As many people have noticed, and many people have written about, Apple has recently started fairly dramatically increasing the number of advertisements in their products. Apple has had advertisements in the App Store for a long time, but they initially were fairly subtle. They focused initially on high-quality editorial content where a team at Apple would review high-quality apps and recommend them, primarily in the “Today” view. Over the last couple of years, Apple has been adding more paid ad slots, then started sending push notifications for their own “services”, and finally, in the last few weeks have dramatically increased the number of ads across the app store.

To me, this dramatically cheapens and worsens the experiences, and frankly, I think this presents some problems for Apple as a brand and company.

Several sites had reported over the last year, in particular that Apple was posting more jobs about advertising and that they were going to start pushing into the space more and more. I was hopeful that this was primarily an effort in the TV+ space, particularly as they start to get major sports packages. I think it totally makes sense to have ads in those spaces, just like linear TV offers (though given the option, I will always pay more to have no ads), but it appears that it won’t just be limited to TV.

What’s wrong with ads? Well, lots of things. First, I feel like it just cheapens the overall experience and is bad for the brand. I think one of the worst things that has happened to tech in the last couple of decades, and to the internet in general, is the explosion of ad-driven “free to use” products. It has led to many people thinking the products are free and don’t really think about how things are being paid for.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, and even Amazon more recently vacuum up everything they possibly can about users, so they can build profiles about you and sell more expensive advertising targeted at you. People were given free products that they grow to love (or become addicted to) then after people are used to it, these companies slowly turn on the advertising spigot, then it doesn’t take long before they are crammed into every corner of your life.

It shouldn’t be surprising, but companies were purposely misleading to get people on their platforms. Time after time, we are “sold” the idea that we are customers of a product like a social media site and that ads are there to just help keep the lights on. Sometimes they even tell you that you should like ads because they are “personalized” for you. They really mean targeted, and they can do that essentially by essentially spying on everything you do in as many ways as possible to try to make their “profile” of you more accurate, AKA more valuable. The customer is someone who pays for a product, so you aren’t the customer for social media or other “free” online services, the advertisers are. You, the user of the site, are actually the product to be sold, and you essentially have no choice.

Apple has always sold itself as different from that. Apple products are expensive, partially because they are premium products, and partially to make a point clear, you are buying a product, and you are the customer of that product. It’s clear where Apple is making its money, and its priority has been almost always the customer, where its money is directly coming from.

Apple has also been pushing itself as the privacy company. You, the actual customer, should have a choice in your own privacy. Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. will do everything in their power to track everything about you, and Apple was saying very clearly - “You should have a choice in this, and if you don’t want to be tracked, you should be able to make that choice”. The more choice Apple has given people, the more they choose to not be tracked. You can see this hammering the revenue of companies that rely on tracking (surveillance) revenue.

Several companies and lawmakers started talking about how this seemed anti-competitive, which I previously disagreed with since they were only giving you the choice, in some cases, not to be tracked across apps. I absolutely think everyone should have the right to choose whether they are or not tracked on the internet. But then Apple started pushing more into advertising, and have repeatedly explained that they see it as different when it’s “first party” data instead of “third party” data. That’s when it started getting gross to me.

This is the second problem to me. I am certainly no lawyer, but I don’t see how it possibly couldn’t be considered anti-competitive when you make a move to purposely knee-cap other companies’ advertising businesses, regardless of the reason, then immediately ramp up your own advertising, often in the exact same space.

On top of that, even if there was nothing wrong with any of this that Apple is doing, they are also just bad at it. When Apple launched their more aggressive ads recently, many people noted major issues. If you searched for an app to help with gambling addiction, you would be suggested gambling ads. If you searched for marriage counseling apps it would suggest dating apps, or even thinly veiled adult chat apps. This in addition to the fact that these garbage apps were showing up for other developers who just didn’t want these kinds of ads showing up next to their app. More info here, from Fast Company. It’s (historically at least) rare for Apple to be this tone-deaf with a product.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to think Apple might be bad at ads because it tries to preserve privacy. I often wonder if that is why Siri is so bad compared to Google Home and Amazon Alexa or how Apple Photos is so much worse at face and object recognition compared to Google Photos, but if that’s the case, they will either always be bad at ads (and shouldn’t do them) or they will slowly start compromising on privacy. Frankly, either way, to me it dramatically cheapens the brand.

Not terribly surprising, but do developers see any money from the ads placed next to their app? Nope. Is anything from apple getting cheaper because of this? Actually, they are getting more expensive at the same time.

None of this is going to immediately change my purchasing habits with Apple products, but it has definitely put a really sour taste in my mouth.

Coupled with the recent change on TV, Apple has been taking a turn for the worse lately in services. I hope they change course but companies rarely make moves to turn down huge gobs of money. Hopefully an antitrust lawsuit will make them back down on this.

Here are some other articles I read around the same topic you should check out - Apple App Store tax is a direct shot at Meta - The Verge Apple is an ad company now - Wired App Store ads gone wild - Daring Fireball