> 4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.
Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.
Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.
I have never said and rarely thought this before, but I really hope the person who came up with / approved this idea got fired for it. It’s rare that you see something so unbelievably stupid and destructive of the shared pool of trust, which Apple spent 30 years building, only for one self-interested PM to blow a chunk of it up for no gain.
If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.
The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.
I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act that includes Smartphone notifications. And gatekeepers like Apple should probably simply be banned from placing any advertisements in push notifications.
The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.
And of course Google practically invented these things.
I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.
I ended up buying tickets but the Fandango checkout flow had so many pitfalls that I doubt this converted very many people .At least 10 screens including one saying “sorry you can’t use Apple Pay to redeem the coupon” (you had to go through a further checkout and then choose Apple Pay ).
They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .
As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.
This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
Apple also pushed a notification through the AppleTV app. I thought I had all notifications turned off (I turn off notifications from most apps on all devices, just because you think I need to see your messages doesn't mean I think that and most apps do not need notifications). Quite irritating. That was the point where I decided I would not see F1 in theaters, and if I ever do it'll be free streaming.
I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.
The irony is Apple is spending a fortune on their Secure with Apple marketing campaign, the one that ends with the Apple logo turning into a lock that clicks shut, and they’ve undone that, plus some, with the F1 campaign. This is a blunder of epic proportions and is illustrative of a company no longer in touch with their core identity and principles.
"Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you."
I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.
[+] [-] em500|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|8 months ago|reply
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
[+] [-] somenameforme|8 months ago|reply
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] hshshshshsh|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] diskzero|8 months ago|reply
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
[+] [-] jwr|8 months ago|reply
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
[+] [-] jmsdnns|8 months ago|reply
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
[+] [-] yomismoaqui|8 months ago|reply
Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...
[+] [-] AdamN|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] surgical_fire|8 months ago|reply
Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.
[+] [-] hcarvalhoalves|8 months ago|reply
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
[+] [-] librasteve|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] necovek|8 months ago|reply
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
[+] [-] alwa|8 months ago|reply
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
[+] [-] Zafira|8 months ago|reply
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
[+] [-] destitude|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] graemep|8 months ago|reply
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
[+] [-] ttcbj|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dubcanada|8 months ago|reply
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
[+] [-] skeeter2020|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|8 months ago|reply
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
[+] [-] thrashh|8 months ago|reply
With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.
That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.
[+] [-] unknown|8 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] epolanski|8 months ago|reply
Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.
And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.
[+] [-] caycep|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DidYaWipe|8 months ago|reply
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
[+] [-] ls-a|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] t8sr|8 months ago|reply
If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.
[+] [-] ksec|8 months ago|reply
The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.
[+] [-] briandw|8 months ago|reply
Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.
[+] [-] andrewinardeer|8 months ago|reply
With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.
As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.
[+] [-] avhception|8 months ago|reply
Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".
Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.
[+] [-] lozenge|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jb1991|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JimDabell|8 months ago|reply
The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.
This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.
This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.
[+] [-] x62Bh7948f|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Zufriedenheit|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lukeschlather|8 months ago|reply
The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.
And of course Google practically invented these things.
[+] [-] nyc_pizzadev|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] epolanski|8 months ago|reply
I'm sad they make the only decent laptop out there, for everything else I'm glad to be out their crap wallet garden.
[+] [-] tonymet|8 months ago|reply
They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .
[+] [-] KingOfCoders|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|8 months ago|reply
It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.
Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.
[+] [-] burnte|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|8 months ago|reply
That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] taylodl|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] steveBK123|8 months ago|reply
This is coming from a guy who generally fawned over every new iterative release as if it was revelatory for 20 years.
[+] [-] MrDresden|8 months ago|reply
I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.
Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.