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The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware

36 points| bangonkeyboard | 6 years ago |mjtsai.com

18 comments

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[+] anko|6 years ago|reply
I think it's probably worse for people in the US, but I am certainly getting sick of news promoting articles that i can't see unless I pay for news+. Quite often the article headlines are bigger than a screen and it doesn't tell you it's apple news+ until you either tap into it or scroll past it. It's cheap, and I expect better from Apple.

I was also thinking about getting a news+ subscription when I buy a new ipad - waiting for a new model to come out - now I'm wondering if I should bother with either.

I don't even mind occasional ads, to show me what i'm missing, but they should be clearly marked as such.

[+] chadlavi|6 years ago|reply
A platform offering you more of it's own services feels distinctly different from a platform selling your data to advertisers or displaying their ads. Does Win10 still have casual gaming ads in the system menu?
[+] stevestreza|6 years ago|reply
Offering and offering and offering and offering. There's no way to say "I don't want this", you will get "offered" (meaning: advertised to) all the time when using these apps that previously worked just fine.
[+] taylodl|6 years ago|reply
YMMV as the old saying goes. I use my phone to listen to music, send & receive text messages, take pictures and videos, and record musical ideas. My iPhone lets me do these things without getting in my way and it's been doing it for years (I don't upgrade unless I have to and so far my iPhone SE has been doing the job for nearly four years now).
[+] RandomWorker|6 years ago|reply
I never though of the red dot around on my service menu (get iCloud) to be an add. Now, I’m pissed because it is exactly that. I still have a Gb free, why is it notifying me that I need more space. I will never use that space.
[+] grawprog|6 years ago|reply
>I never though of the red dot around on my service menu (get iCloud) to be an add

Yet I see comments regularly criticising Microsoft's embedded one drive ads(not by you in particular, in general and not that I support that either).

That's the insidiousness of Apple's marketing, they've sold their products as a brand, ecosystem and lifestyle so well, nobody notices every time they use an Apple device, they're essentially not only being constantly marketed to, but are walking advertisements themselves.

Being locked down in a curated, walled off ecosystem controlled by the purveyor of your device is the epitome of being trapped in a bubble of constant marketing for their products.

How far we've come from the days when everybody lost their shit because an os vendor bundled a web browser with their os.

[+] samwestdev|6 years ago|reply
What is wrong with Health.app on iOS 13? Honest question cause nothing changed for me from iOS 12 (UI changes aside). People in that twitter thread are talking about how they they removed the 'Steps' but it still shows up for me.
[+] RodoBobJon|6 years ago|reply
I think they're mad about the "Apps" section on the Summary tab. But I don't really get the complaints or see it as an advertisement; it's at the very bottom and users may genuinely be wondering how they get more data into the Health app, and a curated list of apps that do that is useful.
[+] egypturnash|6 years ago|reply
God I am so tired of iOS Music constantly showing me ads for their streaming service. I've been paying them to ITunes Match my collection between my Mac and my phone/tablets for years and yet it keeps on trying to upsell me to their streaming thing. And sometimes it just brings up a blank screen over the music instead and hangs for a moment; sometimes that becomes a streaming service ad, sometimes it just hangs until I close the whole app.

I am betting that OSX Music will start doing that too if I upgrade to Catalina - one more reason to put that upgrade off until absolutely necessary.

Apple isn't alone in this though. I've been opening up the Kindle app a lot less lately ever since its home view changed from "here are all your books" to "here are some of your books and here are some books a lot of people are pre-ordering that we think you might wanna buy and here are some books we think you might wanna buy", especially since they launched that new view the same week a book with Trump's angry orange glare prominently featured on the cover got a shit-ton of pre-orders. Exactly what I wanna see when I'm looking for some relaxing bedtime reading, thanks Bezos.

[+] m463|6 years ago|reply
Interesting article - makes an assertion, backs it up with lots of third party references.