
The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware - bangonkeyboard
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2020/02/17/the-paywalled-garden-ios-is-adware/
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anko
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.

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chadlavi
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?

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stevestreza
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.

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chadlavi
Maybe I've drunk too much of the koolaid, because I have never noticed one of
these "ads". I don't use apple music or apple tv, and my phone has never
pushed these services on me. It's not like they toss an alert when I open
Spotify to ask me if I'd rather use Apple Music. Where are you getting served
these ads?

Are you talking about getting upsold to a paid apple music subscription while
listening to apple music for free? (Do they even have a free tier?) Or getting
shown an option to upgrade icloud storage when looking at icloud settings?
Because... those seem fair enough. Pay for the services you use.

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asiachick
I see the music ads. As one example if I click "Search" (which I do to search
my own music) even before I've typed anything there are "trending"
recommendations. As soon as I click to make the search active it defaults to
Apple Music, instead of Your Library. I switch to "Your Library" but for
whatever reason from time to time it ends up back on "Apple Music".

Other times I accidentally press the heart icon at the bottom thinking it's my
favorites but it's an ad is are "browse"

If I could replace the default music player I would.

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chadlavi
> even before I've typed anything there are "trending" recommendations

How is that an ad?

> As soon as I click to make the search active it defaults to Apple Music,
> instead of Your Library.

How is _that_ an ad? The apple music app defaults to searching the apple music
service.

> Other times I accidentally press the heart icon at the bottom thinking it's
> my favorites but it's an ad is are "browse"

I don't even know what that sentence means but that's the "for you"
recommendations section. Even if it doesn't work if you don't pay for Apple
Music, how is that an ad? This is a gated feature.

I agree that it doesn't sound like the apple music app is a good experience
for you, but none of those are ads.

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asiachick
Recommending something I have to pay for not on my phone is an ad by almost
any definition of ads. When I go to google and search I get many
recommendations which are ads. All of the results in the Music app are links
to sign up for Apple Music. That's an ad. If those recommendations were only
for music on my phone they would not be ads. If those recommendations were
just for random webpages that contain related music they would not be ads. But
as a non-subscriber to Apple Music they are all ads for Apple Music.

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taylodl
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).

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RandomWorker
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.

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grawprog
>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.

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redacted
Apple's iCloud upsell is far worse than Microsoft's to boot. To disable:

MS / Windows 10: Uninstall the preloaded OneDrive app in the standard way

Apple / macOS Catalina: Reboot to recovery, mount the system drive (avoiding
SIP etc), use Terminal to move a plist from the System LaunchAgents - named
"followupd", in case you thought it wouldn't be hidden / obfuscated. Unmount
and reboot, praying you didn't break your OS. Then delete a few preference
files for System Preferences.app. Oh, and likely have to repeat the process
after updates

Which one would you be comfortable helping a less technical person do? And
given the trajectory of macOS, I wouldn't be surprised if they close that
"loophole" soon...

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asiachick
I actually kind of feel like there is some false advertising around iCloud. If
think the wording has changed over time but it arguably implies you get 5gig
of storage when you buy an apple device. Except you don't get 5gig of storage
PER device. you get 5gig of storage per account. So if you buy 4 devices (Mac,
iPhone, iPad, AppleTV) it _seems_ like you should be able to get 1 account
with 20 gig of storage or 2 accounts with 10gig, etc. But if all those devices
are for the same person you only get 5gig.

I know the wording used to be something along the lines of "every iPhone comes
with 5gig of icloud storage". The new wording is "iCloud is built into every
Apple device ... Everyone gets 5GB of free iCloud storage to start"

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samwestdev
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.

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RodoBobJon
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.

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egypturnash
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.

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m463
Interesting article - makes an assertion, backs it up with lots of third party
references.

