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The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware (2020)

217 points by tartoran 5y ago

Copernicron 5y ago
I've been saying this for a while now. Apple is no better than Google from a privacy/advertising perspective. They just have better marketing. I admit I bought into their privacy claims but they overplayed their hand with the CSAM scanning announcement. I used to be willing to pay the Apple premium in order to get superior privacy but since the truth has come they've really lost the value proposition.
arthur6667 5y ago
Atleast you don't get a fortnight installer preinstalled that cannot be removed. Looking at you Sony.
piannucci 5y ago
Um. I rely heavily on Apple products, and I subscribe to some of their services for a couple bucks a month because I genuinely get a lot of enjoyment out of them. I find Apple's upsell mildly annoying, sure. But (a) the things they offer me are actually things I would seriously consider buying, (b) their ads appear when you actively seek out a feature you haven't subscribed to, (c) the buttons or headlines or whatever that lead to those ads have a marker so you know what'll happen when you tap. It's not like I'm getting blindsided by interstitials. I have zero inclination to apologize for Apple doing stupid things. But I'm just not nearly so annoyed by their ads as I am by others'.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  When you open Settings on an iPhone, are you actively seeking out Apple TV+?
nikodunk 5y ago
Great article. I hadn’t thought about the upsell like this before. The ad that really drives me nuts on iOS is in the Settings app - saying your phone hasn’t been backed up to iCloud. I consistently have a red bubble on it now that I need to dismiss daily. I then sometimes miss real notifications from Settings because I’ve become blind to it. On macOS the notifications and prompts got so bad that I finally switched to Fedora 2 months ago. Turns out it works very well for my needs nowadays. I will not see ads for iCloud on my $1,000+ mac, thank you very much. https://t2linux.org https://t2linux.org was very helpful for the switch.
- habibur 5y ago
  I switched to Fedora some 4-6 years back -- and that was the first thing I noticed -- no ads.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I don't have this notification. I disabled iCloud backup when setting up phone first time.
- tim333 5y ago
  iCloud backup is actually quite a handy thing to have had when your phone gets lost / stolen. If you just remove photos from the list of things it's backing up the the rest usually fits in the free 5gb they give you.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  I don’t have this and I have iCloud backup off for most things and so the 5gb free plan is more than enough. Is it possible you’re interpreting the reminder to use the free tier of iCloud to back up essential iPhone data as an ad? If you don’t back up photos video and email you can likely remain on the free plan indefinitely. I don’t consider this an ad.
diebeforei485 5y ago
I do think sending notifications without permission is going too far. If there is a special free trial (Apple TV for 12 months if you buy a new device, vs 7 days for the regular free trial), inform customers about it in the Settings app (but if they decline, don't continue to show the red notification badge) or by email. Finally, let people delete the apps. As far as I can tell, macOS still does not allow the News app to be deleted.
- castis 5y ago
  Overall I agree with you, however on that last note: iOS has let you delete pretty much whatever you want for a while now. I just deleted the news app from my iPhone to test this out, successfully deleted. Not just removed from the home screen, removed from the phone.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Siri, though... Is still not even possible to permanently disable globally?
    - strogonoff 5y ago
      Anecdotally, did not have Siri get auto reenabled after system updates in the past few years. Last month after retiring from backup new phone didn't get it reenabled either. At some point I had to go to settings to enable push-to-talk-to-Siri because it's useful.
      - 3np 5y ago
        The problem is that still for newly installed apps, it auto-enables “let Siri learn from how you use this app”. It’s easy to forget whenever you install a new app.
        strogonoff 5y ago
        The flag has no effect if Siri is disabled, as far as I know.
freeflight 5y ago
The attempts at upselling sure are a bit icky but calling it "Adware", when all it's advertising are company own services, is a bit weird. Puts it into the same sphere as a Google or Facebook, both companies that actually heavily rely on ad-revenue from third parties and thus most of their products would easily qualify as actual adware.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  The "ads" aren't even nearly as intrusive as the author (who works for Microsoft - a company whose operating system basically spies on you non-stop, including sending binaries you run to MS, command line commands, etc) suggests. They make it sound like using an iPhone means being constantly assailed with ads. That's not even remotely true. I switched to iOS over a year ago. I don't use any of Apple's paid services. I tried Apple Music under their free three month trial; I was totally unimpressed with the featureset and deactivated it. I think in 6 months I've gotten two, maybe three notifications with offers to re-subscribe. The offers were more and more generous. I use iTunes and Apple Pay, and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad. When I added my cards to Apple Pay, I saw the "sign up for Apple Card" button. I didn't give it more than a second thought, and Apple hasn't "said a word" about Apple Card since. That card, by the way, has one of the strictest personal-data-usage policies of any credit card in the US. They also do something no other CC company does: automatically rotate the CCV code every time the card is used in Apple Pay. If Apple is so hell-bent on selling their services, why do they have the world's least-painful instant sharing tool that works without even a network connection or any additional apps? I can instantly send a contact, photo, file, whatever to someone else with an iPhone. If Apple is so hell-bent on selling their services, why do they make it possible to, with one click, automatically and completely painlessly sync your music, photos, videos, and do complete device backups, over WiFi to a Mac or PC, no iCloud subscription required? You don't get pestered in any way when you click that button, by the way. I use Nextcloud for file sync. It's very tightly integrated into Apple Files; I don't need iCloud for anything. Never get pestered to subscribe to it. Haven't seen an ad for iCloud, ever. My phone does dictation offline, and if I were on a newer model, Siri would work offline too. The Photos app does some magic like showing me how many Damn Cat Photos I take, but it happens entirely on-device. Apple lets you turn off all sorts of data collection that Android doesn't. You'll never see a screen like this in Android: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/iOS/ios13-iphone-xs-settings-privacy-location-services-system-services.jpg https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Every single Apple-provided App has the same privacy controls as third party apps. Don't want Notes to use your location? Done. Don't want Maps using cellular data, for some reason? Done. There's also stuff that's just straight-up bullshit. I've never seen an ad in the settings pages. When I bought my phone and synced it for the first time, my music was immediately visible, not "hidden" or blank like they suggest. iTunes isn't even "open" most of the time; I get in the car, iTunes starts playing, I interact with it via steering wheel controls or the lock screen controls. The article is so bizarre. The author is a senior iOS developer for MS so they damn well know everything I just said; this blog entry seems to be purposefully misrepresenting how the OS behaves.
swiley 5y ago
iOS apps are how you add notifications to your website.
GeekyBear 5y ago
Until Apple's OS reinstalls Candy Crush again after you remove it, they haven't sunk to the anywhere near the level of Microsoft.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  Don't some Linux distros come with games pre-installed? I mean...it's the same thing really.
- 3np 5y ago
  And until they kill babies... then what? Less BS than Microsoft is not really an achievement.
  - GeekyBear 5y ago
    Is this the same Microsoft that decided to change their whole history of user interaction so that clicking the X to dismiss the Windows 10 Update nag screen would be taken as assent? >Microsoft finally admits that its malware-style Get Windows 10 upgrade campaign went too far https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-finally-admits-malware-style-get-windows-10-upgrade-campaign-went-far https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-final... Not to mention the part where they kept blocking every hack users found to keep that nag screen from popping up again after you told it no. Sorry, but Apple is just nowhere near as egregious as Microsoft is.
    - sidr 5y ago
      The comment you are replying to is not suggesting that Apple is as egregious as Microsoft. Shittiness can be measured on absolute terms - one doesn't have to accept the lowest bar as the standard.
      - 3np 5y ago
        This. It’s not like Microsoft sets the standard for what’s acceptable for Apple.
      - 5y ago
geoffcline 5y ago
Music can be uninstalled and replaced with alternatives. News can be uninstalled. Apple TV+ can be uninstalled. The apple card examples shown are minimal. such as adding applecard to a list of choices. the card type list shown often includes additional choices (transit cards). appstore/arcade. meh. anytime you go into a store, expect to be sold things by someone biased.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I haven’t updated past iOS 12 so maybe things are different now, but at least there—while you can technically uninstall music, iOS will routinely ask if I want to restore it when e.g. someone airdrops me an mp3 file. And of course, I can’t change the default app.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Airdropping an mp3 results in a “open with” menu from which you can pick any suitable app. In fact, Music isn’t even in the list of apps presented. The Files app can play mp3s natively in a QuickLook style, no Music required.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    If your device supports it, I strongly encourage you to update. Aside from not getting security updates anymore, which places you at significant risk: the privacy settings in iOS 15 are very good. Even location privacy for system level stuff can be highly locked down. I have an 8, and iOS 15 doesn't feel "slow", if that's your concern.
    - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      My concern is indeed that it will be slower, particularly as I have a 6S, which is of course significantly older than your 8. If Apple allowed downgrades I would absolutely update to try it out, but they don’t.
- coddle-hark 5y ago
  Imagine it was Verizon Music, Verizon News and Verizon TV+ that came pre-installed. Would you feel the same then? A big selling point of Apple products has been the lack of bloatware found in other platforms.
egypturnash 5y ago
Yeah, Music’s constant attempts to sell you on the subscription service is really annoying. I’m already paying Apple to sync my library to my phone, I don’t want to pay them even more for music I don’t actually own.
makecheck 5y ago
One of the things I hate about tech is seeing useful things slowly being repurposed into ad-spammers: - A “notification” is not supposed to be for ads but it seems every other app uses it for (almost) only ads. To hell with that. - A pop-up alert message is not supposed to be for ads but guess what happens. - When you mistype a web address, Internet protocols prescribe what the correct response should be; guess what your ISP does instead? - When you launch an app with the intent to do some specific thing, instead of the app allowing you to start doing that thing, your intended action is usurped by an at-launch screen (i.e. ad for something completely unrelated to what you launched the app to do). Bonus points if it manages to forget the on-launch context entirely, e.g. conveniently forgets the document you asked it to open and just stares at you blankly after the launch-ad goes away. - When you pause a few seconds to gather your thoughts and haven’t gotten around to doing something, guess what happens now? OH THE USER IS IDLE, BETTER SHOW THEM STUPID STUFF. (Thanks, Netflix.) - If you use anything, seems like you get E-mail later that day, and the “unsubscribe” is now just “manage your f*cking preferences” where they present you a page of 50 checkboxes for the INDIVIDUAL UNWANTED THINGS (all pre-enabled of course), that you have to uncheck and “save”, that then “take 3-10 days to take effect”. I want these people fired and banned from their industry. Every other action now is clicking-away, swiping-away, tapping-away things I didn’t ask for and don’t want, with no option to turn most of it off (or if it is, the option is ultra-buried and conveniently forgotten on the next update).
- deleted 5y ago
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- jeroenhd 5y ago
  Sounds to me like you're the victim of a whole load of shitty services. When I get a notification, it's usually something I've set up like a calendar event or an actual message. The only exception that comes to mind is Netflix, but I just haven't bothered disabling that in the Netflix settings yet. I make it a point to purge any app that sends me ads through the notifications, because nobody wants that bullshit. It could be my Pihole at work, but I haven't seen ad popups either. I thought the internet as a whole has moved past DNS redirects but I guess some shitty ISPs still use them. AFAIK, you can change the DNS in your router to point to one that doesn't do the hijacking in most cases. Even email spam seems to have gone down over the years. Using the built-in unsubscribe button in Gmail has made getting out of these stupid mailing lists completely painless. You should invest a little time into a good ad blocker and spam filter, I feel like it would improve your experience online dramatically. Most ad and marketing companies are the scum of the earth but technology has evolved to the point that they're getting easier to get rid of as well.
strogonoff 5y ago
Call it adware after the company starts to derive the majority of its revenue from ads, like Google and Facebook.
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  What do you mean “after”? Wasn’t this the plan from the start?
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    No evidence for that quite a few years into company’s existence and profitability. Compare with Google, Facebook.
echlipse 5y ago
I got my first iphone previous year coming from the android ecosystem. All the things the author mentioned are true. Luckily there was a simple solution to it. I deleted all of those apps altogether. Apple music, tv, wallet and even itunes, removed all of them. Also offloaded a bunch of apps. I’m not letting apple off the hook by saying this though, but at least I can delete the unnecessary apps so that’s alright. Also, slightly off topic maybe but if you’ve seen the show Ted Lasso the advertisement of apple products is so aggressive that it becomes ridiculous after a point. Almost every other scene contains an apple product.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  It’s kind of ironic that the same is true for Google and Android. Except Apple’s business isn’t built on advertising revenue.
  - nixass 5y ago
    Other than google photos, I haven't seen any other intrusive Google made app like the ones from Apple. And even if there were more, Android is so flexible I can do whatever I want with it.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
      Google Play, YouTube, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, Google Messenger, Google Drive, Google Mail, etc are all extremely intrusive apps. At least with Apple, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it and not have to worry about feeding the Google Advertising machine.
      - Copernicron 5y ago
        > Google Play, YouTube, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, Google Messenger, Google Drive, Google Mail, etc are all extremely intrusive apps. With the exception of Google Play, you can delete all of them without issue. If you don't use them, then delete them. > At least with Apple, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it and not have to worry about feeding the Google Advertising machine. No, you're feeding the Apple advertising machine instead. It's not a coincidence that Apple's share of certain advertisements has tripled since they announced app tracking transparency [0]. I'm certain it's only a matter of time before they make themselves the only company that can advertise to iOS users. Apple collects the exact same data about you that Google does only they're less transparent about it. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/18/apples-ad-business-windfall/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/18/apples-ad-business-windfall/
tradertef 5y ago
Stocks app is horrible too. I just want to see the prices but it somehow pushes me to news (Apple news). There is no way to close the news for good.
- stillblue 5y ago
  Let me tell you another way in which the app is dangerously horrible. When you add a stocks widget to the home screen, the ticker value of the stock actually takes some time to update. Sometimes you gotta click it to see the updated value and then when you come back to the home screen, the widget has the same value. There were instances where I wondered how the price stayed the same for so many hours - turns out the value in the widget was not getting refreshed. This was my only source of truth doing intraday trading (when i was not near a computer) until i figured out the bug
ThinBold 5y ago
I find it difficult to position myself on this topic. On one hand, apps like stock can be deleted so you no longer see any ads/add-ons. It's an O(1) effort. On the other hand, the entire appstore is just a big junk of ads, and companies nowadays keep asking you to install a new app for, e.g., renting an e-scooter. Now that's O(1) effort per microservice IRL. I ended up aggressively deleting idle apps as a revenge and an attempt to keep my life simple.
specialist 5y ago
I don't understand ads in App Store, on Amazon, etc. I'm already in the store. I'm there to buy. I already know what I want. I'd rather they improved their search and foraging features. Really pisses me off that it's often so hard to find the specific thing I'm trying to buy.
- asimovfan 5y ago
  it is also really bad if you're looking for, say a function, and not a certain app. i have to google it and then go to the app store directly with its name.
- npteljes 5y ago
  It's aggravating, sure, but ads serve multiple purpose. Sometimes people are entertained by ads, seeing it as a way to sample what's available in the world. Showing ads help establish branding for a company or product. By seeing multiple ads for the same thing, familiarity increases, and with that, the chance of the person choosing the thing in the future. Also companies compete on available ad spots. Sometimes buying an ad space means that your competitor has not bought that ad space. With that said, I block advertisements everywhere I can, and honestly, I feel like this should be the norm. Barely legal psychological warfare. Edit: I'd like to also add something about "I already know what I want". People feel like they do, but they have a lot more going on in their heads than they think. For example, a more attractive alternative might exist that you don't know about. Or you could spot a discount on something that's not urgent, but important - with a limited budget, you might prioritize that instead of your original goal.
steve_avery 5y ago
After the CSAM scanning debacle came out this year, it pushed me towards being far less reliant on any cloud servers and I set up a home NAS, transferred my photos to it, deleted everything off of my iCloud, and discontinued my subscription to iCloud for higher storage, going down to the free 5gb tier. Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions. If you dismiss the almost out of storage notification and the accompanying ad for subscription to iCloud, it comes back a month later. I feel this author's pain. Another fishy thing that Apple does is that when I bought this phone, they gave a free year of Apple TV+. Most of my paid subscriptions I keep a close eye on and cancel right after I sign up, so that I won't have to remember at the end of the subscription period. It works fine with any app on the app store, I get the service for the desired period. With Apple TV +, if you cancel your subscription to avoid autorenew, it immediately cancels your access to the service. Rules for thee, not for me.
- ender341341 5y ago
  > Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions. iCloud backup does a really bad job of reclaiming space, back when I was on the free tier every once in a while I'd clear the backup (I think by disabling it?) and then re-doing the backup.
- j1elo 5y ago
  Some friends have set a NAS up, and I'm doing the same, but most people seem to replace the cloud with a NAS while ignoring a crucial point that cloud providers do for you: replication. Are you handling that in yours? It's an upcoming disaster waiting to occur, having their own private NAS but not backing it up somewhere else, only relying on the RAID reconstruction abilities of whatever they bought (and that's for those who bought the much more expensive units with 2 or 3 disk bays... don't get me started with those cheaper single-disk Synology ones)
isoprophlex 5y ago
The comments about Apple Music's UI aren't wrong... but the experience is a lot less shitty than spotify. At least AM seems to somewhat respect the idea of listening to albums. Spotify instead buries an artist's albums eight clicks deep into it's UI, nudging you towards their asinine payola-as-a-service playlists (or worse, podcasts I don't care about)
- littlecranky67 5y ago
  It is less shitty than spotify, but still shitty. I removed Music when at one point I was in the gym which is in a basement and wanted to bring up music on the treadmill. The overlay-ad for Apple Music blocked the UI, and because receiption was bad it took 10s+ to load that ad screen without allowing me to close it until it was there. I am now using VLC for iOS and am not looking back.
llukas 5y ago
Does it all mean that for a low subscription fee Apple will stop showing ads? In addition to not showing adds I get cloud storage, some movies and music? Where do I sign up?
hvgk 5y ago
Conversely I actually use most of their services and am happy. I spent too many years self flagellating by running local servers, own email server, manually managing backups, mp3 collections and stuff. This didn’t scale with the size of my family, now three adults and two teenagers. If you enjoy doing that, fine but I don’t. I’d rather go for a run. Thanks Apple Music for making that even more enjoyable… What knee jerk reactions I see in these threads seem to skip is the positive functions of the devices. But no everyone wants to burn their universe for some reason.
- npteljes 5y ago
  I think both can be valid at the same time. I mean, hating the upsell / ads, while liking the services themselves. For a long time I skipped a lot of Youtube videos because their thumbnails turned me off, but I found that I like the content itself, while not liking some of the youtuberisms that go along with it.
martini333 5y ago
Uninstall apps. Stop crying?
fxtentacle 5y ago
Yes, Apple is annoying. But so are all the other big cloud companies. It was only a matter of time until they noticed that if you have 1 billion customers and your competition is similarly evil, you truly don't need to care about your customers. Sure, take their money, but apart from that, who cares if their experience is horrible? Apple TV spams you with ads. Apple iOS Settings spam you with ads. In general most iOS apps will abuse notifications to send you ads. Android is filled with ads. Android TVs spam you with ads, even the $2000+ ones. Google Chromecast refuses to work if you block 8.8.8.8, or else it'll use it to spam you with ads. Even Netflix will spam you with ads when you're idle for a few seconds. Edge? Ads. Windows start menu? Ads. Lock-screen? Ads. But guess what, you only get treated like sh*t if you're a paying customer. Torrents for Netflix rips are the same great quality and great content and you can even watch them from USB on a fully offline (read: ad-free) TV. It's only once you start paying Apple or Netflix for their shows that they start abusing you ... And then the same executives that created these perverse incentives get interviewed on TV and whine about people not paying for their content ^_^
- jefftk 5y ago
  I'm not sure I would consider the Netflix ones ads? They're not trying to convince you to buy additional things or otherwise give them money; they're telling you about shows you've already paid for that they think you might enjoy watching.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    > I'm not sure I would consider the Netflix ones ads? They're not trying to convince you to buy additional things or otherwise give them money; they're telling you about shows you've already paid for that they think you might enjoy watching. Encouraging me to consume more of what you're peddling is advertising, regardless of if I'm a customer of yours or not, or if I've consumed similar items before or not.
    - cgriswald 5y ago
      Sure, there's a reasonable argument to be made at a high level that it's all advertising. However, I think the GP is getting at something important. With enough granularity you can see a qualitative difference. Some of this advertising is only self-serving and some of it is in service to the customer. When JetBrains gives me helpful tips on how to consume PyCharm, they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They want me to keep using PyCharm. However, it also serves me because it makes me more productive when I use PyCharm. When Netflix advertises to me that a new season of my favorite show is on Netflix, likewise: they want me to keep subscribing. But it also serves to help me get more value out of the subscription I've already purchased. These activities contrast with the game developer using psychological tricks to get me to purchase in-game currencies at unreasonable rates that I otherwise wouldn't purchase. There's a spectrum with fraud on one end, and, I don't know, something like genuinely helpful information on the other end. Likely different people will place any individual advertisement on a different place on the spectrum.
malshe 5y ago
Something not mentioned anywhere in this whiny post, which you have to read from his About page: I’m a senior iOS engineer at Microsoft
kiririn 5y ago
Apple will also bend their strict rules if you have enough money, for example YouTube partially blocking control center in fullscreen (on home button devices), and background playback. And McDonalds being able to force background location access, making the app unusable if you don’t grant it. One rule for some…

217 points by tartoran 5y ago

I've been saying this for a while now. Apple is no better than Google from a privacy/advertising perspective. They just have better marketing. I admit I bought into their privacy claims but they overplayed their hand with the CSAM scanning announcement. I used to be willing to pay the Apple premium in order to get superior privacy but since the truth has come they've really lost the value proposition.

arthur6667 5y ago

Atleast you don't get a fortnight installer preinstalled that cannot be removed. Looking at you Sony.

piannucci 5y ago

Um. I rely heavily on Apple products, and I subscribe to some of their services for a couple bucks a month because I genuinely get a lot of enjoyment out of them. I find Apple's upsell mildly annoying, sure. But (a) the things they offer me are actually things I would seriously consider buying, (b) their ads appear when you actively seek out a feature you haven't subscribed to, (c) the buttons or headlines or whatever that lead to those ads have a marker so you know what'll happen when you tap. It's not like I'm getting blindsided by interstitials. I have zero inclination to apologize for Apple doing stupid things. But I'm just not nearly so annoyed by their ads as I am by others'.

howinteresting 5y ago
When you open Settings on an iPhone, are you actively seeking out Apple TV+?

nikodunk 5y ago

Great article. I hadn’t thought about the upsell like this before. The ad that really drives me nuts on iOS is in the Settings app - saying your phone hasn’t been backed up to iCloud. I consistently have a red bubble on it now that I need to dismiss daily. I then sometimes miss real notifications from Settings because I’ve become blind to it. On macOS the notifications and prompts got so bad that I finally switched to Fedora 2 months ago. Turns out it works very well for my needs nowadays. I will not see ads for iCloud on my $1,000+ mac, thank you very much. https://t2linux.org https://t2linux.org was very helpful for the switch.

habibur 5y ago
I switched to Fedora some 4-6 years back -- and that was the first thing I noticed -- no ads.
vbezhenar 5y ago
I don't have this notification. I disabled iCloud backup when setting up phone first time.
tim333 5y ago
iCloud backup is actually quite a handy thing to have had when your phone gets lost / stolen. If you just remove photos from the list of things it's backing up the the rest usually fits in the free 5gb they give you.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
I don’t have this and I have iCloud backup off for most things and so the 5gb free plan is more than enough. Is it possible you’re interpreting the reminder to use the free tier of iCloud to back up essential iPhone data as an ad? If you don’t back up photos video and email you can likely remain on the free plan indefinitely. I don’t consider this an ad.

diebeforei485 5y ago

I do think sending notifications without permission is going too far. If there is a special free trial (Apple TV for 12 months if you buy a new device, vs 7 days for the regular free trial), inform customers about it in the Settings app (but if they decline, don't continue to show the red notification badge) or by email. Finally, let people delete the apps. As far as I can tell, macOS still does not allow the News app to be deleted.

castis 5y ago
Overall I agree with you, however on that last note: iOS has let you delete pretty much whatever you want for a while now. I just deleted the news app from my iPhone to test this out, successfully deleted. Not just removed from the home screen, removed from the phone.
- 3np 5y ago
  Siri, though... Is still not even possible to permanently disable globally?
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    Anecdotally, did not have Siri get auto reenabled after system updates in the past few years. Last month after retiring from backup new phone didn't get it reenabled either. At some point I had to go to settings to enable push-to-talk-to-Siri because it's useful.
    - 3np 5y ago
      The problem is that still for newly installed apps, it auto-enables “let Siri learn from how you use this app”. It’s easy to forget whenever you install a new app.
      - strogonoff 5y ago
        The flag has no effect if Siri is disabled, as far as I know.

freeflight 5y ago

The attempts at upselling sure are a bit icky but calling it "Adware", when all it's advertising are company own services, is a bit weird. Puts it into the same sphere as a Google or Facebook, both companies that actually heavily rely on ad-revenue from third parties and thus most of their products would easily qualify as actual adware.

KennyBlanken 5y ago
The "ads" aren't even nearly as intrusive as the author (who works for Microsoft - a company whose operating system basically spies on you non-stop, including sending binaries you run to MS, command line commands, etc) suggests. They make it sound like using an iPhone means being constantly assailed with ads. That's not even remotely true. I switched to iOS over a year ago. I don't use any of Apple's paid services. I tried Apple Music under their free three month trial; I was totally unimpressed with the featureset and deactivated it. I think in 6 months I've gotten two, maybe three notifications with offers to re-subscribe. The offers were more and more generous. I use iTunes and Apple Pay, and I can't remember the last time I saw an ad. When I added my cards to Apple Pay, I saw the "sign up for Apple Card" button. I didn't give it more than a second thought, and Apple hasn't "said a word" about Apple Card since. That card, by the way, has one of the strictest personal-data-usage policies of any credit card in the US. They also do something no other CC company does: automatically rotate the CCV code every time the card is used in Apple Pay. If Apple is so hell-bent on selling their services, why do they have the world's least-painful instant sharing tool that works without even a network connection or any additional apps? I can instantly send a contact, photo, file, whatever to someone else with an iPhone. If Apple is so hell-bent on selling their services, why do they make it possible to, with one click, automatically and completely painlessly sync your music, photos, videos, and do complete device backups, over WiFi to a Mac or PC, no iCloud subscription required? You don't get pestered in any way when you click that button, by the way. I use Nextcloud for file sync. It's very tightly integrated into Apple Files; I don't need iCloud for anything. Never get pestered to subscribe to it. Haven't seen an ad for iCloud, ever. My phone does dictation offline, and if I were on a newer model, Siri would work offline too. The Photos app does some magic like showing me how many Damn Cat Photos I take, but it happens entirely on-device. Apple lets you turn off all sorts of data collection that Android doesn't. You'll never see a screen like this in Android: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare/images/en_US/iOS/ios13-iphone-xs-settings-privacy-location-services-system-services.jpg https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare... Every single Apple-provided App has the same privacy controls as third party apps. Don't want Notes to use your location? Done. Don't want Maps using cellular data, for some reason? Done. There's also stuff that's just straight-up bullshit. I've never seen an ad in the settings pages. When I bought my phone and synced it for the first time, my music was immediately visible, not "hidden" or blank like they suggest. iTunes isn't even "open" most of the time; I get in the car, iTunes starts playing, I interact with it via steering wheel controls or the lock screen controls. The article is so bizarre. The author is a senior iOS developer for MS so they damn well know everything I just said; this blog entry seems to be purposefully misrepresenting how the OS behaves.

swiley 5y ago

iOS apps are how you add notifications to your website.

GeekyBear 5y ago

Until Apple's OS reinstalls Candy Crush again after you remove it, they haven't sunk to the anywhere near the level of Microsoft.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Don't some Linux distros come with games pre-installed? I mean...it's the same thing really.
3np 5y ago
And until they kill babies... then what? Less BS than Microsoft is not really an achievement.
- GeekyBear 5y ago
  Is this the same Microsoft that decided to change their whole history of user interaction so that clicking the X to dismiss the Windows 10 Update nag screen would be taken as assent? >Microsoft finally admits that its malware-style Get Windows 10 upgrade campaign went too far https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-finally-admits-malware-style-get-windows-10-upgrade-campaign-went-far https://www.extremetech.com/computing/241587-microsoft-final... Not to mention the part where they kept blocking every hack users found to keep that nag screen from popping up again after you told it no. Sorry, but Apple is just nowhere near as egregious as Microsoft is.
  - sidr 5y ago
    The comment you are replying to is not suggesting that Apple is as egregious as Microsoft. Shittiness can be measured on absolute terms - one doesn't have to accept the lowest bar as the standard.
    - 3np 5y ago
      This. It’s not like Microsoft sets the standard for what’s acceptable for Apple.
    - 5y ago

geoffcline 5y ago

Music can be uninstalled and replaced with alternatives. News can be uninstalled. Apple TV+ can be uninstalled. The apple card examples shown are minimal. such as adding applecard to a list of choices. the card type list shown often includes additional choices (transit cards). appstore/arcade. meh. anytime you go into a store, expect to be sold things by someone biased.

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
I haven’t updated past iOS 12 so maybe things are different now, but at least there—while you can technically uninstall music, iOS will routinely ask if I want to restore it when e.g. someone airdrops me an mp3 file. And of course, I can’t change the default app.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Airdropping an mp3 results in a “open with” menu from which you can pick any suitable app. In fact, Music isn’t even in the list of apps presented. The Files app can play mp3s natively in a QuickLook style, no Music required.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  If your device supports it, I strongly encourage you to update. Aside from not getting security updates anymore, which places you at significant risk: the privacy settings in iOS 15 are very good. Even location privacy for system level stuff can be highly locked down. I have an 8, and iOS 15 doesn't feel "slow", if that's your concern.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    My concern is indeed that it will be slower, particularly as I have a 6S, which is of course significantly older than your 8. If Apple allowed downgrades I would absolutely update to try it out, but they don’t.
coddle-hark 5y ago
Imagine it was Verizon Music, Verizon News and Verizon TV+ that came pre-installed. Would you feel the same then? A big selling point of Apple products has been the lack of bloatware found in other platforms.

egypturnash 5y ago

Yeah, Music’s constant attempts to sell you on the subscription service is really annoying. I’m already paying Apple to sync my library to my phone, I don’t want to pay them even more for music I don’t actually own.

makecheck 5y ago

One of the things I hate about tech is seeing useful things slowly being repurposed into ad-spammers: - A “notification” is not supposed to be for ads but it seems every other app uses it for (almost) only ads. To hell with that. - A pop-up alert message is not supposed to be for ads but guess what happens. - When you mistype a web address, Internet protocols prescribe what the correct response should be; guess what your ISP does instead? - When you launch an app with the intent to do some specific thing, instead of the app allowing you to start doing that thing, your intended action is usurped by an at-launch screen (i.e. ad for something completely unrelated to what you launched the app to do). Bonus points if it manages to forget the on-launch context entirely, e.g. conveniently forgets the document you asked it to open and just stares at you blankly after the launch-ad goes away. - When you pause a few seconds to gather your thoughts and haven’t gotten around to doing something, guess what happens now? OH THE USER IS IDLE, BETTER SHOW THEM STUPID STUFF. (Thanks, Netflix.) - If you use anything, seems like you get E-mail later that day, and the “unsubscribe” is now just “manage your f*cking preferences” where they present you a page of 50 checkboxes for the INDIVIDUAL UNWANTED THINGS (all pre-enabled of course), that you have to uncheck and “save”, that then “take 3-10 days to take effect”. I want these people fired and banned from their industry. Every other action now is clicking-away, swiping-away, tapping-away things I didn’t ask for and don’t want, with no option to turn most of it off (or if it is, the option is ultra-buried and conveniently forgotten on the next update).

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jeroenhd 5y ago
Sounds to me like you're the victim of a whole load of shitty services. When I get a notification, it's usually something I've set up like a calendar event or an actual message. The only exception that comes to mind is Netflix, but I just haven't bothered disabling that in the Netflix settings yet. I make it a point to purge any app that sends me ads through the notifications, because nobody wants that bullshit. It could be my Pihole at work, but I haven't seen ad popups either. I thought the internet as a whole has moved past DNS redirects but I guess some shitty ISPs still use them. AFAIK, you can change the DNS in your router to point to one that doesn't do the hijacking in most cases. Even email spam seems to have gone down over the years. Using the built-in unsubscribe button in Gmail has made getting out of these stupid mailing lists completely painless. You should invest a little time into a good ad blocker and spam filter, I feel like it would improve your experience online dramatically. Most ad and marketing companies are the scum of the earth but technology has evolved to the point that they're getting easier to get rid of as well.

strogonoff 5y ago

Call it adware after the company starts to derive the majority of its revenue from ads, like Google and Facebook.

bottled_poe 5y ago
What do you mean “after”? Wasn’t this the plan from the start?
- strogonoff 5y ago
  No evidence for that quite a few years into company’s existence and profitability. Compare with Google, Facebook.

echlipse 5y ago

I got my first iphone previous year coming from the android ecosystem. All the things the author mentioned are true. Luckily there was a simple solution to it. I deleted all of those apps altogether. Apple music, tv, wallet and even itunes, removed all of them. Also offloaded a bunch of apps. I’m not letting apple off the hook by saying this though, but at least I can delete the unnecessary apps so that’s alright. Also, slightly off topic maybe but if you’ve seen the show Ted Lasso the advertisement of apple products is so aggressive that it becomes ridiculous after a point. Almost every other scene contains an apple product.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
It’s kind of ironic that the same is true for Google and Android. Except Apple’s business isn’t built on advertising revenue.
- nixass 5y ago
  Other than google photos, I haven't seen any other intrusive Google made app like the ones from Apple. And even if there were more, Android is so flexible I can do whatever I want with it.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Google Play, YouTube, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, Google Messenger, Google Drive, Google Mail, etc are all extremely intrusive apps. At least with Apple, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it and not have to worry about feeding the Google Advertising machine.
    - Copernicron 5y ago
      > Google Play, YouTube, Google Books, Google Maps, Google Hangouts, Google Messenger, Google Drive, Google Mail, etc are all extremely intrusive apps. With the exception of Google Play, you can delete all of them without issue. If you don't use them, then delete them. > At least with Apple, you have the flexibility to do whatever you want with it and not have to worry about feeding the Google Advertising machine. No, you're feeding the Apple advertising machine instead. It's not a coincidence that Apple's share of certain advertisements has tripled since they announced app tracking transparency [0]. I'm certain it's only a matter of time before they make themselves the only company that can advertise to iOS users. Apple collects the exact same data about you that Google does only they're less transparent about it. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/18/apples-ad-business-windfall/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/18/apples-ad-business-windfall/

tradertef 5y ago

Stocks app is horrible too. I just want to see the prices but it somehow pushes me to news (Apple news). There is no way to close the news for good.

stillblue 5y ago
Let me tell you another way in which the app is dangerously horrible. When you add a stocks widget to the home screen, the ticker value of the stock actually takes some time to update. Sometimes you gotta click it to see the updated value and then when you come back to the home screen, the widget has the same value. There were instances where I wondered how the price stayed the same for so many hours - turns out the value in the widget was not getting refreshed. This was my only source of truth doing intraday trading (when i was not near a computer) until i figured out the bug

ThinBold 5y ago

I find it difficult to position myself on this topic. On one hand, apps like stock can be deleted so you no longer see any ads/add-ons. It's an O(1) effort. On the other hand, the entire appstore is just a big junk of ads, and companies nowadays keep asking you to install a new app for, e.g., renting an e-scooter. Now that's O(1) effort per microservice IRL. I ended up aggressively deleting idle apps as a revenge and an attempt to keep my life simple.

specialist 5y ago

I don't understand ads in App Store, on Amazon, etc. I'm already in the store. I'm there to buy. I already know what I want. I'd rather they improved their search and foraging features. Really pisses me off that it's often so hard to find the specific thing I'm trying to buy.

asimovfan 5y ago
it is also really bad if you're looking for, say a function, and not a certain app. i have to google it and then go to the app store directly with its name.
npteljes 5y ago
It's aggravating, sure, but ads serve multiple purpose. Sometimes people are entertained by ads, seeing it as a way to sample what's available in the world. Showing ads help establish branding for a company or product. By seeing multiple ads for the same thing, familiarity increases, and with that, the chance of the person choosing the thing in the future. Also companies compete on available ad spots. Sometimes buying an ad space means that your competitor has not bought that ad space. With that said, I block advertisements everywhere I can, and honestly, I feel like this should be the norm. Barely legal psychological warfare. Edit: I'd like to also add something about "I already know what I want". People feel like they do, but they have a lot more going on in their heads than they think. For example, a more attractive alternative might exist that you don't know about. Or you could spot a discount on something that's not urgent, but important - with a limited budget, you might prioritize that instead of your original goal.

steve_avery 5y ago

After the CSAM scanning debacle came out this year, it pushed me towards being far less reliant on any cloud servers and I set up a home NAS, transferred my photos to it, deleted everything off of my iCloud, and discontinued my subscription to iCloud for higher storage, going down to the free 5gb tier. Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions. If you dismiss the almost out of storage notification and the accompanying ad for subscription to iCloud, it comes back a month later. I feel this author's pain. Another fishy thing that Apple does is that when I bought this phone, they gave a free year of Apple TV+. Most of my paid subscriptions I keep a close eye on and cancel right after I sign up, so that I won't have to remember at the end of the subscription period. It works fine with any app on the app store, I get the service for the desired period. With Apple TV +, if you cancel your subscription to avoid autorenew, it immediately cancels your access to the service. Rules for thee, not for me.

ender341341 5y ago
> Ever since then, I've been getting notifications on the settings app about how my iCloud storage is almost out of space because somehow my iPhone backup takes nearly 4.8gb, even though I have disabled the vast majority of app backup permissions. iCloud backup does a really bad job of reclaiming space, back when I was on the free tier every once in a while I'd clear the backup (I think by disabling it?) and then re-doing the backup.
j1elo 5y ago
Some friends have set a NAS up, and I'm doing the same, but most people seem to replace the cloud with a NAS while ignoring a crucial point that cloud providers do for you: replication. Are you handling that in yours? It's an upcoming disaster waiting to occur, having their own private NAS but not backing it up somewhere else, only relying on the RAID reconstruction abilities of whatever they bought (and that's for those who bought the much more expensive units with 2 or 3 disk bays... don't get me started with those cheaper single-disk Synology ones)

isoprophlex 5y ago

The comments about Apple Music's UI aren't wrong... but the experience is a lot less shitty than spotify. At least AM seems to somewhat respect the idea of listening to albums. Spotify instead buries an artist's albums eight clicks deep into it's UI, nudging you towards their asinine payola-as-a-service playlists (or worse, podcasts I don't care about)

littlecranky67 5y ago
It is less shitty than spotify, but still shitty. I removed Music when at one point I was in the gym which is in a basement and wanted to bring up music on the treadmill. The overlay-ad for Apple Music blocked the UI, and because receiption was bad it took 10s+ to load that ad screen without allowing me to close it until it was there. I am now using VLC for iOS and am not looking back.

llukas 5y ago

Does it all mean that for a low subscription fee Apple will stop showing ads? In addition to not showing adds I get cloud storage, some movies and music? Where do I sign up?

hvgk 5y ago

Conversely I actually use most of their services and am happy. I spent too many years self flagellating by running local servers, own email server, manually managing backups, mp3 collections and stuff. This didn’t scale with the size of my family, now three adults and two teenagers. If you enjoy doing that, fine but I don’t. I’d rather go for a run. Thanks Apple Music for making that even more enjoyable… What knee jerk reactions I see in these threads seem to skip is the positive functions of the devices. But no everyone wants to burn their universe for some reason.

npteljes 5y ago
I think both can be valid at the same time. I mean, hating the upsell / ads, while liking the services themselves. For a long time I skipped a lot of Youtube videos because their thumbnails turned me off, but I found that I like the content itself, while not liking some of the youtuberisms that go along with it.

martini333 5y ago

Uninstall apps. Stop crying?

fxtentacle 5y ago

Yes, Apple is annoying. But so are all the other big cloud companies. It was only a matter of time until they noticed that if you have 1 billion customers and your competition is similarly evil, you truly don't need to care about your customers. Sure, take their money, but apart from that, who cares if their experience is horrible? Apple TV spams you with ads. Apple iOS Settings spam you with ads. In general most iOS apps will abuse notifications to send you ads. Android is filled with ads. Android TVs spam you with ads, even the $2000+ ones. Google Chromecast refuses to work if you block 8.8.8.8, or else it'll use it to spam you with ads. Even Netflix will spam you with ads when you're idle for a few seconds. Edge? Ads. Windows start menu? Ads. Lock-screen? Ads. But guess what, you only get treated like sh*t if you're a paying customer. Torrents for Netflix rips are the same great quality and great content and you can even watch them from USB on a fully offline (read: ad-free) TV. It's only once you start paying Apple or Netflix for their shows that they start abusing you ... And then the same executives that created these perverse incentives get interviewed on TV and whine about people not paying for their content ^_^

jefftk 5y ago
I'm not sure I would consider the Netflix ones ads? They're not trying to convince you to buy additional things or otherwise give them money; they're telling you about shows you've already paid for that they think you might enjoy watching.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > I'm not sure I would consider the Netflix ones ads? They're not trying to convince you to buy additional things or otherwise give them money; they're telling you about shows you've already paid for that they think you might enjoy watching. Encouraging me to consume more of what you're peddling is advertising, regardless of if I'm a customer of yours or not, or if I've consumed similar items before or not.
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    Sure, there's a reasonable argument to be made at a high level that it's all advertising. However, I think the GP is getting at something important. With enough granularity you can see a qualitative difference. Some of this advertising is only self-serving and some of it is in service to the customer. When JetBrains gives me helpful tips on how to consume PyCharm, they aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They want me to keep using PyCharm. However, it also serves me because it makes me more productive when I use PyCharm. When Netflix advertises to me that a new season of my favorite show is on Netflix, likewise: they want me to keep subscribing. But it also serves to help me get more value out of the subscription I've already purchased. These activities contrast with the game developer using psychological tricks to get me to purchase in-game currencies at unreasonable rates that I otherwise wouldn't purchase. There's a spectrum with fraud on one end, and, I don't know, something like genuinely helpful information on the other end. Likely different people will place any individual advertisement on a different place on the spectrum.

malshe 5y ago

Something not mentioned anywhere in this whiny post, which you have to read from his About page: I’m a senior iOS engineer at Microsoft

kiririn 5y ago

Apple will also bend their strict rules if you have enough money, for example YouTube partially blocking control center in fullscreen (on home button devices), and background playback. And McDonalds being able to force background location access, making the app unusable if you don’t grant it. One rule for some…