I get Apple are looking at doing this tastefully but this is a slippery slope where bean-counters realise they can get extra revenue for little effort. Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles — except Apple upselling their own services and I’m honest not ok with that either.
If I wanted my hardware to be subsidised by advertisers then I’d have stuck with Android.
This used to be true, but they have been focusing very heavily on services, and on ads to a lesser degree for quite a few years to pursue greater profits. & It's clear that this trend will not stop.
> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles
I pay for Apple One and I am furious about their ham fisted inclusion of easily the lowest quality ads in Apple News Premium, and to have included them to such a degree that they are a major distraction.
What part of a Pixel is subsidized by advertisers? Are you one of those people that ridiculously believe flagship and midrange Android phones are plastered with ads? Have you even used an Android phone recently?
It already inadvertently does! The controls Apple has on "who can upload data to Maps" has been gamed for years.
Type something like "Double Bedroom" in London - You get Booking.com SEO (MEO?) spam! I had to do some qualitative analysis of map results (don't ask) and we decided to drop it as a data partner - there are 10's of example of search terms like this for Apple Maps that I found without much effort!
Apple seems to build things that are very fundamentally unsound - but pass surface inspection. The article at the top of HN right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953) is another great showcase of this flaw in Apples processes, the really don't go super deep on good software.
Three other places this shows up - Gaming, Swift and Machine Learning.
- Gaming: I have heard 3 times in the past 15 years that Apple have made some fundamental change to their OS to support Desktop class gaming like Windows has - and every time those efforts fall flat. Every time it happens they get huge amount of kudos and press, the effort fizzles out, then they do it again after a few years.
- Swift: I have heard of two separate efforts to make Swift code bases work on Linux, both of which failed. Server support has died. They throw "support" libs over the wall, and don't fix them when they don't work. Swift UI is a canonical study in not spending enough time planning.
- ML: People are getting excited about MLX at the moment, and I see it as a great mirror of what they do with Gaming - some shallowly supported, not fundamentally sound, passion project gets some steam, they make big announcement, effort dies in a year and shuffled under the carpet.
Gross. The slow intrusion of ads into more and more places might raise revenue a little bit, but tarnishes Apple's brand image. Apple News is already a revolting app, only somewhat saved by the fact that Google News is even worse.
I've already decided that my personal line in the sand is when they replace the scenic screensavers on Apple TV with ads, something they're already toeing the line with in the newly added Peanuts screensavers. At that point Apple has lost the plot and I want nothing to do with their products anymore.
The peanuts collab is not an advertisement nor is it a collab. Apple purchased the rights to the Peanuts franchise years ago and they are using the characters as part of their product design. If they are advertising (which they are not), they are not receiving any money for it, and Apple themselves have nothing to capitalize on these "ads" considering there is no product being sold. The Peanuts movie had a weak response and nearly everybody has already watched the Peanuts animated shorts. So no, it is not advertising.
I'm in line with most of what you said, but I gotta disagree about the peanuts collab. I grew up with peanuts and I just love having it there on the tv.
I love Apple Maps for navigation. Blows google maps out of the water. Clearer instructions. More awareness of lanes. Generally much better UX.
However their business search is barely worth using. Frequently out of date. Missing hours. Reviews from yelp which are inferior to googles, and need to leave to app to browse.
If they want to make ad revenue it will be on the search side and they have a long way to go.
It really makes you wonder if anyone who works on the driving directions of Google Maps has ever used the product. The two most maddening dysfunctions of their driving directions are 1) displaying and holding a waypoint that is unavoidable, such as "merge onto Highway Whatever" when there are no other options, and 2) holding a direction such as "take exit 42" until the very last moment, even when there is a choice to be made immediately afterward, where you really want guidance about whether to bear left or right at a divergence. Combine them both and you get Google Maps repeatedly telling you to do something you can't avoid at the time when it should have been telling you the next turn.
i'm not sure how far you've tried to drive with apple maps. but from what i can tell, apple maps is better for navigation around NYC and SF. not so much when you get out of the few cities where it's better.
even around vancouver, which i would have thought might be a big enough place to get some love from apple, i still get frustrated with apple maps directions. google maps might not have all the shiny bits that apple maps has, but the directions are always right, or at least close enough to right that i'm not mad about it.
When Apple built their Maps it was presumably easy to justify the cost because it was dangerous to stay reliant on Google for something so essential to mobile. But maintaining a useful map system has got to be fantastically expensive as well and it's hard to imagine that anyone is really buying an Apple device because of Maps. Therefore, ads of some variety are pretty much guaranteed.
This argument would have worked except that Apple collects its map data largely from you, the iPhone user, without your knowledge or consent. For example, the live traffic data in Apple and Google maps is incredibly useful, except that they gather this data from aggregated motion and GPS data from users themselves. If you are driving and see through your app that there is traffic ahead, it is because Apple is tapping the phones of the drivers directly in front of you and uploading that data to a central server. So Apple is running their service off of the device you paid for and extracting without your knowledge or informed consent. Now, they plan to place ads into this service as well so that you can pay for the service with your data in two ways.
Beyond this, Apple uses the location data of its hundreds of millions of users to identify paths like sidewalks, parking lots, etc. Essentially, as you walk/drive, you are drawing Apple's maps for them. Apple is taking this data from you for free without any compensation and largely without informing you. So now, it's clear Apple has been building out much of its map data with free labor, and they only send out their little envoy vehicles for data gathering in areas where they do not have enough free labor to do it for them.
I guess this and other dark patterns, there’s no point to using Apple products after all. I was hoping the premium price gets you privacy - but what they’re giving is not so much privacy as much as a walled garden where THEY can violate your privacy and keep the wins for themselves.
Apple Maps always refers you to Yelp, which in the past extorted businesses for good ratings. I avoided them like the plague, so I can't say if they're any better.
When Maps was updated in the last 3 or 4 iOS updates to make the nearby search result list much larger it was obvious that ads were coming. The UX of "search for x nearby" has suffered because where as before you could fit ~2x as many results.
Why are people outraged? Apple is an advertising company and in order to sustain their growth they need to expand and proliferate their advertising to all of their products.
All the Apple ecosystem is subsidized by the price of the iPhones and Macs. There is no excuse for putting ads in such expensive products. And it's one reason why I'm moving away from Apple but that's another story.
Although maps are very useful, for me it is the street view functionality that I find the most useful—especially if I am driving somewhere I have not been before. I can rehearse key points of the drive, see landmarks, exit numbers, and so on.
> I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads.
Probably because people don't click on ads while using Apple/Google maps to drive somewhere. The app has one job: give me directions. I'm not interested in enshitification of these products.
Plus, they already gather lots of data about you, which is more valuable than showing ads.
I just tried OpenStreetMap and was awfully disappointed. It's "just a map". I can't click on businesses, bus stops, etc. to get extra information about them. It's more like a digital version of paper maps I used to have eons ago.
People forget that what makes products "sticky" is the amount of stuff added to them by the users over the years.
How did you use OpenStreetMap? If you're just browsing it via the website, you can click the query button and then select a map item for more information.
(Just to be clear, I am not suggesting the UX or data on OSM competes with Google Maps. But I did go and click on a Chase Bank near me and got the phone number and hours, just to be sure that I wasn't making anything up. There are OSM apps that provide a nicer experience including navigation features.)
Historically, the project has not focused on making openstreetmap.org an end user mapping tool. Good or bad, that's the history, it's shown a flat slippy map without much interaction.
Features often do have additional information, but broadly speaking, it's pretty incomplete and wouldn't be comparable to Apple/Google maps. There's areas where the data is probably better than commercial maps, but that isn't the case on average.
You tried openstreetmap.org. That isn’t a consumer mapping site, it’s the community site for the OSM project. The idea is that the data is published as open source for other apps/sites to build on.
The plain OpenStreetMap web site isn’t very user friendly. Have you tried Organic Maps? It’s an OSM app for Android and iOS. It’s probably the most user friendly OSM app right now.
The entire paradigm difference or "features" which you are lacking is exactly the way the providers want you to funnel you - compare Organic maps (using osm), which only allow you to browse and navigate, to gm or am, which will always prefer you to be served with opening hours and ads of their partners, then only show GO LEFT, WARM, WARMER, you're almost there, now CONSUME&BUY!
And come back to our app again if you need to get a taxi or buy a fare... cmon, sweet convenience!
Then to wake up in a reality where you forgot why north was showing on top of the screen, you prefer it to turn map orientation with your body movements and ofc whisper more dopamine inducing advices.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|1 year ago|reply
If I wanted my hardware to be subsidised by advertisers then I’d have stuck with Android.
[+] [-] staplung|1 year ago|reply
The App Store is already filled with paid search results.
[+] [-] wirybeige|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] voisin|1 year ago|reply
I pay for Apple One and I am furious about their ham fisted inclusion of easily the lowest quality ads in Apple News Premium, and to have included them to such a degree that they are a major distraction.
[+] [-] VHRanger|1 year ago|reply
His one significant win as a CEO was making the profit margins on apple processors higher.
[+] [-] ryao|1 year ago|reply
I paid a premium for Apple hardware in part to not have this nonsense, yet they did it anyway after the fact. :/
[+] [-] kernal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] AJRF|1 year ago|reply
Type something like "Double Bedroom" in London - You get Booking.com SEO (MEO?) spam! I had to do some qualitative analysis of map results (don't ask) and we decided to drop it as a data partner - there are 10's of example of search terms like this for Apple Maps that I found without much effort!
Apple seems to build things that are very fundamentally unsound - but pass surface inspection. The article at the top of HN right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953) is another great showcase of this flaw in Apples processes, the really don't go super deep on good software.
Three other places this shows up - Gaming, Swift and Machine Learning.
- Gaming: I have heard 3 times in the past 15 years that Apple have made some fundamental change to their OS to support Desktop class gaming like Windows has - and every time those efforts fall flat. Every time it happens they get huge amount of kudos and press, the effort fizzles out, then they do it again after a few years.
- Swift: I have heard of two separate efforts to make Swift code bases work on Linux, both of which failed. Server support has died. They throw "support" libs over the wall, and don't fix them when they don't work. Swift UI is a canonical study in not spending enough time planning.
- ML: People are getting excited about MLX at the moment, and I see it as a great mirror of what they do with Gaming - some shallowly supported, not fundamentally sound, passion project gets some steam, they make big announcement, effort dies in a year and shuffled under the carpet.
And fans of Apple keep falling for it!
[+] [-] dmart|1 year ago|reply
I've already decided that my personal line in the sand is when they replace the scenic screensavers on Apple TV with ads, something they're already toeing the line with in the newly added Peanuts screensavers. At that point Apple has lost the plot and I want nothing to do with their products anymore.
[+] [-] aykay55|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unsnap_biceps|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scosman|1 year ago|reply
However their business search is barely worth using. Frequently out of date. Missing hours. Reviews from yelp which are inferior to googles, and need to leave to app to browse.
If they want to make ad revenue it will be on the search side and they have a long way to go.
[+] [-] jeffbee|1 year ago|reply
It really makes you wonder if anyone who works on the driving directions of Google Maps has ever used the product. The two most maddening dysfunctions of their driving directions are 1) displaying and holding a waypoint that is unavoidable, such as "merge onto Highway Whatever" when there are no other options, and 2) holding a direction such as "take exit 42" until the very last moment, even when there is a choice to be made immediately afterward, where you really want guidance about whether to bear left or right at a divergence. Combine them both and you get Google Maps repeatedly telling you to do something you can't avoid at the time when it should have been telling you the next turn.
[+] [-] notatoad|1 year ago|reply
even around vancouver, which i would have thought might be a big enough place to get some love from apple, i still get frustrated with apple maps directions. google maps might not have all the shiny bits that apple maps has, but the directions are always right, or at least close enough to right that i'm not mad about it.
[+] [-] staplung|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aykay55|1 year ago|reply
Beyond this, Apple uses the location data of its hundreds of millions of users to identify paths like sidewalks, parking lots, etc. Essentially, as you walk/drive, you are drawing Apple's maps for them. Apple is taking this data from you for free without any compensation and largely without informing you. So now, it's clear Apple has been building out much of its map data with free labor, and they only send out their little envoy vehicles for data gathering in areas where they do not have enough free labor to do it for them.
[+] [-] blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] k310|1 year ago|reply
Or worse.
[+] [-] hosteur|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] echelon_musk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kernal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] callc|1 year ago|reply
Directions (garmin), finding businesses and places (yellow pages), pinning places (like a big map on the wall with pins), trip time estimation, etc
I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads.
[+] [-] JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B|1 year ago|reply
All the Apple ecosystem is subsidized by the price of the iPhones and Macs. There is no excuse for putting ads in such expensive products. And it's one reason why I'm moving away from Apple but that's another story.
[+] [-] Wistar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] behnamoh|1 year ago|reply
Probably because people don't click on ads while using Apple/Google maps to drive somewhere. The app has one job: give me directions. I'm not interested in enshitification of these products.
Plus, they already gather lots of data about you, which is more valuable than showing ads.
[+] [-] bdangubic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] behnamoh|1 year ago|reply
People forget that what makes products "sticky" is the amount of stuff added to them by the users over the years.
[+] [-] jchw|1 year ago|reply
(Just to be clear, I am not suggesting the UX or data on OSM competes with Google Maps. But I did go and click on a Chase Bank near me and got the phone number and hours, just to be sure that I wasn't making anything up. There are OSM apps that provide a nicer experience including navigation features.)
[+] [-] maxerickson|1 year ago|reply
Features often do have additional information, but broadly speaking, it's pretty incomplete and wouldn't be comparable to Apple/Google maps. There's areas where the data is probably better than commercial maps, but that isn't the case on average.
[+] [-] yborg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maelito|1 year ago|reply
OSM is a database, and osm.org is the database browser.
End-User apps are Organic Maps, osmapp.Org, and the one that I'm building cartes.app. I hope to internationalise soon.
[+] [-] Doctor_Fegg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] derekmorr|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] koziserek|1 year ago|reply
And come back to our app again if you need to get a taxi or buy a fare... cmon, sweet convenience!
Then to wake up in a reality where you forgot why north was showing on top of the screen, you prefer it to turn map orientation with your body movements and ofc whisper more dopamine inducing advices.
[+] [-] sethd|1 year ago|reply