Thankfully Apple only sends tasteful ads, like the pop-up Apple Music modal when you put on headphones or that friendly perennial reminder to Try The New Safari. Then there's the total non-advertisement at the top of Settings encouraging you to try iCloud, along with the native and beautiful builtins like Apple News and TV+ that totally don't exist to upsell you on more services.
> Because for Meta at least it literally cost them $10b in revenue each year.
Is there any reason to believe Apple cannot stop them at an OS-level rather than a store-level?
> Then there's the total non-advertisement at the top of Settings encouraging you to try iCloud.
Just looked at the settings on my phone, can’t see any ‘ads’ for iCloud at all. Am I doing something wrong? And since I had to open the settings app to check, if there are ads, are they modal and stopping me doing what I wanted to do? Do they force some kind of call to action to get past? A action blocking modal? I’m genuinely asking because I have literally never seen what you are describing.
> …along with the native and beautiful builtins like Apple News and TV+ that totally don't exist to upsell you on more services.
Never knowingly opened them so I can’t comment, but what is wrong with upselling services? Is it any different to YouTube being native on Android devices? I mean, if I use YouTube in my browser, iPhone or otherwise, I literally get a modal on any new tab I open with YouTube pushing me to subscribe to the premium feature - even with an ad blocker. Does this happen on Google’s own devices or platforms? Again, I genuinely don’t know.
The thing that I see everytime this comes up is that “advertising bad m’kay, silly little Apple user”, which was never the argument. User tracking and identification is what is bad. Targeting ads based on this in places like the settings app would be bad. Is there any evidence that this is happening? The same goes for telemetry from apps. I have no problem with Apple, Google or anybody else gathering telemetry about how an app is used, just so long as they don’t identify me based on it and use the data to sell me shit. There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising services, what is wrong is the how, when and where that takes place, and what the advertisers are basing it on. The condescending tone that is employed by the anti-lobby here doesn’t help the discussion either, but that is the whole “I know better” Orange Site phenomenon.
> Just looked at the settings on my phone, can’t see any ‘ads’ for iCloud at all. Am I doing something wrong?
For one, it's on macOS and shows up for anyone who doesn't log into the App Store with an Apple ID. It will be a red notification badge in Settings that does not go away unless you log in.
> if there are ads, are they modal and stopping me doing what I wanted to do?
I mean, yeah. This is the default behavior for Apple Music on Mac - when you put on your headphones, it auto-launches Apple Music with a modal blocking the app and asking you to try subscribing to Apple Music. I haven't seen default system behavior this sycophantic or contrived since Windows 8 came out.
> but what is wrong with upselling services? Is it any different to YouTube being native on Android devices?
No, it's not. Both fucking suck.
When people pay for a device (especially a premium experience) they expect that cost to get recouped somehow. I used to daily-drive Mac because I expected a premium experience, but you cannot look at the past decade of Mac releases and say there have been less advertisements. The desire for you to pay for more services is now an intrinsic part of MacOS like it is on Windows, and honestly that's the worst.
> what is wrong is the how, when and where that takes place, and what the advertisers are basing it on.
What a shockingly vague and nonspecific example of what "wrong" looks like.
Hitchen's Razor. If we cannot hold either company accountable for their data usage (we cannot), then we're fighting over which fairytale we like better.
Apple has very strict controls which prevent tracking and mess with attribution.
The second side-loading is permitted Meta and Google will spend billions in advertising convincing people to use it.
Because for Meta at least it literally cost them $10b in revenue each year.