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This annoyed me. Any app that pushes me adverts gets its push notifications turned off. Sure, I'd love to know my package status Amazon, but you send me some ad

This annoyed me. Any app that pushes me adverts gets its push notifications turned off. Sure, I'd love to know my package status Amazon, but you send me some advert of something stupid every 3 hours (it feels like)... so no, you don't get notifications. I get enough advertising in my life, without it constantly assaulting me every time I check my watch or phone lock screen. So no Apple Wallet, you do not get to keep your notification privileges.

lambdasquirrel 1y ago
Yeah this is not what I pay the Apple premium for.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  Have you tried to use Windows lately? I have one for a media PC. It's so insanely terrible, the ads, the popups, the nags, the dark patterns. Microsoft has given up on personal desktops, just milking the elderly with scams. Terrible
  - paxys 1y ago
    What does that have to do with Apple?
    - idle_zealot 1y ago
      More just the state of the world. Apple doesn't need to be squeaky clean to justify a premium price tag. It only needs to be better enough that discerning customers pick it over the outrageously awful alternatives. Market forces at work, racing to the bottom of tolerability.
      - fsflover 1y ago
        Did you maybe hear about the third option, apart from the duopoly?
        idle_zealot 1y ago
        For a variety of reasons that I confess to not understanding, Linux doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for most people. I'm very glad it exists for my own use, though.
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Well considering the article is about a mobile device...
        fsflover 1y ago
        GNU/Linux phones exist. Sent from my Librem 5.
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Seemed like this thread was referring to the Apple/Windows duopoly while the post was about a mobile OS.
  - mgh2 1y ago
    The benefits outweigh the costs for them, not for Apple though: slightly related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369227
  - tw600040 1y ago
    //Have you tried to use Windows lately? I haven't. When I read that I was wondering if you were going to say it got better and is good now or something. Oh well. Good to know. Thanks for the info.
  - animatethrow 1y ago
    You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit. On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this. As a long time user of Linux, Mac, and Windows, Windows involves the fewest time concerning hassles to tweak a system to be perfectly comfortable and distraction free. With Linux I have spent way too much time solving hardware issues like a laptop not waking from sleep or a bluetooth device freezing Gnome or NVidia drivers not playing nice with Wayland, etc. Linux has been way too slow to support HDR monitor output for YouTube. Mac has way too many issues with third party hardware. If you use a non-Apple mouse with a Macbook the scroll wheel direction will be wrong until you research and install a third party scroll reverser utility. I also remember having a lot of trouble figuring out what third party software I had to install to disable mouse acceleration on the Mac (Steelseries Exactmouse was one older solution). Last I used a Mac the Night Shift feature didn't work with non-Apple monitors so I had to research and install the third party Flux solution, but I recall that had some bugs and its own privacy concerns.... Meanwhile, Windows works great with all my non-Microsoft hardware because that's the nature of its open ecosystem. Windows 11 now also does proper desktop color management like the Mac has had for ages.
    - Gud 1y ago
      During my almost 25 years of usage of FreeBSD I don’t recall one instance of this happening. Same for OpenBSD. So it would appear some operating systems are in fact immune to this.
      - animatethrow 1y ago
        Yes, I concede these niche operating systems won't show me ads. But can I play an HDR YouTube video in a web browser on my HDR display using FreeBSD or OpenBSD? No. One can't even do this with Linux yet as far as I know, though Firefox on Linux recently in the past few months now has experimental HDR support (haven't tried it yet).
        Gud 1y ago
        Did you try yt-dlp?
  - latexr 1y ago
    The fact that another companies does it worse in no way excuses that Apple does it at all.
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Do you not remember the time they force downloaded a U2 album to everyone's phone? What do you pay the apple tax for?
  - mingus88 1y ago
    Serious answers? Vertical integration of hardware/firmware/OS/Software/services from a big tech firm that isn’t making their margins from selling my personal data and actually delivers industry leading privacy features Pushing ads through the Wallet is pretty gauche though. Nobody’s perfect
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      Vertical integration I can understand. Give a man money, and he'll pay for convenience. But this? > actually delivers industry leading privacy features You can't prove that to save your life. You can hope that Apple delivers industry-leading privacy features... but there is no iOS Open Source Project for you to audit. Apple sues security researchers, the most cutting-edge iOS vulnerability engineers make six figures working for NSO Group. You aren't trusted with an open bootloader to try using other phone ROMs, not that anything would stop it from working. You aren't given a way to roll back updates if Apple makes a controversial change to their security model. Apple won't even give you alternatives to features they admit are backdoored[0]. It's entirely a system of trust. If you don't trust Apple unconditionally, the magic of their products starts to collapse. It's not a new trend either, people in this thread are right to call back to the "gracious" free U2 album. Or further back to the coinage of "Reality Distortion Field" itself. > Nobody’s perfect You say that like there's no way to fix this. As though you live in an alternate reality where it's somehow impossible to write software that respects the user, or legislate guidelines that enforces fair competition. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
      - mingus88 1y ago
        Read up on private compute cloud, the transparency log and published binaries, the VRE, use of oHTTP proxies … And then come back and tell me that there is anyone else going through such hoops (at not charge) to make sure they know nothing about you and you don’t need to trust them for the system to work
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  Apple settings have been littered with ads for years.
SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago
The funny thing is, this is actually against ToS (or at least was at some point, I'm not sure if it still is). Apple just blatantly lets companies walk all over it if they are big enough. Doordash and Uber are two huge examples beyond Amazon.
- ShakataGaNai 1y ago
  You're 100% right. It's still against the TOS. But enough money (For Apple) will make the fruit ignore a lot of things. Sadly, this has always been the way of corporations.
- yreg 1y ago
  App Review Guidelines > 4.5.4 > Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges. To be honest I would like to see Apple be more strict with this stuff in App Review. It's frustrating what some of the big apps get away with.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I’ve had Uber notifications disabled, but using it last week noticed that it now plays ads in the UI when showing where my car’s at - so I’m done with Uber and going back to taxis.
m463 1y ago
But that's the thing... what if some critical notification regarding your money is suppressed? I turned off emergency alerts when they had that trump alert, and now they seem to have added "test alerts" as an option. I suspect crying wolf just leads to people dying because they turned off emergency alerts.
- ShakataGaNai 1y ago
  You're not wrong, but also there is a big difference between "apple wallet" and "emergency alerts". There is nothing life or death coming from apple wallet. Also also, Apple (and basically all devs) have instrumentation to tell them if people are disabling notifications. So if enough people disable notifications for Apple Wallet, I promise you someone in corporate will notice.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  > I turned off emergency alerts when they had that trump alert, and now they seem to have added "test alerts" as an option. You can’t actually disable presidential level alerts unless you have a jailbroken/rooted phone. I know because in Canada they send every alert at that priority level and none of them have can be disabled. (Though phones customized to the Canadian locale have “Presidential” removed from the front-end nomenclature.)

lambdasquirrel 1y ago

Yeah this is not what I pay the Apple premium for.

monero-xmr 1y ago
Have you tried to use Windows lately? I have one for a media PC. It's so insanely terrible, the ads, the popups, the nags, the dark patterns. Microsoft has given up on personal desktops, just milking the elderly with scams. Terrible
- paxys 1y ago
  What does that have to do with Apple?
  - idle_zealot 1y ago
    More just the state of the world. Apple doesn't need to be squeaky clean to justify a premium price tag. It only needs to be better enough that discerning customers pick it over the outrageously awful alternatives. Market forces at work, racing to the bottom of tolerability.
    - fsflover 1y ago
      Did you maybe hear about the third option, apart from the duopoly?
      - idle_zealot 1y ago
        For a variety of reasons that I confess to not understanding, Linux doesn't seem to be an acceptable alternative for most people. I'm very glad it exists for my own use, though.
      - cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Well considering the article is about a mobile device...
        fsflover 1y ago
        GNU/Linux phones exist. Sent from my Librem 5.
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Seemed like this thread was referring to the Apple/Windows duopoly while the post was about a mobile OS.
- mgh2 1y ago
  The benefits outweigh the costs for them, not for Apple though: slightly related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44369227
- tw600040 1y ago
  //Have you tried to use Windows lately? I haven't. When I read that I was wondering if you were going to say it got better and is good now or something. Oh well. Good to know. Thanks for the info.
- animatethrow 1y ago
  You can quickly disable all the Windows start menu ads using either gpedit.msc or regedit. On Linux Ubuntu there's a least one Ubuntu Pro terminal ad I remember having to disable, so no OS is immune from this. As a long time user of Linux, Mac, and Windows, Windows involves the fewest time concerning hassles to tweak a system to be perfectly comfortable and distraction free. With Linux I have spent way too much time solving hardware issues like a laptop not waking from sleep or a bluetooth device freezing Gnome or NVidia drivers not playing nice with Wayland, etc. Linux has been way too slow to support HDR monitor output for YouTube. Mac has way too many issues with third party hardware. If you use a non-Apple mouse with a Macbook the scroll wheel direction will be wrong until you research and install a third party scroll reverser utility. I also remember having a lot of trouble figuring out what third party software I had to install to disable mouse acceleration on the Mac (Steelseries Exactmouse was one older solution). Last I used a Mac the Night Shift feature didn't work with non-Apple monitors so I had to research and install the third party Flux solution, but I recall that had some bugs and its own privacy concerns.... Meanwhile, Windows works great with all my non-Microsoft hardware because that's the nature of its open ecosystem. Windows 11 now also does proper desktop color management like the Mac has had for ages.
  - Gud 1y ago
    During my almost 25 years of usage of FreeBSD I don’t recall one instance of this happening. Same for OpenBSD. So it would appear some operating systems are in fact immune to this.
    - animatethrow 1y ago
      Yes, I concede these niche operating systems won't show me ads. But can I play an HDR YouTube video in a web browser on my HDR display using FreeBSD or OpenBSD? No. One can't even do this with Linux yet as far as I know, though Firefox on Linux recently in the past few months now has experimental HDR support (haven't tried it yet).
      - Gud 1y ago
        Did you try yt-dlp?
- latexr 1y ago
  The fact that another companies does it worse in no way excuses that Apple does it at all.
mrguyorama 1y ago
Do you not remember the time they force downloaded a U2 album to everyone's phone? What do you pay the apple tax for?
- mingus88 1y ago
  Serious answers? Vertical integration of hardware/firmware/OS/Software/services from a big tech firm that isn’t making their margins from selling my personal data and actually delivers industry leading privacy features Pushing ads through the Wallet is pretty gauche though. Nobody’s perfect
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Vertical integration I can understand. Give a man money, and he'll pay for convenience. But this? > actually delivers industry leading privacy features You can't prove that to save your life. You can hope that Apple delivers industry-leading privacy features... but there is no iOS Open Source Project for you to audit. Apple sues security researchers, the most cutting-edge iOS vulnerability engineers make six figures working for NSO Group. You aren't trusted with an open bootloader to try using other phone ROMs, not that anything would stop it from working. You aren't given a way to roll back updates if Apple makes a controversial change to their security model. Apple won't even give you alternatives to features they admit are backdoored[0]. It's entirely a system of trust. If you don't trust Apple unconditionally, the magic of their products starts to collapse. It's not a new trend either, people in this thread are right to call back to the "gracious" free U2 album. Or further back to the coinage of "Reality Distortion Field" itself. > Nobody’s perfect You say that like there's no way to fix this. As though you live in an alternate reality where it's somehow impossible to write software that respects the user, or legislate guidelines that enforces fair competition. [0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
    - mingus88 1y ago
      Read up on private compute cloud, the transparency log and published binaries, the VRE, use of oHTTP proxies … And then come back and tell me that there is anyone else going through such hoops (at not charge) to make sure they know nothing about you and you don’t need to trust them for the system to work
TiredOfLife 1y ago
Apple settings have been littered with ads for years.

SOLAR_FIELDS 1y ago

The funny thing is, this is actually against ToS (or at least was at some point, I'm not sure if it still is). Apple just blatantly lets companies walk all over it if they are big enough. Doordash and Uber are two huge examples beyond Amazon.

ShakataGaNai 1y ago
You're 100% right. It's still against the TOS. But enough money (For Apple) will make the fruit ignore a lot of things. Sadly, this has always been the way of corporations.
yreg 1y ago
App Review Guidelines > 4.5.4 > Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges. To be honest I would like to see Apple be more strict with this stuff in App Review. It's frustrating what some of the big apps get away with.
Marsymars 1y ago
I’ve had Uber notifications disabled, but using it last week noticed that it now plays ads in the UI when showing where my car’s at - so I’m done with Uber and going back to taxis.

m463 1y ago

But that's the thing... what if some critical notification regarding your money is suppressed? I turned off emergency alerts when they had that trump alert, and now they seem to have added "test alerts" as an option. I suspect crying wolf just leads to people dying because they turned off emergency alerts.

ShakataGaNai 1y ago
You're not wrong, but also there is a big difference between "apple wallet" and "emergency alerts". There is nothing life or death coming from apple wallet. Also also, Apple (and basically all devs) have instrumentation to tell them if people are disabling notifications. So if enough people disable notifications for Apple Wallet, I promise you someone in corporate will notice.
Marsymars 1y ago
> I turned off emergency alerts when they had that trump alert, and now they seem to have added "test alerts" as an option. You can’t actually disable presidential level alerts unless you have a jailbroken/rooted phone. I know because in Canada they send every alert at that priority level and none of them have can be disabled. (Though phones customized to the Canadian locale have “Presidential” removed from the front-end nomenclature.)