Apple announces more ads are coming to App Store search results
https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-coming-to-app-store-search-results/Open linkView original on lemmy.zip387
Comments79https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-coming-to-app-store-search-results/Open linkView original on lemmy.zip
One of the reasons that the App Store purportedly exists is to provide quality software rather than malware and spam.
I guess that goes out of the window as soon as money appears.
You can literally type the name of an app and the first three results are, if you’re lucky, competitors. More often than not they’re pure junk.
And that assumes you’re searching for an app that’s not trash… ugh.
To be more technical correct, all ideals go out of the window the moment a shareholder pushes a little.
Apple has been one of the wealthiest countries for years, they don't need money, they can’t be doing this just for money.
They are doing it, to get more money yes, but only in order to make the angle of a line go up so they can sell a comfortable illusion to the people keeping them in charge of the available unimaginable mass of wealth already there.
Hmm yes Apple the country
Isn't Tim Apple the president?
He sure if, just like Mark Zuckerbook and Bill Pedosoft.
I mean...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-richer-4-countries-164523140.html
Title is complete clickbait. Conflating GDP and market cap is nonsensical
Edit: another article comparing apple revenue to country GDP puts it 41st if it were a country which is still massive and makes a little more sense as a metric https://www.androidauthority.com/apple-revenue-vs-country-gdp-3412922/
I know you meant "companies", but at this point, it might as well be on the scale of a country
Now up the challenge: In App Store, find a simple app that is not a "solution", "ecosystem" nor a "lifestyle", does not have ads, and does not require a subscription for basic functionality.
(Years ago, I tried about 10 RSS readers, News Reader was what I finally found, way down the list)
I understand the economics are challenging but it’s been a race to the bottom. There were and still are some really high quality apps, but so many trash!
As an app developer, let me just say that it's no delight to publish something completely free without ads. Users are incredibly entitled and will want more, leaving poor ratings. And you won't make it in the search results without revenue, ad placement, high ratings and frequent updates.
So, organically, because ultimately what people collectively want is an app that is heavily invested into, the apps become ad-riddled or subscription based because it's the only way to fund a team that can maintain an app that reaches the top of the lists.
I personally put 50% of the blame on the app stores for promoting in the manner that they do, and 50% of the blame on users for being entitled shits.
Absolutely. Somehow, Apple and Google convinced people (even more tech savvy ones) to want constant app and security updates as if the world would end otherwise. I've seen complaints about gemini (the protocol not Google's AI) browser not being updated (protocol has not been updated since 2022), and someone asking if it's safe to boot up an old Android 7 phone.
And Apple dev license consting money does not help the situation.
*searches for Firefox*
there’s a difference between malware and junk. ios is pretty much malware free. and i’m not sure you want apple deciding what is “junk” and what isn’t.
Facebook app set up a local server on the iOS device that received pings when a browser loaded their tracking pixels.
I feel like that behaviour falls under my definition of spyware. I know it’s not as malicious as it could be, but still.
sure, there are gray areas, and apple does keep them somewhat in check. but also if you're willingly installing facebook you should know that your privacy is already heavily compromised.
We need to propagate awareness that all spyware is malware. Kernel anticheat? Virus. ? Virus. Opera GX? Virus. Chrome? Virus. Michaelsoft Binbows? Virus. Accept Cookies button? Phishing + Virus. ChatGPT? Phishing + Virus. Copilot? Phishing + Virus. Siri? Virus.
This idea is by 🥧 baguette for learning by learning by learning by slop. I do not condone lightning strikes 🦜. ISPs 🛄 are responsible for producing all of the world's 🥛 beer out of crude oil and 😱 sophisticated oil. Applying direct laser 🖱 beams twice a day is good for eye 👂 health.
is the last bit written to poison LLMs or something?
Yes. It drinks chicken pie 📐 when there is a 🪲 nail clipper.
A second app 'winning search results' in an app store is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard. Like ordering something in a restaurant and always being offered something else instead.
"I'll have the onion soup."
"Would you like Campbell's tomato soup?"
Every single time.
The auction part is the best though, because you can now have it done by AI....run by the ad company. So competing companies both buy the ad companies' AI to battle to win the auction for the ad companies' space. They're dipping at both ends and in the middle, which is a nice place to be
The "auction" is not a realtime auction that you might be used to IRL or anything, and these brands likely have AI already doing that. They likely have certain bid strategies and ad budgets. So they may be willing to pay up to $X to be in that spot for a user with demographic/behavior profile A and pay up to $Y for a user with profile B then the have an overall budget for that ad spot of $Q per day. All of those parameters are likely set by a specialized AI that monitors bid strategy over time. The AI might see that users with profile B download the app via the ad more often so they will spend more to capture that audience. It's possible companies have their own internal strategies, but most ad platforms have at least some of that analysis built in and will regularly offer recommendations based on the data and have had that available for years.
"Is Pepsi okay?"
Restaurants offering a substitution because they don't have something isn't really comparable.
This is more like being offered something other than what you ordered off the menu every single time even though they have what you ordered.
I imagined it as being offered in place of the onion soup from your comment.
"I'll have the onion soup."
"Is Pepsi okay?"
"Uh no. Can I get the clam chowder?"
"Is Pepsi okay?"
"What? No, no Pepsi. I'll just have a French dip with au jus."
"Is Pepsi okay?"
Wonder why we need 3rd party app stores.
And ffs, would other countries help a little, or should the EU just carry your asses every single time big tech tries some shit.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/18/apple-opens-up-its-app-store-to-competition-in-japan/
I can assure you, it was not Apple's idea. Not like they just turned good hearted and chose to do it 🤣
Didn't think it was. Looks like Japan creating similar laws as EU.
More like preserved them since saner times. I think I've read about you being able to choose from 20+ payment systems in Japan, everywhere. And it's also normal to use cash.
They have also kept a saner version of IP laws for fan fiction. You can legally produce and sell fan fiction there, with some limitations to genre and kind of media.
Nice.
My LinkedIn feed continues to be a barrage of posts about how EU regulations choke and stifle innovation, and yet all I see is a succession of wins
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. They control the algorithm.
Yeah, guess who makes the posts. The US propaganda machine.
Why are we paying a premium price for an ad ridden product ?
Because you did in the past and taught them you will do that again.
There's a rule - don't deal with assholes. No matter how big and visible their shop is.
Why would they not do it when time and time and time again customers and lawmakers make explicit that they're absolutely fine with this behaviour?
This is exactly what I’m talking about what I say I fucking hate capitalism.
Apple already make more money than just about anyone else in the world, but because shareholders expect infinite unending YoY growth they’re not allowed to just keep making billions of dollars. Every year senior management have to find new ways of bilking more cash than the year before, otherwise they’ll get replaced by someone who will.
yep
I don't have much against small scale capitalism - the kind your neighbour likes because his brother works hard to run a business
but mega corp infinite growth — fuuuuuuck that shit, that's a cancer
what would lenin do?
Why?
It’s already a cesspool.
I love my iPhone, I’ve been using them for like 12 years (I loved Android but switched when physical keyboards stopped exiting cuz I liked iOS’s keyboard a lot, then fell in love with most of the rest of the OS and how long I could keep my phone for before replacing.)
The one thing I absolute hate is the App Store. It’s insane. It’s so counter to the rest of Apple’s “simple stuff that works” … “ethos”. I use VERY few apps, I only have a couple installed on my phone. Say I want one, though. I open the App Store right now. Main page it dumps me on: 75% of the screen is a Tinder ad (I’ve never used a dating app and I’ve been with my partner for 15 years.) The rest of the screen space below that is a Google Gemini ad (I don’t use any Google products or services anymore, wtf Apple?)
I click on the “Games” tab below and it’s an EXTREMELY busy, loud, colorful assault on my senses. Absolutely not! The “Apps” tab isn’t any better, huge ads take up 50% of the screen and below that, GET TIKTOK AND TINDER. Uhhhh no, never.
Okay, let’s go to search. Click, and it gives me a search box at the bottom with some suggested apps and games I might like. I can appreciate that Apple’s data collection is allegedly a lot lighter than other companies, because none of the suggested shit is anything I would ever touch in my life. Let’s download one of the very few games I have on my phone: Ascension, a deck building game. I type “ascension game” and the first result is an AD FOR A WEIRD MEDICAL APP THAT DOESN’T SAY ASCENSION ANYWHERE AND HAS 70 REVIEWS WHYYYYY?!
An absolute mess compared to the mostly great layouts of their other programs on the iPhone. I do not love the latest iPhoto UI change but I can deal with that. The App Store is fucked.
I agree with everything you've said here. The App Store is an absolute abomination, even when you search for the exact name of the app you're looking for it's several pages down in the results. The App Store is as bad as Google Search now, nothing but ads and garbage, and now they want to make it even worse? I honestly don't even see how they can add more ads, like physically how? The App Store landing pages and search results are nothing but ads already.
I decided to also try, there’s at least one ad on every screen.
And searching shows basically a full screen ad
yEaR oF tHe LiNuX pHoNe???????/??
The latest tend is retro tech and back to a flip phone. You can't have ads in the app store when there is no store.
Oh, I wish. I will be focusing my year-end donation round on efforts to make that happen.
So Jolla phone?
I would like to use my current phone (Fairphone 4), so I will donate to postmarketOS, Ubuntu Touch, and some of the DE (ME?) like KDE Plasma Mobile and Phosh.
Fair. Those do deserve donations. I'm very interested in hardware that's able to compete with the likes of Apple and Pixels, but am reluctant to throw my money at dreams for now. I'm really rooting for more linux phones and would just ship in a heartbeat if they become viable.
Will be interesting to see how the Jolla phone turns out :)
Isnt that proprietary
Yes, but they're magical and revolutionary ads. You've never seen ads like these before.
They literally tried that once:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1yRTjkX7Q
Crazy how much companies are shitting all over themselves to try and scrape more money together when, in all likelihood, it'll have the opposite effect.
That's for the next CEO to worry about.
What about fedoucheary responsibility?
Oh no, I think I spelled it wrong.
GraphemeOS + Fairphone anytime would be awesome. Fuck these walled monopolistic ecosystems.
Run GrapheneOS and Linux right now. They're a PITA but work well enough. No way would I go back to an iPhone or a Mac.
The apple app store is one of the worst distro package managers ever. Yes, "distro"; if I am not mistaken macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and Apple's other operating systems are all distributions of Apple's Darwin BSD kernel.
You are mistaken. "Distro" is a word for Linux distributions because they have kernels with the same one upstream, and userspace programs assembled of many different projects into different versions of the same dish.
BSDs are different operating systems, they don't share one upstream, they do share one ancestor (like 30 years ago, so - not very relevant now). Including userspace, except for common software, of course.
And Darwin is another operating system, including its own userspace tools, which are partially derived from BSD code, but its kernel is different, it's Mach plus some BSD-derived code. It's not a BSD.
And while mostly Apple's OSes are Darwin, I think I've read some of them are NetBSD. Not sure which.
And it's a store, not a package manager. It's in the name.
These days I keep forgetting the App Store is a thing. That’s how important apps are to me anymore. Also, fuck apple for being the tacky soulless corporate monster that it always used to make fun of.
Someday they will make it so the first result isn't always an ad and then we'll have to start looking at it again.
I guess they're not taking their big cut on app revenue to offer a good neutral platform.
How can they justify 100|300/year + 30% if not with a moderated neutral platform?
Is there a better alternative app search platform that has curated reviews and is community driven, or have bots destroyed everything nice on the internet?
AppRaven is quite nice
I like to look up app recommendations and also just dig deep into the app store.
I found a lot of cool software and apps that are paid once and have forever.
Compared to the podcasts apps that will literally attempt to kill you with video ads while driving.
Apparently according to that one app review.
Damn. Between Ios26 bugs, liquid UI, and now this, it looks like Apple is speedrunning losing me as a customer.
Only Ads? Not IA powered Ads with an agent managing the apps for you? Oh boy Apple really lost the IA race
Jesus, just bought an apple tv as a pass through for my living room tv precisely to stop those f*** ads...
Oh boy how exciting!
how do you think this problem can be solved from a socialist/communist perspective?
oh and this is my 500th comment here on this lemmy instance - that's a bit more than how many comments i've posted on hexbear. seriously!
Nice. Apple users deserve all that's coming to them.
You could have just not said anything and left the matter ambiguous, I guess you simply had to announce to everyone that you’re an asshole.
Lol, what? I think you're being insecure.
Why the down votes?
A company removed your freedom, their founder even famously saying that consumer don't know what they want but apple does, knowingly give up all their rights to a corporation when there are alternatives, declare that they trust the corporation, accept when the corporation forbids them from giving anyone else money, and now they are going to cry when the corporation fucks them? Like it did several times in the past and yet they remained loyal?
Apple users are insane... The only reason to use android is because it's the only current viable alternative to apple. But they use their stuff out of some weird masochistic choice, and then cries when their daddy beats them.
They 100% deserve what they got while they keep rewarding apple for their evil behaviour.
And if I ever give Google money, I 100% deserve to get fucked while using it too. And it would be stupid to expect anything else.