-nerds too) would install all sorts of viruses by clicking on popups thinking it’s the real thing. I personally switched to Firefox then Mac which didn’t have this problem. It’s like browsing a torrent website without an adblocker: There is absolutely no way to hit the right button, it’s URL changes between mousedown and mouseup.
You're not allowed to use Pikachu commercially. Why should Google? They're taking advantage of every trademark to make money.
Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode.
If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder.
Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales.
The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.
You could search for "{trademark} competitors", "{trademark} reviews", "{trademark} vs ...", etc.
For bare trademark searches, we could write laws that allow competitors, but restrict taxing and bidding off the reserved mark above the trademark owner's result.
You should be able to explicitly bid on trademarks because you intend to compete directly with that business. Nobody should ever have a legal right to appear at the top of search rankings for anything. Laws restricting business competition are almost never a good thing.
There used to be plenty of ways to get in touch with the owner of a brand directly. Now they're all being camped by rent extractors.
Google is chief amongst those taxing businesses. They are not government anointed to perform this role. Google should not be allowed to do this.
As a business gets more successful, Google extracts more money from them. Simply trying to access the business will send revenue to Google.
Google took the standard URL bar and turned in into a rent extraction product. This should have been illegal, but our regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google adds costs to every business, every product, every entrepreneur. They should stick to servicing user inquiries, not stuffing ads in front of simple trademark lookup.
It's time to knock on their doors of regulatory bodies, both in the US and abroad. No more trademark camping from the "URL bar".
And every single one of those ways to get in touch still exists. Advertising is, and always has been, optional. But of course those companies that pay for it get more customers. So in practice, almost everyone pays for it. That's not rent extraction. Paying for advertising is paying for attention. And you are in absolutely no circumstance ever entitled to anyone's attention. The only difference with Google is that you even get to appear at all without paying. No other ad supported platform is like that. It's pay up or GTFO. Nobody hijacked your URL bar. You can type in the URL just like you always could.
> And you are in absolutely no circumstance ever entitled to anyone's attention. The only difference with Google is that you even get to appear at all without paying. No other ad supported platform is like that.
If google wants to rebrand to an advertising platform instead of a search engine, I will accept that argument. And I mean truly, fully rebrand, making it clear to everyone that visits.
Until then, their rent extraction is a real problem. They're pretending to return information and putting ads in the way in a deliberately deceptive manner.
Companies wouldn't feel nearly as compelled to bid on their own name if that deception wasn't there.
If I want to get in touch with a company, I go through Google. It's not the brand's choice, it's not my choice. The brand has to pay for that. I, ultimately, also have to pay for that.
This is NOT okay. Google is using monopoly power to do this. They have inserted themselves as parasitic middle men. No different than a cymothoa exigua eating away at the tongue.
This is not advertising. It's a road bump. It's getting throttled by the mafia. It's a protection racket on people's hard-earned brands. A tax on cognition and communication.
Google is a villain here. They are not offering value or service or anything useful. They're extracting.
They're the Harvey Weinstein of the internet here -- nobody wants to do business with the guy, but he's there and he's asking you to do what he wants. You can go along, and do the thing, or you can say no and completely lose your customer.
The customer that already knows you by name. You made it this far. Now there's this gross middle man asking you to give up.
So you let Harvey Weinstein slip his hands in. Cost of doing business.
That's what Google is in this story.
This isn't advertising. It's the R-word, being perpetrated because of a lack of the other R word: healthy market regulation.
90 percent of all humans on the planet are being fleeced by this. Every time you put something into the URL bar, Google gets a piece of the action.
What I'm saying is, when these are brand names, this is theft. Highway robbery. Monopolistic pillaging.
Typing in URLs by hand is a choice you can make. Scrolling down to organic results (for brands you like) is another choice you can make. Paying for a search engine service is a great choice.
Brands can ask you to add them to your contacts with their website in their vcard. They can prompt you to bookmark them. They could publish a feed for you.
Sure Google can get us to routed in a way we’re all conditioned to depend on, but there are plenty of other ways to get to your destination. There must be 50 ways to leave…
Yes it is your choice. You could have gone to the physical location, called them, sent a letter to their address, used Bing, Yahoo or whatever. Your argument is just not rational.
Advertising alternatives to trademarked names is completely legal in every sense.
It's known as comparative advertising and is established for more than a century.
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
What does it imply that the other term does not? Enshitification is the inevitable result of the tendency of profit to revert to zero. This is basic schumpeter (not to mention marx).
That is what's expected when you put a glorified accountant in charge and he decides Wall St. is the real customer and the stock price is the real product and users and consumer technology are an afterthought.
He’s been in charge for a while, even during some good times. I dunno. It definitely seems like the company is trending in a bad direction, though—maybe he was able to extrapolate from the good points well enough. But now that they are far past those points, the higher order terms are going bad…
Google was killed when Pichai took over - in his first speech, he said: Everything is AI now.
From moment on, Google search tanked: from a userexperience perspective and a useracquisition-vehicle perspective. Lots of companies could have been built only Google worked 15years ago the way that Google did work. Lots of companies today do not have the same lane anymore, so spending more and more on advertising....
It probably doesn't help that I just spend an hour trying to figure out how to update to 18.7.3 on my iphone. It turns out you can't. The only way to get security updates now is to upgrade to iOS 26. Apple no longer supports security updates to old major versions if the device is capable of running the new major release. Apple is no longer making choices that benefit customers, but ones that benefit project managers.
If in the past it has, it was precisely to reach the present situation. It's naive to expect these companies to be pro-costumers. They would rape your mother if they could - the only reason they don't is because that would make you not buy their product and falsehoods.
Wow, I just checked and looks like I'm stuck on 18.7 for the rest of the life of this iPhone I guess. That being said it looks like I can opt into ios 18 beta. I wonder if that would include security patches? Actually maybe I don't want security patches. It would be nice to have a jailbroken iphone again one day...
> completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.
Maybe I’m too old, but if Apple fixed every single bug and added absolutely zero features until the day of my death, I would still be a satisfied customer.
The problem is not lack of innovation, the problem is that everything barely works.
Doing your job and doing your job well are two different things, of course. The innovation is going to have to be in how to return to the latter when they’ve lost their way. Or, perhaps more accurately, been led astray by conflicting priorities.
They’ve done it recently with their hardware. Past time for the other side of the house to refocus.
I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.
Fadell might also be a good choice. Either way it should be someone currently outside Apple. The company needs an external eye to review its processes and cruft that built up under Cook (nothing negative against the guy, but what worked 5-10 years ago won’t necessarily work 5-10 years down the road).
> they’re completely devoid of any ideas on the software side.
Nah, they're full of ideas. Mostly around sucking out every dollar from anyone foolish enough to build on their OS.
They've seen which way the wind is blowing and their extortionate payment processing fees are going to get limited by most governments. The plan flatly is to extort companies for money in the app store to make up for it.
eg allowing companies to advertise against other companies' names: just like google, they plan to extort companies on navigation (ie direct product/company name) queries.
Nadella turned Microsoft completely around. Before Nadella, for about 2 decades, Microsoft’s entire purpose seemed to be to stuff Windows into everything. Changing this was a massive undertaking that was largely unimaginable within MS.
Unfortunately now under Nadella AI is taking the role Windows used to play, but even there he understood the importance of AI before most of his competitors did which is what allowed Microsoft to gain such a substantial footing in OpenAI.
And in the process alieanted most of the Windows developers, only game devs care (hence Proton), and now it is a QA mess.
Also it is quite clear for us old timers, that since the AI obssession started in Redmond, the old rotten Microsoft culture is back, it probably never left but it was tamed in the early Satya years.
Remember Nadella doesn't read emails (he gets AI to summarise them all), he doesn't pay attention in meetings (he claims to get the minutes and then AI summerise them), what makes you think he even really knows the nuances of what the board want?
What has Nadella done for Windows users? It appears to me that Windows is becoming every bit as enshittified as macOS, if not more so. And isn't Microsoft experimenting with advertisements in Windows?
I had VMWare Workstation before, and it isn't as if there were not Terminal alternatives already.
Other than that the whole UAP/UWP/WinUI/WinAppSDK, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT has been a mess. They may shout to the winds it is the future, yet it is mostly crickets and endless list of bugs on the Github repos and related VS tooling.
Microsoft doesn’t care about Windows. It’s been clear for years that their focus is on Azure, Office, and enterprise sales.
The enterprise is going to choose Windows regardless for the masses and even if consumers make a mass exodus to Apple (not going to happen because of price) or Linux (even less likely) they are out of $30 they charge OEMs.
How is MacOS as enshittified as Windows? It doesn't have ads, doesn't push AI on you, their online services are trivial to ignore once and never think about again, etc. I haven't tried Tahoe, and sure, its new glass UI is shit, but merely incompetent UI design is not "enshittification" and is not in any way equivalent to what Microsoft does in Windows.
> their online services are trivial to ignore once and never think about again
The workarounds to get rid of the nag to log into your icloud account on macOS are far more difficult than the workarounds to avoid using an MS account in Windows.
Buy a new Apple Watch and notice that the settings app with have a [1] badge trying to upsell you to buy AppleCare+. They obscure dismissing these by clicking the "Add AppleCare Coverage" button and then having a button that says actually no.
The undissmissable badges in settings irk me to no end. Using language like “finish setting up” in iOS to describe me opting out of Apple Intelligence by choice as leaving MY device in some sort of “unfinished state” is user hostile too. With the amount of effort it takes me to push back constantly on these dark patterns, I know for a fact all my less tech savvy friends and family just aren’t bothering and that’s what they count on.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
This, on top of the nonstop onslaught of advertisements for F1. It seemed like every one of Apple's services were pushing for that movie. They even put it into maps, wallets, into CarPlay (while people were driving!) It was surprisingly shameless.
It's certainly not as bad _right now_ as what you'll see on Windows 11, but this is something that will almost certainly only get worse over time.
Surely we can distinguish MacOS – the operating system – from the online services provided by Apple that happen to have a native app?
If you are choosing to use Apple online services, sure, you'll get upsells I guess, as with any other online service. I don't use any of Apple's online services, and never see those ads.
macOS does have ads, their online services are worse than Windows, and installing basic software like Homebrew and Git is like having teeth pulled.
Windows is absolutely miserable, but with WSL installed it's far and away the better dev environment. I say that as someone who dailies Linux and hates all three OSes.
So what if it is? A Master's in Economics gets you diddly squat in the job market whereas an MBA opens doors everywhere. You could get a PhD in Economics and still only work at a university, your country's central bank or at a stretch, the IMF or the World Bank, which are hardly held up as the pinnacle of professional development. And even then they'd only take you if you studied monetary economics.
They're not criticizing someone for seeing the appeal of an MBA, they're criticizing that an MBA has those factors in the first place. It shouldn't be the degree you pick to open doors.
Apple Maps from day one was skating to where the puck was going to be. They had vector based maps when that stuff was brand new. Possibly before Google deployed it widespread (but I'm not sure on this fact).
But the problem with Apple Maps was easy to see (and can only be fixex over time)... data. Google and others had a decade+ head start on Apple when it came to collecting data for maps. Judge Apple Maps 5 years old vs Google Maps 5 years old. Not Apple Maps brand new vs Google Maps 10 years later.
Forstall is the one that pushed to make iOS based on macOS/Unix. He was definitely a lightning rod but had product sense.
From my reading, Forstall was one of the few who actually refused to partake in performative corporate culture, and decided to quit rather than bend over
>when Apple issued a formal apology for the errors in Maps, Forstall refused to sign it
It's obvious that apple maps would never be able to be a perfect replacement for google maps at launch, and it's possible Forstall in fact voiced these exact concerns but was overruled before launch, only to then be used as cannon fodder when he turned out to be right. Given all the clearly empty corporate-style "we take full responsibility" stuff you see today, someone actually _refusing_ to play those games when it wasn't his fault is a very positive sign for authenticity.
(He also did work on Siri, but given that he was booted right after its launch, I don't think it's fair to attribute their present incompetence on that front to him.)
Strange take. Apple Maps was a new product. It's expected it would be behind Google Maps, maybe even forever given all the headstart and resources Google gives it.
In any case, Apple Maps (a NEW then product, in an entirely new space for Apple) being bad, is not at all related to "enshittification".
Apple Maps is absolutely the wrong thing to judge Forstall on.
Not to mention that its main problem is coverage i.e. data quality. Regarding software engineering it's fine, even better than Google Maps in lots of aspects.
This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app other than for the occasional airline.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
I see a parallel to how Google search created incentives for SEO and social network feeds created incentive for attention grabbing slop. Platforms optimizing for their own interest at the expense of both upstream and downstream.
Yeah, I miss those days, I would actively browse the "Top 50" of the different categories and find cool new stuff (especially games). I really miss that time period of when I got the 3GS and this stuff was all new and _actually good_. Since then, more and more cool apps and games have come out, but everything around those has become crappier and more exploitative, and far less pleasant to use :\
Allowing weekly subscriptions is so comically evil.
It only exists to trick people into overpaying since 99.99% of subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, so hopefully you don't notice that it says "wk" instead of "mo".
The time that an “App Store” existed and didn’t have adverts was very minimal. Like OP I haven’t browsed the iPhone App Store for over a decade. Occasionally a web page will send me to their app directly and if I want it (very rare) I’ll get it, same with installing specific apps - Spotify, YouTube, WhatsApp etc.
Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.
It’s because no one bothers with pay once apps anymore the only way to get customers is free app and tricking them into a subscription. Entire system raced the price people would pay for iOS software to 0
I’m building a pay-once app, but as mentioned in another comment, the business advisors don’t believe in that model.
Since I’m unemployed, I need them to approve my financial plan, and they’re really pressuring me into a subscription model. It’s crazy how many spreadsheet folk don’t think of anything but recurring revenue with a captive customer base.
I get where you're coming from and your examples are egregiously expensive, but do we really want to live in a world where software is valued at a $2 one-time payment? We shouldn't be engaging in a race to the bottom like that.
No, but I want to live in a world where software can be 'done.' With very occasional security updates perhaps. I don't want to justify why my pomodoro timer needs a subscription model with constant updates.
Well, in this present world where it isn't valued at a one-time payment, OP is no longer a customer. Myself as well. Likewise probably a lot of people on HN. Like OP, I don't scroll through the app store anymore. I used to actually do that for fun! So the developer of that would be $2 app is getting nothing today. They release their app and get no one downloading it because it is comingled with the bullshit. Best they can hope for is a 6 year old steals their parents CC and signs them up for a recurring subscription they miss between the rest of their bills. This is the world we live in instead of the $2 software world.
I have a few app subscriptions that are under $5/yr, like Parcel, and always purchase the latest release of Acorn for around $20/yr. I use those apps frequently and hope those rates are supporting the independent developers who make them. I would gladly pay more for tools I use to make a living.
A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.
On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.
I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.
It recently occurred to me that it’s been years since it was possible to find some new and interesting app just by browsing the App Store, like it used to be when iPhone and Android were first introduced. Now I open the store knowing in advance what exactly I’m looking for and take care not to accidentally click on a lookalike.
It's a mature market. Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over? I know I've pretty much settled into a small set of apps that I use on my iPhone, ThinkPad, and iPad and probably haven't installed anything new (ie not upgrades) for five or ten years now.
The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.
I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.
>Maybe the age of new and interesting apps is over?
it's a shame it really feels this way! i discovered some fun social apps recently like Bump and Retro that are a refreshing break from the big algoscrollers, but all my friends are either too locked into the existing big social apps or are determined to not mess with any social apps at all.
Yes. My wife’s mother keeps buying crap in game using my card and I have no reasonable way of blocking her from doing so if I want to keep app purchase sharing.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
I've had success finding games in the Apple Arcade by just browsing. The bonus is that the games are all included with Apple+ and don't have any ads or microtransactions.
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
I still do this but with F-Droid (or one of the nice frontends like Droidify).
Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.
Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.
This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.
This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.
99.99% of users never visit the settings. For those that do, they won't get past scare wall #1 of enabling APKs and scare walls #2, #3, and #4 of downloading, installing, and enabling the app.
Google knows this.
Tyranny of defaults, trained user behaviors, ecosystem, scare tactics, and even SERPs manipulation to make this nigh undiscoverable.
But they weren't content with some number of you slipping through the cracks! They're starting to close the ability to release unsigned and self-signed code. You can only imagine what's after that.
It still says AD in big blue letters on the new version. Not really a big deal from my point of view.
Still there does seem to be a pattern of ignoring their hardcore fanbase: using Gemini, making ads less obvious, making free apps part of paid bundles. I suspect Apple are getting a lot of pressure from shareholders, given their recent growth has been far lower than e.g. Google.
This is not a trend I like and I'm definitely looking for a Linux boat to jump on, to future proof app distribution, but there just doesn't seem to be an obvious candidate right now.
> It still says AD in big blue letters on the new version. Not really a big deal from my point of view.
Sure, but it'll be small next letters after this. Then small grey letters. Then small grey letters on the details page. Then small grey letters in an accordion on the details page. Then ...
Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable. It's rumored that they'll add ads to maps as soon as next year.
Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music, Books.app is like reading in a Barnes and Noble while someone from marketing looks over your shoulder and their TV app features their own shows to an overbearing degree — everything else is becoming more of an afterthought.
If you use iTunes Match or load your own MP3s every time you open the app the search field is set to “Apple Music” and the search fails until you toggle it, every time.
> Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable.
As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.
By "degrade the experience" you mean you get a text that says "TheDong liked $message." The horror! Maybe people will go back to just sending a thumbs up emoji.
1. Unable to remove members, or change member's phone-numbers without recreating the entire chat and losing continuity / bothering everyone with noise about these changes.
2. Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.
3. Unable to send high quality photos or videos
4. Just plain failure to deliver messages with shocking frequency for a supposedly modern messaging system.
5. RCS still isn't supported by carriers in a bunch of countries, so when one member of the group chat travels, roams to a foreign network that doesn't support RCS, and chats the group chat can split into one for MMS and one for RCS, and then it's a total crapshoot based on network conditions as to which one the messages go to in the future, with messages having now an even higher chance of vanishing into the void.
Basically, it's a subpar experience. Every other group messaging app (signal, whatsapp, etc) works fine on iOS and android, Apple really should be publishing iMessage for Android to solve this. But, due to reason 2 where green bubbles result in becoming a social outcast and being bullied, they of course won't.
Like, signal, a company running on donations iirc, is able to build a messaging app for windows/linux/iOS/android, and yet Apple isn't capable of that? Come on.
I do with anyone I can. Unfortunately some people I want to chat with (i.e. family) are too scared to install any third-party apps from the app store because each time they tried, they clicked on an app store ad and get garbage instead.
It would be great if people actually did this, but in the US that is not the case. There are only so many people you can convince to move off of their main platform, and usually you have to meet people where they are.
Apple's app-store "results" have long been absolute bullshit. Apple lied to judges, developers, and the public about the app store. I wrote an application for a popular company; and even if you searched for the company's exact name, the application didn't show up in the top 300 results (which is where I gave up scrolling).
Instead, Apple delivered results with misspellings of the company name or applications that didn't contain any portion or variant of the search string AT ALL. Not in the app name, description, publisher name... anywhere.
I complained to Apple and got a boilerplate bullshit response. Then I raised a threat of legal action for Apple's hijacking and perversion of our trademark in their search results. This at least provoked a specific response, where Apple claimed that publisher name is "one of the top three" criteria for app-store search.
This is very unfortunate. To me Apple was the last corporate standing that is not doing ads nefariously. If this is changing what is next? I’m aware it is a slippery slope argument, but this has to do with trust. Apple’s advertised stance on privacy and security and ads always has been believable (to me) because of their business model and that they made it the distinguishing feature.
Now, what is left? iPads are great, MacBook with Apple silicon are unmatched in refinement, iPhones are awesome but getting a bit stale. Apple Watch is awesome, but for sports Garmin are better. It is the integrated ecosystem with iCloud that makes the total system powerful.
Where to go? I love Linux with CachyOS on my desktop. Anything similar for tablets and laptops? I think KDE has something like connect that aims to do what iCloud does.
How do you test for ad effectiveness vs annoyance? Especially so for a captive audience where they can’t leave and go elsewhere?
It seems like every market leader that gets ads eventually “optimises” towards making them look like not ads. Obviously they will be more effective if people don’t realise what they are, so how do they account for annoyance (and the other negatives a user experiences) while doing these a/b tests?
It is a question asking how you would do that if you cared. I.e how do you measure/quantify that annoyance as a metric when they are captive and have no choice to leave.
Traditionally you would be able to measure annoyance by reduced usage, but that’s not the case in a captive market, so how do you measure it?
That’s the way it appears, sure. But my question is how would you do it if you did care. What metric would there be you could measure if they have no choice but to use the product.
Do people actually browse the App Store to discover what’s new? I personally only open it when I already know exactly what I want to download, for example Obsidian or Firefox. I search, install, and I am done. I never scroll around or browse for inspiration.
I am genuinely curious how others use it. Is App Store browsing a real behavior, or is discovery mostly being forced because search no longer reliably gets you to the thing you already know you want?
Wont make a difference. People are already in the Walled Prison and moms/teens/lower-middle class people are shamed for not being able to afford the $50/mo to buy an iphone. They had numerous privacy and security issues that caused literal deaths of VIPs. Their quality is always 2nd best if we are being generous.
If they haven't switched yet, its not going to happen. Apple knows this. Late users are always punished like my parents who still have a landline and cable tv.
Quality is 2nd best to what? And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS.
Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.
It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.
> And people haven't switched to what? Android? The situation is no better on Google OS
Agree. Even GrapheneOS is hell to use. I tried both PixelOS and GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 and ended up returning it. If I was not homeless I would switch to a flip phone and just use a Linux desktop.
This is not my experience. GrapheneOS is great and has absolutely zero bloatware/malware. The base system is just a couple of basic apps like the phone, messages app, and a Web browser. That's it. All the rest is up to the user to set up. You can be completely Google-free if you don't install sandboxed Google Play Services and other GApps.
Without GApps, the setup is extremely private and ideal to use with self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Home Assistant as substitutes for the typical commercial malware found on most "smart" phones.
The company cares about neither. People inside the company will care about a great many things. The people who care about users either don't have the power to act or no longer care enough to do so.
If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.
This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.
Services business is a slippery slope, everyone succumbs to the YoY revenue growth push and they all gravitate towards the same dirty tactics. They even tried turning the hardware into a subscription model but I guess it didn’t gain much traction.
Ah! The illusion of predictability (for the organisation, of course, because that's what only counts nowadays). Then users get tired/upset of the crap and walk away.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.
Apple annual gross profit for 2024 was $180.683B, a 6.82% increase from 2023.
Apple annual gross profit for 2023 was $169.148B, a 0.96% decline from 2022.
This is an interesting left hand vs right hand thing. Apple is making it more difficult for find a particular app while coding assistance is making it easier to build one. At some point those curves intersect and the App Store becomes irrelevant.
I can remember, or perhaps imagine a time when the FTC would knowingly not look kindly on a situation like this, so Apple with its huge market share and revenue wouldn’t consider it. I imagine now it’s likely not a concern for the agency, and if it were, a political contribution would go a long way towards resolving any concerns.
Every now and then, normally while I’m bored before departing on a plane, I’ll scroll the App Store. It’s all ads at this point. Lists and lists of “top [x]” most of which are clearly just paid lists.
I never visit the App Store outside of that. If I need an app, I search for it and go directly to its listing page (yes, technically the App Store) or install it directly from my Home Screen.
It's crazy to think that even if you buy the phone with the highest price premium your are still forced to navigate between ads for basic feature and have a shitty experience.
Despite Apple not needing more money has they have already can reserves more then they can know how to use it
Two things - browsing appstore is not a "basic feature". It's an entertainment and folks gotta pay for it. I have never browsed Appstore in my life - all i got were either direct links or search by title.
On the "highest price premium" - they can charge it simply because there is no alternative. I have tried android several times and it was was a huge eye opener how shitty and unworkable it is, even in 2025. Boy, they can't even get notifications working properly. So yea, apple charge because they can, can't they?
The ad appears in search result. So "search by title". Not like having fun "wandering randomly" in the app store...
Probably not the best place to troll iphone vs android, but you are probably mind fucked by apple coolaid because so far there are both good and bad sides of both android and iOS. But iOS has a lot of things really fucked and missing or broken features compared to Android.
Just recently you had this nice "liquid glass" making apps unreadable/unusable with semi transparent buttons on top of random UI elements...
Still they clearly can charge whatever they want, that is not the question, the point is that nowadays you can buy the product with the highest margin and still not expect an experience without ad and fucked up interface dark patterns.
In the same way, whatever price you pay for a tv set, it is becoming harder and harder to get one from a major brand that we not screw you with hidden telemetry or forced ads or unwanted features...
They still don't want users to leave. Yeah they can get away with stuff like removing the jack or being slightly annoying about iCloud, but things would be way worse if they didn't care at all.
the change is more subtle than I expected but this does seem like a step in the wrong direction
a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.
Oh, so the Google playstore since... forever. Or at least as long as I can remember. If you have a "search" feature on your <anything app> it should filter down to exactly what you would expect, no sponsored positions, no irrelevant apps as ads, etc.
Shame apple is going towards the dark pattern of ads as results.
It is kinda interesting how like every company seems to go through this flow of highlighting that something is an ad (usually even with some differing background color like what Google used to do!), and then they just pull back differentiators more and more until it really is the smallest minimal marker possible
The most insulting aspect of these kinds of changes is the fact that Apple is generally sold as the "premium" brand. You are still paying a premium price, but you are getting the "freemium" experience anyways. And don't forget the additional 30% they take on every sale on the app store.
To be be honest, the worst Google-like thing about the before and after is how you have to scroll down to see actual results. On my iPhone, I get half of an app showing below the full sponsored app.
Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.
This is funny, since clear separation of ads and not ads is one of the requirements of apps that are admitted to AppStore. If there is no clear separation, the app is rejected.
This will always be a thing, the click metrics dictate it and to justify the costs to the company advertising and the low # of clicks, something has to be done to save the new revenue Ads give. They might as well add modal (psudeo popup) ads, because they will be there in 15yrs.
I remember when it was a news headline that Apple showed ads _at all_ in App Store. It's sad that they're straying even further into scummy ways to nickel-and-dime every ounce of profit they can get out of everyone using their products and services.
The lines where pretty blurred already. If you search for the exact name of an app, I think that needs to go first in the results, the ads can be the third or forth. Having ads show up before the "correct" app is incredibly dangerous in a world where so much of our digital life is in various apps. Often the people see is actively trying to trick people into installing the wrong thing, making the ad less visible is going to get a lot of people scammed.
How the hell Apple does not see this is beyond me. All of their fancy security in iOS is worthless if they allow people to be tricked into installing scam-ware.
Ffs. Alright, what’s the best way for me to run Silverblue on Mac hardware these days with a full GPU-accelerated desktop experience? Is UTM any good? Any alternatives? I used to run Win 10 in Parallels on MacOS and it was excellent - that’s the level of virtualisation polish I’m going for.
After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.
I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.
Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
Do people actually use the app store? Are we not all just searching in spotlight and clicking the first app that comes up (as long as it has 100K/1mil+ downloads) ?
I'm sure you're right. I'm out of touch because I can't remember the last time I actually had a need to browse (or search) the app store for something. Does it go like this for most people, really?
Open app store > search "food delivery app" > Read and compare the reviews of Doordash, ubereats, jimmyjohns app, pizzahut app, shawarma city app, scam app > Make a decision > download the app ???
Seriously? Already the only thing that makes ads distinguishable from results is that you search for "microsoft authenticator" and the first result is ... something else.
They do have an unnoticeable "this is an ad" tiny text somewhere. Are they talking about removing even that?
App Store's UX has always been a show of excrement, and its search is wonky as hell. I can't imagine myself use that to discover apps, after having been shoved tons of dreck results up my behind the last time I've tried it.
I'd rather ask for app recommendations on 4chan or Reddit than browse App Store.
You mean the same Apple who will remove an app like Tumblr for a little consensual nudity posted by people and is too afraid of what Trump might say to remove X which is allowing none consensual undressing of women just by posting a picture and telling Grok to remove clothes - including CSAM?
Capitalism pretty much demands it. Some companies can delay it for awhile, but the numbers must go up and eventually expansion because of a better product reaches it's natural limit.
Corporations always operate at the lowest morality level of any member of the company. Lots of executives can say no to dark patterns, but it only takes one to say yes. Then that exec gets to report the successful revenue boosting metrics. They will tend to get promoted and soon the entire leadership team is filled with people with the lowest ethical standards.
> Lots of executives can say no to dark patterns, but it only takes one to say yes.
I think the situation is a lot more stark than this. Unless they're desperate, the board of directors of corporations will install an MBA as CEO. In most cases, the only time this doesn't happen is at the founding of the company, when a founder is CEO. But if the founder doesn't maintain controlling interest, the founder can be replaced.
The promotion of Steve Jobs to interim CEO of Apple in 1997 was a rare exception. Apple fired its CEO, and the company was in danger of bankruptcy. They were running out of options and feeling the aforemention desperation. Note how the situation was very different in 1985, when the board of directors chose John Sculley over Steve Jobs in a power struggle. At the time, they weren't financially desperate.
It's been like this for a while, the top results for a lot of known apps are scam impersonators.
So much for the so called "safety" of the appstore.
In fact, they had so many ChatGPT fake apps showing as top results that they had to do something as users couldn't find the real one and it reached the news.
But when you're forced to choose the App Store over the many many alternative .ipa distributors, it's perfectly logical and fair?
Android is a hardware alternative - Apple needs upward pressure to make their services competitive. If you use a Mac this is already obvious, you can't buy industry-standard software on the App Store. They all avoid it like the plague when given the opportunity, and Apple deliberately closes this escape hatch on iOS. Apple has known the App Store isn't good enough for over a decade.
It is an arbitrary and deliberate protectionist monopoly of app distribution. How many trophies does Tim Apple need to give Trump before people get the hint?
The App Store is an integrated component of the iPhone experience.
It's perfectly fine to have different preferences but doesn't mean you get to meddle in the UI/UX of something you didn't create. If you really want to sideload, that's what Android is for.
> The App Store is an integrated component of the iPhone experience.
It's an App Store. The .IPA is an integrated component of the iPhone experience, the App Store is an optional storefront. Again, look at the Mac.
You're repeating the same limp defenses that Apple has already watched get torn down by the EU and Japanese courts. We've solidly moved onto the "beg Trump for help" phase, which is miles worse than the humiliation of allowing sideloading.
Do you still want to know why they're putting ads into the only integrated storefront on iOS? It's real simple from where I'm standing.
This feels like a conversation about irrelevant matters the App Store ad design at the advent of AI integration? I see the future being AI suggesting or responding with an app or extension to add specific abilities or features based on stated objectives, i.e., just a package manager behind the scenes. I don’t see myself going to some App Store. I haven’t even “browsed” one in years because they all seem extremely static, having reached a peak saturation and static state.
Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.
App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.
These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
I'm a pretty liberal guy, I like democracy I like captialism but its stuff like this that is blackpilling me on private enterprise. No matter how much they have they continue to push the boundary and squeeze the customer. My cope at the moment is that its only americans and its due to a failure of culture. But im starting to the same greed in companies in my own country. I dont think worker owned enterprise is any better as they still have the same incentives.
Not obvious to me that this is worse or as user-hostile as many seem to presume.
Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.
Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.
Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.
That means App Store search is not broken by malice but by incompetence. Apple just don't know how to implement search.
And +1 to pitiful Mail search.
But Apple has long suffered from a peculiar learning disability in regard to search. Not only does Finder fail to find files matching search strings that it's showing you IN THE CURRENT DIRECTORY... but both Finder and Spotlight provide no option to include WHERE it found stuff in search results. You can't even add "path" to the result columns as an OPTION. So if it finds a bunch of files with the same name... oh well.
Leave it to Apple to field a search facility that refuses to tell you WHERE it found stuff.
A few weeks ago I pruned back a jade plant, and it’s started to sprout new growth. I took a picture to send to my friends, and searched for “jade” so I could reply to an earlier message about it. For some reason, the results included almost every message sent in this group chat in the last 48 hours, before the one single message that actually contained the word “jade”. It’s just astonishingly bad.
I don’t know why I bother syncing and storing years of iMessages when they’re functionally inaccessible to me.
Search on iOS Mail is… what is it doing? I can see the e-mail right there, but Mail can’t find it. Especially if it needs to be « connected to power and on Wi-Fi ». Why?
My latest macOS gripe is that the ability to copy text out of iTunes (something ridiculous like, say, an album description) has...just disappeared? I’d love to know what UI framework shenanigans just straight up break text selection.
Makes you scroll past shit with a 0.001% chance you will download it on the way to the app you are really looking for.
Every single time you read "search is broken" you should parse it as "search has been exhaustively optimised and tuned to maximize revenue for the company providing it".
Search is never broken. It's just not doing what you think it should be doing.
Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen.
If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products.
It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.
Or I could simply be another clueless victim of advertising. If only I could know the number of sponsored posts I never consciously acknowledge and am influenced by on the daily.
in every search ive done on the app store in the last several years, I'm looking for a specific app. That app is never the ad result at the top, its always the second result down.
Right now i did a search for several different popular social media apps. TikTok was the top 'ad' result for all of them. Then i did a search for TikTok and got some random app i've never heard of as the 'ad' result. Its like it doesn't want the same app to fill both of the top two slots, but there is always an ad. So what you are looking for is always second on the list. Never first.
Because of this, why would i ever click the ad? If i search something less-specific like "flashcard app" the best result will fill the second slot. Something else goes in the ad slot.
I wish there was regulation enforcing background colors for ads.
https://blog.scaledon.com/p/the-evolution-of-google-ads
E.g. I search for "nuk baby bottle warmer" and the first result is a window washing squeegee and the second is a bathroom grime scrubber.
Probably a few dozen lines of CSS could give me a much better browsing experience.
[0]: https://ublockorigin.com/
That's default firefox behavior.
https://darekkay.com/blog/ublock-website-themes/
It's tacit admission that people need to be 'tricked' into thinking that the advertising is actually an organic result. It's manipulative. It's an admission of the fact that advertising actively gets in the way of the service they're (incidentally) providing that 'the people' actually find useful.
Unfortunately this is just a much longer way of saying 'you're the product'.
It's not that shocking — them not doing that is part of why I keep buying their products. I believed their leadership understood that.
Looking at the article, the kind interpretation is that this is the same wrong-headed shift towards uniformity at all costs we've seen elsewhere in their products. The less kind interpretation is that they're deliberately blurring the lines with ads. Either way, it erodes away some of the trust that has been their lifeblood for the better part of maybe two decades.
(aka a personalized Ad)
Lets say you compete in a market with 3 players.
You have a 95% trust rating.
Your other competitors have a 55% and 35% trust rating.
Modern capitalism would tell you that you have a 40% trust margin you can burn to make more profit with.
I pay Apple premium price for their phones. If they become as bad as the other, what’s the point to pay so much ?
No choice. Most Apple users usually defend by telling... they are not as bad a Google or now it is impossible to escape ecosystem.
Do I think the software ecosystem is superior? I _hate_ using the app store with a passion. I _hate_ trying to find an app for my needs(most recently a gym app) and there's 40 options and they're all a monthly subscription. I _hate_ the advertising that my children get trapped in while playing a game(I sometimes have to switch to data so that my pihole isn't used so that the ads can load so that the game will work at all), but the ads don't have a timer or an X in the top right, you have to interact with them the right way to escape.
But most of all, I _HATE_ that all my daughter wants is a draw-by-numbers game and there's literally hundreds of almost identical games which all charge $10+ a MONTH for the privilege.
Nah, I don't think the software ecosystem is superior. Although Google trying to stop sideloading does make me think they're happy racing to the goddamn bottom.
Due to the previous idiot's brilliant idea of not allowing major version paid upgrades, everything is either a subscription or an IAP fest.
The "App Store" should be called the "Gacha Store".
This new idiot it just ruining whatever was left to be ruined, software wise.
Too bad about the hardware.
Great ecosystem for my aging parents, but not for me.
See, instead of leaving a lot of cash on the table to be way better than the other, they'll pocket that cash and become just a little bit better than the other
But it seems Tim Cook can’t leave anything on the table. I’m really going to be irritated if we end up with a premium Siri. It’s going to undermine the privacy aspect, the hardware innovation, and everything else they have going for themselves despite missing the boat on AI
To sell you ads that are mostly lies already.
Especially if you have a marketplace monopoly.
Especially if you used overwhelming force to turn the "URL Bar" into a search product and then bought up 90% market share where you can tax every single brand on the planet.
Google is the most egregious with this with respect to Google Search. It ought to be illegal, frankly.
Google Android is a runner up. Half the time I try to install an app, I get bamboozled into installing an ad placement app (and immediately undo it). Seems like Apple is following in the same footsteps.
Amazon isn't blameless here, either.
So much of our economy is being taxed by gatekeepers that installed themselves into a place that is impossible to dislodge. And the systems they built were not how the web originally worked. They dismantled the user-friendly behavior brick by brick, decade by decade.
Google "Pokemon" -> Ad.
Google "AWS" -> Amazon competitively bidding for their own trademark
Google "Thinkpad" -> Lots of ads.
Google "Anthropic" or "ChatGPT" -> I bet Google is happy to bleed its direct competitors like this.
What the fuck is this, and why did we let it happen?
Companies own these trademarks. Google turned the URL bar into a 100% Google search shakedown.
I'm thinking about a grassroots movement to stop these shenanigans.
This makes me a bit uncomfortable because of how close it comes to infringing on freedom of speech, and how specific a rule it would for search engines (and chat bots) - i.e. there's no real analogy of "can't target trademarked terms" for any ad format other than search engines.
I think my preference would be to simply enforce laws around fraud. If you're a business and you intentionally mislead people, that's fraud, pure and simple. Bring the enforcement hammer down so that companies don't dare make an ad that granny might mistake for not being an ad. Make them err far on the side of making ads look unmistakably like ads for fear of ruinous fines.
That's fine, ads should be downright forbidden and get no "freedom of speech".
It would require conflicts of interest to be disclosed clearly. I.e. labelling speech incentivized by someone else (ad buyer) clearly, as not organic speech (the search engine results).
That is pro-transparency and ethics, not anti-speech.
That's specifically what I'm proposing in the post you replied to?
Thanks. I misread a sentence, missed your nuance, and then off to the races.
Googling a trademark should activate a "no bids" mode.
If Google wants to defend this action, then they should explain why they turned the URL bar into a search product and bought up 90% of the real estate. They've been incredibly heavy handed in search, web, and ads.
There are many uses of "Pikachu" that are reserved for the trademark holder, but by-and-large the point of trademark is to avoid consumer confusion by preventing people from passing off goods/services that aren't from the "Pikachu" holder as actually being from the "Pikachu" trademark holder.
Generally, I am allowed to use "Pikachu" if it's in reference to Pikachu and doesn't involve passing off non-Pikachu things as actually being Pikachu things. If I'm a former employed-by-Nintendo Pikachu illustrator, I'm allowed to advertise that. (Even if I can't provide samples of my work.) I can advertise that I'm the "#1 seller of Pikachu snuggies" as long as I am the #1 seller of non-counterfeit Pikachu snuggies. I can charge people a subscription fee for full access to a website where I review Pikachu (and other pokemon). If I work at Walmart and someone asks me where they can get a Pikachu plush, I'm allowed to direct them to the Digimon plush section, for which I receive a kickback on sales.
The consumer confusion happening when someone googles a trademark and gets ads for different things isn't due to trademark infringement, it's due to misleading ads, which shouldn't be allowed regardless of whether a search term is trademarked or not.
For bare trademark searches, we could write laws that allow competitors, but restrict taxing and bidding off the reserved mark above the trademark owner's result.
There used to be plenty of ways to get in touch with the owner of a brand directly. Now they're all being camped by rent extractors.
Google is chief amongst those taxing businesses. They are not government anointed to perform this role. Google should not be allowed to do this.
As a business gets more successful, Google extracts more money from them. Simply trying to access the business will send revenue to Google.
Google took the standard URL bar and turned in into a rent extraction product. This should have been illegal, but our regulatory bodies have been asleep at the wheel.
Google adds costs to every business, every product, every entrepreneur. They should stick to servicing user inquiries, not stuffing ads in front of simple trademark lookup.
It's time to knock on their doors of regulatory bodies, both in the US and abroad. No more trademark camping from the "URL bar".
If google wants to rebrand to an advertising platform instead of a search engine, I will accept that argument. And I mean truly, fully rebrand, making it clear to everyone that visits.
Until then, their rent extraction is a real problem. They're pretending to return information and putting ads in the way in a deliberately deceptive manner.
Companies wouldn't feel nearly as compelled to bid on their own name if that deception wasn't there.
This is NOT okay. Google is using monopoly power to do this. They have inserted themselves as parasitic middle men. No different than a cymothoa exigua eating away at the tongue.
This is not advertising. It's a road bump. It's getting throttled by the mafia. It's a protection racket on people's hard-earned brands. A tax on cognition and communication.
Google is a villain here. They are not offering value or service or anything useful. They're extracting.
They're the Harvey Weinstein of the internet here -- nobody wants to do business with the guy, but he's there and he's asking you to do what he wants. You can go along, and do the thing, or you can say no and completely lose your customer.
The customer that already knows you by name. You made it this far. Now there's this gross middle man asking you to give up.
So you let Harvey Weinstein slip his hands in. Cost of doing business.
That's what Google is in this story.
This isn't advertising. It's the R-word, being perpetrated because of a lack of the other R word: healthy market regulation.
90 percent of all humans on the planet are being fleeced by this. Every time you put something into the URL bar, Google gets a piece of the action.
What I'm saying is, when these are brand names, this is theft. Highway robbery. Monopolistic pillaging.
Google needs a slap down.
Brands can ask you to add them to your contacts with their website in their vcard. They can prompt you to bookmark them. They could publish a feed for you.
Sure Google can get us to routed in a way we’re all conditioned to depend on, but there are plenty of other ways to get to your destination. There must be 50 ways to leave…
You simply cannot pretend to be that trademark product/business and you cannot disparage that trademark.
I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea.
Apple is having its Ballmer moment. Google did too before AI lit the fire under their feet.
Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella? Steve Jobs was the original.
From moment on, Google search tanked: from a userexperience perspective and a useracquisition-vehicle perspective. Lots of companies could have been built only Google worked 15years ago the way that Google did work. Lots of companies today do not have the same lane anymore, so spending more and more on advertising....
Nadella is a budget Larry Ellison.
It probably doesn't help that I just spend an hour trying to figure out how to update to 18.7.3 on my iphone. It turns out you can't. The only way to get security updates now is to upgrade to iOS 26. Apple no longer supports security updates to old major versions if the device is capable of running the new major release. Apple is no longer making choices that benefit customers, but ones that benefit project managers.
Maybe I’m too old, but if Apple fixed every single bug and added absolutely zero features until the day of my death, I would still be a satisfied customer.
The problem is not lack of innovation, the problem is that everything barely works.
They’ve done it recently with their hardware. Past time for the other side of the house to refocus.
Fadell might also be a good choice. Either way it should be someone currently outside Apple. The company needs an external eye to review its processes and cruft that built up under Cook (nothing negative against the guy, but what worked 5-10 years ago won’t necessarily work 5-10 years down the road).
Nah, they're full of ideas. Mostly around sucking out every dollar from anyone foolish enough to build on their OS.
They've seen which way the wind is blowing and their extortionate payment processing fees are going to get limited by most governments. The plan flatly is to extort companies for money in the app store to make up for it.
eg allowing companies to advertise against other companies' names: just like google, they plan to extort companies on navigation (ie direct product/company name) queries.
Unfortunately now under Nadella AI is taking the role Windows used to play, but even there he understood the importance of AI before most of his competitors did which is what allowed Microsoft to gain such a substantial footing in OpenAI.
Also it is quite clear for us old timers, that since the AI obssession started in Redmond, the old rotten Microsoft culture is back, it probably never left but it was tamed in the early Satya years.
Remember Nadella doesn't read emails (he gets AI to summarise them all), he doesn't pay attention in meetings (he claims to get the minutes and then AI summerise them), what makes you think he even really knows the nuances of what the board want?
No.
But for mega-tech CEO salary, I’d probably do exactly the same.
I had VMWare Workstation before, and it isn't as if there were not Terminal alternatives already.
Other than that the whole UAP/UWP/WinUI/WinAppSDK, .NET Native, C++/CX, C++/WinRT has been a mess. They may shout to the winds it is the future, yet it is mostly crickets and endless list of bugs on the Github repos and related VS tooling.
The enterprise is going to choose Windows regardless for the masses and even if consumers make a mass exodus to Apple (not going to happen because of price) or Linux (even less likely) they are out of $30 they charge OEMs.
The workarounds to get rid of the nag to log into your icloud account on macOS are far more difficult than the workarounds to avoid using an MS account in Windows.
Buy a new Apple Watch and notice that the settings app with have a [1] badge trying to upsell you to buy AppleCare+. They obscure dismissing these by clicking the "Add AppleCare Coverage" button and then having a button that says actually no.
Not as egregious as what windows is doing with copilot everywhere or sneakily flipping user-toggled options during updates, but it’s all some degree of gross.
It's certainly not as bad _right now_ as what you'll see on Windows 11, but this is something that will almost certainly only get worse over time.
You don't need to buy a Windows Watch to get ads on Windows though. They'll be right there anyway, and more of them.
If you are choosing to use Apple online services, sure, you'll get upsells I guess, as with any other online service. I don't use any of Apple's online services, and never see those ads.
Windows is absolutely miserable, but with WSL installed it's far and away the better dev environment. I say that as someone who dailies Linux and hates all three OSes.
Same thing that killed Intel, Microslop, pretty much every american company.
But the problem with Apple Maps was easy to see (and can only be fixex over time)... data. Google and others had a decade+ head start on Apple when it came to collecting data for maps. Judge Apple Maps 5 years old vs Google Maps 5 years old. Not Apple Maps brand new vs Google Maps 10 years later.
Forstall is the one that pushed to make iOS based on macOS/Unix. He was definitely a lightning rod but had product sense.
>when Apple issued a formal apology for the errors in Maps, Forstall refused to sign it
It's obvious that apple maps would never be able to be a perfect replacement for google maps at launch, and it's possible Forstall in fact voiced these exact concerns but was overruled before launch, only to then be used as cannon fodder when he turned out to be right. Given all the clearly empty corporate-style "we take full responsibility" stuff you see today, someone actually _refusing_ to play those games when it wasn't his fault is a very positive sign for authenticity.
(He also did work on Siri, but given that he was booted right after its launch, I don't think it's fair to attribute their present incompetence on that front to him.)
In any case, Apple Maps (a NEW then product, in an entirely new space for Apple) being bad, is not at all related to "enshittification".
Apple Maps is absolutely the wrong thing to judge Forstall on.
Not to mention that its main problem is coverage i.e. data quality. Regarding software engineering it's fine, even better than Google Maps in lots of aspects.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
If you've made a game, it doesn't matter how high quality it is, how many awards it has won, etc.
The only thing that matters is that it's live service, that it doesn't "have an end", that it can drive engagement and perpetual revenue.
Quite a few testimonies from game devs: according to them, Google representatives pretty much told them this.
See also: the requirements to constantly update your app/game even if it's a "finished product" that does not inherently require any updates.
Allowing weekly subscriptions is so comically evil.
It only exists to trick people into overpaying since 99.99% of subscriptions are priced on a monthly basis, so hopefully you don't notice that it says "wk" instead of "mo".
consumer manipulation en masse does impact you even if YOU don't fall for it.
A whole new generation has never known an App Store without ads.
To them this is the norm.
Apple used to charge money for a premium product where the customers were customers and not the product. It’s moving away from that.
Since I’m unemployed, I need them to approve my financial plan, and they’re really pressuring me into a subscription model. It’s crazy how many spreadsheet folk don’t think of anything but recurring revenue with a captive customer base.
A few other apps that are only occasionally used support short-term paid activations, like Flighty and Oceanic+. I think that's a respectable business model, too.
On the less-reasonable end of the spectrum though are the $10/mo apps. Apple used to charge that much for the entire operating system.
I am pretty sure that if I tried to load up my phone with a handful of the kinds of apps I used to use (a word game, a third-party Twitter client, an SSH terminal, a calculator or to-do app with a trendy minimalist design) I would easily cross $100/mo for some marginally-useful features.
The last new app I installed was either Fusion360 or Visual Studio Code.
I guess I have had to install apps for other things I bought (like Christmas tree lights), but I don't really count that because the app is only a gateway to the thing I really want to use.
it's a shame it really feels this way! i discovered some fun social apps recently like Bump and Retro that are a refreshing break from the big algoscrollers, but all my friends are either too locked into the existing big social apps or are determined to not mess with any social apps at all.
Apple doesn’t care about quality.
It’s insane. Does no one at apple have senile in laws? Or is this acceptable?
That said, I completely agree that you cannot find any interesting apps by just browsing the App Store as a whole.
If you’re optimizing for searchers (SEO) you’ve been out of the loop for a decade or catering almost exclusively to the elderly
Will some new player come and give us some golden years of VC handouts and pre-enshittification decency? I hope so, but the barriers to entry are mighty.
I'm relatively new to the space, but it feels like more and more of the time of indie devs / bootstrappers needs to get allocated towards marketing.
Except on Android when you search for something and you get the big "match found" with "install" button, it's an ad and the real result is hidden like a search result.
This practice ought to be illegal. These are trademarks, and monopolies are injecting themselves as market makers in a bidding war they created.
This isn't enshittification. This is Roman Empire collapse. It doesn't work anymore.
I installed a regex powered notification blocker yesterday. Works as a charm.
99.99% of users never visit the settings. For those that do, they won't get past scare wall #1 of enabling APKs and scare walls #2, #3, and #4 of downloading, installing, and enabling the app.
Google knows this.
Tyranny of defaults, trained user behaviors, ecosystem, scare tactics, and even SERPs manipulation to make this nigh undiscoverable.
But they weren't content with some number of you slipping through the cracks! They're starting to close the ability to release unsigned and self-signed code. You can only imagine what's after that.
Still there does seem to be a pattern of ignoring their hardcore fanbase: using Gemini, making ads less obvious, making free apps part of paid bundles. I suspect Apple are getting a lot of pressure from shareholders, given their recent growth has been far lower than e.g. Google.
This is not a trend I like and I'm definitely looking for a Linux boat to jump on, to future proof app distribution, but there just doesn't seem to be an obvious candidate right now.
Sure, but it'll be small next letters after this. Then small grey letters. Then small grey letters on the details page. Then small grey letters in an accordion on the details page. Then ...
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
So why not maximize profit?
Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music, Books.app is like reading in a Barnes and Noble while someone from marketing looks over your shoulder and their TV app features their own shows to an overbearing degree — everything else is becoming more of an afterthought.
If you use iTunes Match or load your own MP3s every time you open the app the search field is set to “Apple Music” and the search fails until you toggle it, every time.
Been like that for 2+ years
As long as you decide to stay in Apple's jail. Next time you need or want a new phone, buy a Pixel 9a for $399 on sale, flash Graphene, and you can be 100% Apple and Google free. It's even better when paired with FOSS apps only like Nextcloud and Home Assistant.
Most notably, a single non-iMessage member in a group chat will degrade the experience for everyone significantly.
It's very much an issue in the US.
1. Unable to remove members, or change member's phone-numbers without recreating the entire chat and losing continuity / bothering everyone with noise about these changes.
2. Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.
3. Unable to send high quality photos or videos
4. Just plain failure to deliver messages with shocking frequency for a supposedly modern messaging system.
5. RCS still isn't supported by carriers in a bunch of countries, so when one member of the group chat travels, roams to a foreign network that doesn't support RCS, and chats the group chat can split into one for MMS and one for RCS, and then it's a total crapshoot based on network conditions as to which one the messages go to in the future, with messages having now an even higher chance of vanishing into the void.
Basically, it's a subpar experience. Every other group messaging app (signal, whatsapp, etc) works fine on iOS and android, Apple really should be publishing iMessage for Android to solve this. But, due to reason 2 where green bubbles result in becoming a social outcast and being bullied, they of course won't.
Like, signal, a company running on donations iirc, is able to build a messaging app for windows/linux/iOS/android, and yet Apple isn't capable of that? Come on.
If you move to the EU you can change the default navigation app on iOS and never see apple maps.
A plan to display ads would explain why they region locked that setting.
Instead, Apple delivered results with misspellings of the company name or applications that didn't contain any portion or variant of the search string AT ALL. Not in the app name, description, publisher name... anywhere.
I complained to Apple and got a boilerplate bullshit response. Then I raised a threat of legal action for Apple's hijacking and perversion of our trademark in their search results. This at least provoked a specific response, where Apple claimed that publisher name is "one of the top three" criteria for app-store search.
BULLSHIT.
Now, what is left? iPads are great, MacBook with Apple silicon are unmatched in refinement, iPhones are awesome but getting a bit stale. Apple Watch is awesome, but for sports Garmin are better. It is the integrated ecosystem with iCloud that makes the total system powerful.
Where to go? I love Linux with CachyOS on my desktop. Anything similar for tablets and laptops? I think KDE has something like connect that aims to do what iCloud does.
It seems like every market leader that gets ads eventually “optimises” towards making them look like not ads. Obviously they will be more effective if people don’t realise what they are, so how do they account for annoyance (and the other negatives a user experiences) while doing these a/b tests?
Traditionally you would be able to measure annoyance by reduced usage, but that’s not the case in a captive market, so how do you measure it?
In a walled garden like apple? You simply don't, just make the test gradual and long enough until people get used to it.
I am genuinely curious how others use it. Is App Store browsing a real behavior, or is discovery mostly being forced because search no longer reliably gets you to the thing you already know you want?
If they haven't switched yet, its not going to happen. Apple knows this. Late users are always punished like my parents who still have a landline and cable tv.
Apple's App Store ad initiatives have always been woeful, and doubt it makes enough revenue to warrant a separate line item on their public accounting reports. Some executive has seen yet another overfunded company potentially making bank with an ad-based business model (OpenAI, et al.), and has thought they could extract Google-level ad revenue due to the App Store's exclusivity. It could also be a response to potentially competing App Stores given their rocky relationship with the EU.
It will have little effect, on revenue or user experience. The greater tragedy is the organisational decay that led to this being greenlit in the first place.
Agree. Even GrapheneOS is hell to use. I tried both PixelOS and GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 and ended up returning it. If I was not homeless I would switch to a flip phone and just use a Linux desktop.
This is not my experience. GrapheneOS is great and has absolutely zero bloatware/malware. The base system is just a couple of basic apps like the phone, messages app, and a Web browser. That's it. All the rest is up to the user to set up. You can be completely Google-free if you don't install sandboxed Google Play Services and other GApps.
Without GApps, the setup is extremely private and ideal to use with self-hosted solutions like Nextcloud and Home Assistant as substitutes for the typical commercial malware found on most "smart" phones.
Is it? I feel like that would only be tragic if you expected the App Store monopoly company to care about users instead of profits.
For most of us on the sidelines this is a real "told you so" moment.
If the company was trying to extract as much profit as possible, it would be doing so at every level; it would be a company-wide strategy. This just looks disjointed. It speaks to Apple's loss of social cohesion, the signals of which have been apparent for sometime.
This isn't an "I told you so" moment, as this initiative is meaningless without context, and it's a poor attitude to take.
Like long lasting customers of my employer.
Still, the new investor pushes the method further, into infinity, price strategy 'modernization' and whatnot, so numbers and charts in categories of buzzwords look as they want in the sheets. For a while.
Functionality? Secondary, tertiary, or even lower priority annoyance.
I wonder why they invest in troublesome R&D and not in selling sugary water or something from that beatifully simple alley instead, that would be better playfield for them.
Seems like this is just plain old greed...
You can't tell family to search for things in the app store anymore, I always provide direct links. It's just to dangerous otherwise.
A hn post about Apple: the entire clergy and the clandestine cell network of Apple devotees emerges to hug hn to death.
It's pretty much worthless, to me. I always use direct app links, from the developers' sites.
I shudder to think of it getting worse.
I never visit the App Store outside of that. If I need an app, I search for it and go directly to its listing page (yes, technically the App Store) or install it directly from my Home Screen.
Despite Apple not needing more money has they have already can reserves more then they can know how to use it
On the "highest price premium" - they can charge it simply because there is no alternative. I have tried android several times and it was was a huge eye opener how shitty and unworkable it is, even in 2025. Boy, they can't even get notifications working properly. So yea, apple charge because they can, can't they?
The ad appears in search result. So "search by title". Not like having fun "wandering randomly" in the app store...
Probably not the best place to troll iphone vs android, but you are probably mind fucked by apple coolaid because so far there are both good and bad sides of both android and iOS. But iOS has a lot of things really fucked and missing or broken features compared to Android.
Just recently you had this nice "liquid glass" making apps unreadable/unusable with semi transparent buttons on top of random UI elements...
Still they clearly can charge whatever they want, that is not the question, the point is that nowadays you can buy the product with the highest margin and still not expect an experience without ad and fucked up interface dark patterns.
In the same way, whatever price you pay for a tv set, it is becoming harder and harder to get one from a major brand that we not screw you with hidden telemetry or forced ads or unwanted features...
I assume that means it increases the number of times users install the wrong app (possibly with serious consequences)?
a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.
Shame apple is going towards the dark pattern of ads as results.
> This means the only differentiator between organic results and the promoted ad is the presence of the small ‘Ad’ banner next to the app icon.
If it's that easy to fail to notice a paragraph, how much easier would it be to miss just the word 'Ad'?
Apple might take user privacy seriously now, but don’t assume that will be the case forever.
Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.
(Check out nice and simple it was in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9cKe_Fch8 )
How the hell Apple does not see this is beyond me. All of their fancy security in iOS is worthless if they allow people to be tricked into installing scam-ware.
After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.
I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.
Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
Open app store > search "food delivery app" > Read and compare the reviews of Doordash, ubereats, jimmyjohns app, pizzahut app, shawarma city app, scam app > Make a decision > download the app ???
They do have an unnoticeable "this is an ad" tiny text somewhere. Are they talking about removing even that?
These companies are overconfident.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.
And still, they feel they can do this? I have never seen a better sign of a monopoly in my life.
I'd rather ask for app recommendations on 4chan or Reddit than browse App Store.
I think the situation is a lot more stark than this. Unless they're desperate, the board of directors of corporations will install an MBA as CEO. In most cases, the only time this doesn't happen is at the founding of the company, when a founder is CEO. But if the founder doesn't maintain controlling interest, the founder can be replaced.
The promotion of Steve Jobs to interim CEO of Apple in 1997 was a rare exception. Apple fired its CEO, and the company was in danger of bankruptcy. They were running out of options and feeling the aforemention desperation. Note how the situation was very different in 1985, when the board of directors chose John Sculley over Steve Jobs in a power struggle. At the time, they weren't financially desperate.
With compensation so completely tied to "did our stock go up since you joined?", it's a whole thing.
So much for the so called "safety" of the appstore.
In fact, they had so many ChatGPT fake apps showing as top results that they had to do something as users couldn't find the real one and it reached the news.
They're already rolling in profits that dwarf the national budgets of most countries. And I say this as a shameless Apple fanboy.
No one is forced to choose an iPhone over the many many Android alternatives.
Android is a hardware alternative - Apple needs upward pressure to make their services competitive. If you use a Mac this is already obvious, you can't buy industry-standard software on the App Store. They all avoid it like the plague when given the opportunity, and Apple deliberately closes this escape hatch on iOS. Apple has known the App Store isn't good enough for over a decade.
It is an arbitrary and deliberate protectionist monopoly of app distribution. How many trophies does Tim Apple need to give Trump before people get the hint?
It's perfectly fine to have different preferences but doesn't mean you get to meddle in the UI/UX of something you didn't create. If you really want to sideload, that's what Android is for.
The consumer harm is obvious. Whether you call it a "monopoly" or something else, it is a problem that needs to be addressed.
It's an App Store. The .IPA is an integrated component of the iPhone experience, the App Store is an optional storefront. Again, look at the Mac.
You're repeating the same limp defenses that Apple has already watched get torn down by the EU and Japanese courts. We've solidly moved onto the "beg Trump for help" phase, which is miles worse than the humiliation of allowing sideloading.
Do you still want to know why they're putting ads into the only integrated storefront on iOS? It's real simple from where I'm standing.
Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.
App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.
These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.
Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.
Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
Deceptive UI is the issue. By removing distinctions between ads and normal results, you're going from a frying pan situation straight into the fire.