Apple is using their dominant (monopoly) position in mobile devices to shut down competitors in another industry (advertising) in order to drive growth in their own advertising platform, got it.
Here's an exhaustive list of companies running ads in the Settings app:
1. Apple - examples include Apple Arcade, AppleCare+, Fitness+
I was so shocked when I saw an ad in Settings I took a screenshot. It's dated December 8th, 2020. Prosecution of Apple for abuse should have started at least that long ago.
I 100% believe that's the case, but I'm curious about the details.
I think integration with a specific product is ok with branding and a link to their website. Like you'd have FitBit, Nike+, or whatever under a fitness tab in settings.
But it sounds closer to the banner ads on the bottom of the screen like a lot of free android apps do.
It's not "ads" per se, but when you are eligible for a promotion such as free Apple TV+, Music, etc - there's an option all the way at the top that appears. You can open them and press "decline" and that particular promotion goes away.
Not great (especially considering the services are shit), but very tame compared to the advertising you usually see.
I'm sure they did thorough research on what "temperature" to set initially. They've probably already completed the research on the most effective way to turn up the "heat". Once you have a mechanism like that, it only makes sense to get the most value out of it. It's a dark pattern.
They certainly haven't done it yet, though some things viewed in this perspective seem on the spectrum. The iOS 14 change of tracking preferences to opt-in absolutely put a knife in Meta's advertising business.
And, sure, it can be viewed as a privacy feature, and that's great. So what happens next year when Apple rolls out their own user-targetted ad system based on the same tracking data they disallowed to competitors?
It's a slippery slope for sure. Apple deserves the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see how anyone would look at this as good news.
Apple doesn't have to even roll out a user-targeted ad system.
All they have to do is offer a buying platform where you can track conversion on Apple devices and software better. In other words, they don't have to offer more user-level accuracy to the end buyer, they simply need to measure campaigns more accurately on iOS (a bit of a simplification but not much).
That alone will make their DSP a dominant player in the industry.
Especially a trillion dollar company who routinely exploits foreign labor [1] not to mention Apple still collects your data, so long as it is "aggregated and annonymized" [2].
The article in [2] says that Apple is backtracking on their privacy policy, without ever specifying what stated Apple policy they were not adhering to.
"Ask Apps not to Track" was about an advertiser you did not have a relationship with, building profiles across multiple organizations to profile you without any consent. So a policy was created where apps did have to prompt, and to make it a business requirement to work with Apple. If you track without explicit OS-gathered user consent, you can be kicked from the store. AFAIK, even if you do so via means like IP address correlation.
But the feature wasn't "privacy", it was "ask apps not to track". It is very clearly specified about whether you want multiple organizations to correlate you. It is not meant to be a policy to limit e.g. what the Meta learns about you while you are interacting within Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
That's a deeply cynical way to view things, and exactly what people here are afraid of happening.
Clearly the iOS marketing of the past few years has led people to believe that Apple is opposed to advertising technologies that rely on persistently-stored and correlated user behavior, because that persistent store can be plausibly (and terribly) misused.
And remember that the misuse itself hasn't really happened anywhere. People like to complain about Facebook and Google's (also Amazon's, and TikTok is in this conversation now too) accumulation of this data, but so far the actual abuses haven't happened. Tech companies have been, on the whole, actually pretty good stewards of this stuff. But people hate that they have it anyway, and mistrust them.
> Under what definition of monopoly does Apple possess one?
Market power is defined by pricing power (empirical absence of substitution effect), not share of some descriptive market (where you could always get any result you wanted just by changing the way you divide market descriptions.)
Then say market power instead of monopoly and no one will ever dispute that. Of course Apple can and does set the price of its products above their marginal cost. Doesn't have quite the ring to it as "monopoly" though.
This is such banal point to make when Apple combined with Google have Duoloply. With Apple's advantage in App store spending Apple basically dictates whatever they want to App developers. So saying that they have monopoly like powers is completely and entirely correct.
That isn’t the definition of monopoly as stated by Wikipedia[1]: “a market with the "absence of competition", creating a situation where a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular thing.” I think calling them a monopoly is a real stretch.
> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.
> Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns.
>Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages.
which seems to lend real credence to the argument that Apple would (most likely) not be understood as a monopoly in the courts. Sure it could happen, but lots of unlikely things can happen that still say won't happen because of how humans communicate.
> which seems to lend real credence to the argument that Apple would (most likely) not be understood as a monopoly in the courts
The issue isn't marketshare, the issue is defining the market within which marketshare is looked at. If you don't use some consistent objective defenition of market boundaries, you can pick or choose any result you want by how you describe the market applicable to any given case.
While it isn’t perfect, “the space within which consumer substitution in response to changes like pricing occurs from the given good or service” is a rough description of what market boundary determination in US antitrust/competition law aims at.
It's also, for obvious reasons, often the most contentious issue in antitrust cases, with a whole lot of market data thrown up by every interested party aimed at proving what the right market boundary is. If you just assume the boundary is some popular market description without interrogating whether consumer substitution for the given product really occurs across that whole descriptive market space (and, on the other side, only within that space), you are really just skipping over the most important question in antitrust.
If you're stretching "market power" and "consumer substitution" this far it seems like a whole lot of fashion brands would be "monopolies". Tesla. The BMW/Mercedes/Audi luxury German auto bands in the US. Google Search. Macs. Thinkpads. There are SO MANY market sub-slices where some brands have pricing power over others. Where do you draw the "how often do people have to switch" line? Some of use have switched multiple times between Android and iOS in the last decade, after all.
If there's anything that's an industry outlier, it's a FAANG, not to mention the most profitable company in the history of the world since the Dutch East India Company.
Apple has 60% of the mobile OS market share in the US, and even more when it comes to mobile app distribution. Google has 40%, both in effect are a duopoly.
I mean they are the only person who can legally provide adds and payment services on iPhones. Apple exhibits a huge amount of control over there platform in name of defending there customers but give little choice to the customer in how that's delivered
> That isn’t the definition of monopoly as stated by Wikipedia[1]: “a market with the "absence of competition",
It exactly is, if you further define “market” empirically by consumer behavior demonstrating products actually compete with each other rather than analytically based on some abstract comparison of features that make you think they should.
We have a good old fashioned concept of "relevant market".
> A relevant product market comprises all those products and/or services which are regarded as interchangeable or substitutable by the consumer by reason of the products’ characteristics, their prices and their intended use.
Are we able to substitute browser engine or app store in iOS? If not, then its app store itself can make of a single relevant market. This is so obvious to the level that even Apple knows they cannot avoid, so they're trying to make an argument that app store and browser engine are technically inseparable system service, not an interchangable product. (I strongly suspect that this is one of the reasons why we cannot get standard 4~6 weeks browser updates for Safari, decoupled from OS updates) EU doesn't seem to be very happy with that argument so they passed the Digital Market Act in response. And US is preparing a bipartisan bill similar to DMA as well.
Yeah, I know the actual process for defining market is much more complicated but this is the basic idea. Antitrust investigation is a largely economical, data driven process and you cannot simply say "Even in their best market, the U.S., iPhone holds just a smidge over 50%". I won't assert they're in a monopolistic position, but many regulators (especially in EU) believe in that.
You can buy a used game from a separate company and throw it in your nintendo no problem. You can use a different app store on Android or sideload. The Epic case was not a total loss - I do not agree personally
How many consoles will let you run games published without licensing enforced with code signing or such mechanisms? Bit harder to make an unlicensed game now than it used to be.
Profits. Apple has by far the lion share of profits and is able to leverage them to muscle into businesses. As iPhones are the premium devices one can reasonably argue Apple has a near monopoly of access to affluent eyeballs.
Apple, please listen. These platform dreams of controlling supply, demand and the underlying tech platform are dangerous. Likely to fail or if you succeed it will run anti-trust problems. But your biggest risk is distraction. The shiny new kids on block wagging the core business to the detriment of customers and shareholders.
Buying an iPhone is like buying a Costco membership. The argument is that you buy the device for the app ecosystem. If you want a different app ecosystem, you buy a different device.
I mean, that is what Apple wants to sell you, but that's really no different than Ford saying "You have to buy Ford gas and tires because this is a Ford ecosystem", in which we've told the car companies to screw right off, though this is coming back with electric vehicles in a bad way.
One of the other arguments here is that when it comes to games I can get a Nintendo, or an Xbox, or a PS5, or a PC that I can run Windows/Linux games on.
When it comes to phones we pretty much have a duopoly which means both groups can find it easy to manipulate the market to higher prices without indirect (illegal) signalling.
Luckily it looks like the EU is telling Apple to suck it and they'll have to open up app stores on their phones.
All of those gaming platforms have platform exclusives though, and pretty clearly can exert significant influence on game developers due to their ability to determine what software runs on their devices. I'm not really sure how the duopoly of smartphones is significantly different than the handful of competitors in the gaming market.
There are thousands of competitors in the gaming market.
There is also a big difference between a company saying "I am only going to make this for the Apple app store" and saying "You can only have the Apple app store".
I would only make it illegal to sign an exclusive contract. The market would handle the rest, unless the platform they targeted had unique capabilities that other platforms didn't (e.g you game will only work with on a touch screen).
Buying a Costco membership doesn't mean you can only shop at Costco though. If Wal-Mart has a better price on X or if Mom and Pop shop has item Y that Costco doesn't carry you can still buy them.
And buying an iPhone doesn't mean you can't also buy an Android phone. The analogy you're looking for is that Costco does not indiscriminately allow all sellers to sell products at a Costco warehouse.
Monopoly means lack of competition, not lack of consumer choice. High end consumers prefer Apple devices, but nothing stops them or anyone from going out to buy any Android device they want, or any PC they want.
Sure there is, Apple has done the same kind of bundling Microsoft got busted for. Switch from Safari to Firefox on your desktop and now your browser won't sync tabs to your phone unless you use the fake webkit-in-sheeps-clothing version of Firefox that Apple has mandated and maintains insane control over (no real ad blockers, only limited ones).
Microsoft never got “busted” in the US for bundling IE and absolutely nothing change. Microsoft got “busted” for forcing OEMs to pay for Windows licenses even for computers that didn’t ship with Windows.
Would you actually want a computer to ship with nothing?
Also your other talking point about no “real adblockers” is at least a year out of date. Safari has supported standard extensions for over a year not just JSON based content blocking rules.
The alternatives weren't nothing or Windows. OEMs had other options even in the 90s. Would OS\2 have done a little better in the marketplace to actually carve out a niche? Would desktop Linux be a better experience since OEMs could have had machines designed and targeted with Linux in mind back in 1997? Would BeOS still be around?
Had OEMs not be forced to pay for Windows licences for all computers shipped regardless of whether it actually included Windows or not perhaps they wouldn't have shipped Windows so damn much?
1. Microsoft was held accountable and forced to stop making OEMs pay Windows licenses for computers that didn’t ship with Windows.
As an aside, there is no “Windows tax”. OEMs make more than enough by bundling third party crapware it more than pays for Windows. But third party OSs - especially Linux was never going to be big on the desktop without third party commercial support. The only Unix[1] operating system that has ever gained any traction on the desktop is MacOS and Apple makes sure they bend over backwards to keep Microsoft and Adobe happy.
I sold IBM Aptivas briefly in the 90s that came with OS/2 at Radio Shack. They were not going to overtake the world.
2. As far as “bundling” in 2022, would you suggest any platform come without a browser? Macs, Windows, ChromeOS computers, iOS and Android all come with browsers. What would the consumer experience be like if all platforms just came with an empty desktop and they had to download everything?
Maybe Linux would have gained more traction if OEMs were shipping it? But instead they had to pay for a Windows license anyways so may as well ship that...
And had it shipped on OEM machines that might have attracted more third party devs too. And they could have sold crapware if they wanted as well. It's impossible to say for certain that MS's policies had no impact on the desktop computer space.
As for 2, well that depends how hard is it to get a browser? Can I just open a store or repo and grab one or do I have to sneakernet it on there? I don't think it has to be a bad experience to have a barebones system if done right.
Since the 90s, platforms really didn’t have a chance that didn’t run Microsoft Office and Adobe. Remember that MS was on stage with Apple when the first Mac was introduced.
Vertical market apps are going to target the computer with the largest market share. You’re going to be hard pressed to tell your local dentist office they need to run Linux to run the equivalent of their VB based software.
Most people already complain when their first launch experience requires them to update their OS - mostly consoles. I can’t imagine telling my mom, to download a browser, email client, dialer, messaging app, calendar, contacts software, notes app, etc.
Dollar share of a market is 9ne measure of market share that can be used; and a large enough market can be split into segments when applying monopoly tests.
And I’m sure you have case law that the high priced lawyers couldn’t find that would have convinced the judge in the Epic trial that Apple was a monopoly?
Well, I would assume whatever it was, a bunch of high priced lawyers would have a better strategy and didn’t miss a line of argument that was found by a random person on HN.
Holding a monopoly and engaging in anti-competitive behavior are entirely different.
The app store being closed and not allowing 3rd party stores would be considered anti-competitive. They have a 100% monopoly on the ios application market.
I don't think they're doing much anti-competitive in the phone hardware space though.
The problem becomes when people buy the phone specifically because they hate the advertising industry, and Apple is the only player attempting to make the situation a little better.
But they aren't. They're making it harder for other advertisers because they want their cut. Apple's Hide My Email was a perfect example. It builds barriers to tracking for third parties, while Apple themselves can still track you just fine. Apple makes everyone's tracking opt in, while theirs is opt out.
Apple defines 'tracking' as cross-party. Apple (and Google) don't care as much about tracking as they put effort into building their own first-party relationship with you.
Apple doesn't need to scrub the internet for information to show you ads in the App Store - they have your authenticated account where you have bought other apps. Similarly, Google doesn't need to build a clandestine profile for you if they have your Youtube and search history going back to when you created your gmail account.
Google and Apple typically have little desire to share any of that information with third parties (in either direction). Without a need to implement third-party tracking, features like Hide My Email don't really affect them. However, thats not a privileged position in the operating system (Google doesn't really have such a position on iOS). Thats just a strong relationship with the person involved - something both companies have been establishing for decades.
Both companies are also heavily invested in future tech where ad decisions being based on local data rather than sharing that data to make a decision on a server, and in conversions being tracked by an anonymized process.
But this means that you are baking a certain amount of business logic into the browser. So, in addition to advertising providers needing to do substantial work to leverage these new features, they also might have a mismatch between what their product does today and the proposed browser schemes.
In addition to making this a remarkably complex technical problem, it is also why Google's attempts to block third party cookies has been held up by regulators for years.
The difficulty is that they've created a situation where only Apple can track you. And now they're creating a bigger ads business. This sure looks like using dominance in one market to increase share in another, which EU law tends to regard as anti-competitive.
Apple is already advertising on the App Store, significantly hurting the experience. Excited to see how they're going to kill their biggest advantage over other platforms (basic respect for the user in certain areas).
This need to be heard loud and clear. The main reason to use iProducts is the non-ad experience. App Store is already a horrible experience with their ads. If this expands, I don't see why one shouldn't move to Google.
Eh, it's overblown. I use Android, and I don't see ads.
I tried moving to iOS for the bleeding-edge app permissions and privacy protections. But because they forbid any browser besides Safari/WebKit, the iOS version of Firefox cannot run ordinary extensions.
I tried, but I could not find a content blocker that was nearly as effective as uBlock+noScript. So I'm back on Android, where I can browse the web in peace.
I use an nvidia shield TV for many many years. It was perfect, after having tried raspberry pis and cuboxes and all manner of shit low perf SBCs as a HTPC.
Mid 2021, Google forcefully replaced the launcher/home screen for all android TV devices, such that the first 1/3 to 1/2 of the screen is taken up by an ad. You can't disable it, you can't remove it, there is _nothing_ you can do about it. Every time you use this home theatre device, the first thing you're presented with is an ad. I paid for that device and the software on it. I paid for youtube premium to avoid ads. I paid for google drive space to store my data. It's not like I was getting a free lunch.
I've got an Apple TV now, and an iPhone as well - replaced my OnePlus.
I use chrome for work unfortunately, yesterday I was _delighted_ to see that Google had very helpfully placed an add for their new wireless earphones on my new tab page. Very cool.
Check out Orion[1]. They claim to run web extensions on iOS. Apparently they ported many extension APIs to work with WebKit, which sounds pretty impressive.
I can’t vouch for their iOS browser (yet) but I’ve been using their Mac browser and it’s been pleasant.
> We’re working on it! We’ve begun with some of our components and intend to open more in the future.
Forking WebKit, porting hundreds of APIs and writing a browser app from scratch has been challenging for our small team. Properly maintaining an open-source project takes time and resources we’re short on at the moment, so if you want to contribute at this time, please consider becoming a beta tester.
A really bad implementation of the WebExtension API (many missing features compared to other browsers and next to no relevant documentation) that also requires wrapping each extension with an iOS app and distributing it on the App Store.
It's nice but has one major flaw of all webkit browsers. If you speed up a video, the audio will crap out and become tinny. Especially hard to hear speech. Only Firefox, Chrome get it right. It's a shame Safari / Orion still have such a fundamental flaw.
Yeah, I'm pretty happy with how Google tends to follow Apple's better ideas, but Apple has usually been the leader in privacy innovations.
It's frustrating. They make fantastic hardware, but their software leaves a lot to be desired, and they are extremely insistent on maintaining control over the devices that they sell. The M1s look like a small step in the right direction, but they have a lot of lost trust to rebuild.
> Yeah, I'm pretty happy with how Google tends to follow Apple's better ideas
they just innovate in different areas. and they borrow from each other all the time. Android introduced multi-tasking, notifications, PiP, widgets, etc. iOS introduced the app screen, app store, gesture navigation, fingerprint unlock, etc. I think Android tends to cater towards power user features (like PiP and multi-tasking) whereas iOS tends to focus on UX (like gesture navigation).
I'm looking forward to trying it out, but realistically it's gonna be running on low single digit percentage of all Android phones for at least 2 years. iOS 16 will be on 90+% of iOS devices by October...
I'm probably going have to buy a newer Android phone to be able to install Android13, I doubt the Lineage crowd are going to bother building a version to run on even my newest Android phone - at least not anytime soon.
I am not sure I understand who you are blaming for this. Google will update its Pixel devices just like Apple updates its iPhones.
If Samsung and other phone makers don't push Android 13 on their current phones, then that's not Google's problem.
> I'm looking forward to trying it out, but realistically it's gonna be running on low single digit percentage of all Android phones for at least 2 years.
Good point about the platform but you have a personal choice to get the Pixel or other phone that runs the latest Android its benefits. No different than getting an iPhone.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. It's more like Windows (a thousand vendors, each with their own config) vs Mac (one vendor, a small handful of configs).
Except it's even worse than that in the Android world because different vendors produce not just their own drivers, but their own UIs and apps that override the defaults. There's not just one Android but one for every major vendor, and thing like calendars, photos, messages, voice assistants, files, accounts, etc. can't easily be shared between them. I have a Pixel and my partner a Samsung, and we can never figure out how to share things with each other because every vendor's Android is so different.
That is a direct result of Google releasing Android under a certain model of openness, trying to catch up with iOS when it was first released and needing to give phone vendors a reason to adopt it. It got really bad for a while and they tried to rein it in with Play phones and the Google One phones and the Pixel line, but the market is still incredibly fragmented, especially between the Samsung, HTC, Google, and other major vendor variants.
Meanwhile on my iPad and Mac, everything is just seamless. After a decade of Pixels, I'm gonna switch to an iPhone soon, just because iMessage is still so much better and the carriers don't really seem to care about RCS. Android has like two dozen chat and messaging programs, all of which suck in various ways, while iOS has had one superior one all these years. Centralized control can make your platform a lot cleaner.
The fragmentation does nothing to impair your own ability to use app permissions in Android 13. You only need Android 13 on your phone. No network effect.
As for communication apps, there is exactly one great app for both Android and iPhone. It's the same app: Signal.
For those of us old enough to remember television, cable TV also started out as a premium experience that you pay for, that did not have ads.
Fast foward to the present, and cable TV is nothing but ads, you are the product, and you get to pay $XYZ/month for the privilege of being advertised to.
It's just a matter of time until Apple will be the cable TV of tech.
Just because you pay, or even pay a premium doesn't mean you aren't the product. When quarterly growth expected by shareholders cannot be met by getting new users, it will be met by squeezing existing ones.
Why does this false meme keep coming up? Basic cable was never a premium experience. Cable was first introduced to bring network TV - with ads - to areas that couldn’t get over the air reception,
The only stations that were add free were the same premium channels that you have today like HBO.
Some of the earliest cable “superstations” were just rebroadcast of local channels with ads like TBS and WGzn.
In India, regulations stated that ads on cable TV pay-to-view were supposed to be limited / less than Free-to-Air channels. But it wasn't much different ...
The above was absolutely true in my market (Australia). The GP didn't appear to specify a country, so I'm unsure why you're trying to invalidate their experience.
I think the same will first happen to Netflix, but yeah if ios drops the premium experience then Apple will find that they will have to compete with all the other Android manufacturers.
It is already a pain point for apps, because they tend to assume that it is fine to make the same shitty app for both platforms. Apple really should be way more strict with the quality of apps they approve.
Because if Apple does ads and Google does ads then it would be categorically stupid to still pay the "halo tax" to Apple with incredibly inferior software and services. How about that? Or maybe for the blue bubble?
Because Google didn’t encrypt mobile phones until Android 6, and updates are up to the manufacturer, so Android’s security culture is globally appalling? in addition to permissions being intentionally mingled, for the benefit of advertisers. At least Apple pretends that the consumer is the client.
I’m an iOS user aside from a few attempts to switch. But I’ve never heard this accusation before that permissions are grouped in a way that benefit advertisers. Could you elaborate?
They might be talking about Bluetooth requiring location permissions, which seems reasonable to me. Their reasoning is that if you can scan for Bluetooth devices you can fingerprint and potentially get a location anyway.
Apple has made their own music app horrific to use -- every month it bricks when I open it and become unresponsive until it loads a fullscreen ad for their streaming service.
Even when I'm in low or no-data modes (like on a plane).
Every time that screen pops up I lose a little more sanity.
Also the job posting for Senior Manager for DSP (Demand-Side Platform) was probably supposed to be Antonio Garica Martinez before he got hired/fired/offer rescinded.
I wish someone would explain in simple terms what a demand-side platform is. If you are assumed to be fluent in ad business speak to work in the technology field that is kind of a depressing commentary.
A demand side platform (DSP) is a platform where you as an ad buyer can buy advertising space on one or more platforms. The ad spaces are standardized.
There are also supply-side platforms (SSP) where media companies sell space to advertisers. In this case the ad inventory is already there on the platform looking for places to get deployed.
Eh, not really. Google's DV360 platform (formerly known as DBM) is their DSP. Google Search is their platform for buying search inventory. Some of the display/video buying capabilities that exist in Google Ads exist in a much more advanced version in Dv360 via Search Ads 360.
The stack can get a bit convoluted.
If you want a high signal overview to various components of the ecosystem, I often point people to the Jounce "little black book" series as I find it does a decent job of summarizing the components and their use, as well as how data flows between and within them.
Google search is closely linked with Google Ads, Google’s own advertising service which allows advertisers to place search results for their website on search engine results. Google also allows Advertisers to let the ads be displayed on their Search partners as well.
Technically speaking, Google Ads is a DSP.
Google search is a place where ads shown along with Search results.
ELI5: Apple pretended to shut down their ad division. But they were preparing to relaunch it and now are ready to do so. It will mine your personal data that it has been collecting for decades now (while claiming to care about your privacy), and allow advertisers to exploit you better with the "insights" on you that their ad platform will deliver. Rest all is PR and marketing bullshit to ensure Apple doesn't face a backlash for this.
> It will mine your personal data that it has been collecting for decades now (while claiming to care about your privacy), and allow advertisers to exploit you better with the "insights" on you that their ad platform will deliver.
Do you have a credible basis for this, or is this pure conjecture?
Edit: while writing this, my understanding was undermined by an adjacent comment. If sibling comment is accurate and I’m not, I apologize and agree that the concept is needlessly opaque.
My understanding from reading the Wikipedia article[1] is that it’s a marketing-specific suite for analytics and competitive ad-buying. As a layperson, I’m understanding it as something like a bidding system for ad space, combined with analytics specifically tailored to that, and designed to be highly interactive/fast paced. Or, a private stock exchange/poker table where the stakes are ad-viewing eyeballs/equivalent.
So was Apple being disingenuous this whole time about privacy? Presuming they plan on using all the data they capture from their users iDevices for their ad platform. Is there a way to opt out of that?
Any OS vendor that tries to trick or harangue you into signing into/up for cloud services and telemetry before you even log into your device for the first time is absolutely not privacy-oriented. That Apple automatically opts users into everything and tries to alarm them with popups if they dare opt out should have made things clear enough.
The only way that Apple has managed to seem even sort of focused on customer privacy is that Microsoft is my now so god-awful and free software desktops are so marginal that most people no longer trulyv remember what it's like to even set up a system whose mission is not to monetize the user by plugging them into a ton of services that collect data about them.
The only companies not tempted to do this are (some of) the ones that don't collect data like this in the first place.
> Any OS vendor that tries to trick or harangue you into signing into/up for cloud services and telemetry before you even log into your device for the first time is absolutely not privacy-oriented.
This is a needlessly binary take. When most people hear privacy, they really just want to stop seeing creepy personalized ads courtesy of Google, Facebook, and Amazon. The "Apple" solution is not one of 'complete' privacy, but one where the user knows exactly who and what is using their data, assuming you completely buy into their ecosystem (including iCloud+).
Having a gay CEO in times of re-emerging bigotry and homophobic oppression probably does help make Apple genuinely committed to some privacy for its own sake, and its revenue model does give it more latitude to serve the needs of customers.
But at the same time when it comes to advertising, it's clear that Apple has the same sense of self-serving "we mean private between you and us, not private to you. Total coincidence that that means we can build a walled garden around our ad platform" that is an industry norm in the US.
I recently unlocked my iPad mini while staying in downtown Boston. Right there on the Home Screen was a geo-based app suggestion for Dunkin' Donuts. It felt very wrong, like when a Smart TV tries to give you a suggestion. I don't want my iPad spying on me. I've never used the Dunkin' Donuts app and had no interest. Apple had clearly used my location to target me with a suggestion. That told me everything I need to know about how far they are willing to push privacy.
“Having a gay CEO in times of re-emerging bigotry and homophobic oppression probably does help make Apple genuinely committed to some privacy for its own sake,”
I doubt that. He will use his billions to get privacy for himself while the users will be used for profits.
Occam's Razor suggests that marketing explains it better than "he's gay so he must like privacy". By that line of logic, it's equally possible that he is sensitive to privacy because he has a cocaine addiction. This kind of mental gymnastics gets me so fired-up on HN; there are people so convinced that $BIGCORP is benevolent that they'll refute other people's arguments by assuming things on something as arbitrary as sexuality. There's no putting the cat back in the bag now, every single FAANG member is completely compliant with the NSA's surveillance program. There's been an overwhelming number of leaks and whistleblowers over the past few dozen years, and we still have no decent refutation for PRISM.
Privacy is not a luxury that can be offered by a US-based company, especially not at that scale.
You read too much into my words. And sexuality is far from being arbitrary. I'm not saying cook drives the company on this factor. But I'll bet solid money that he his leagues above straight CEOs on term of being aware of privacy reach.
Any chance that was a location based App Clip suggestion in your Siri App Suggestions home screen widget?
That or the App Store widget (which is essentially a banner ad widget) are the only reasons I can imagine where:
1. You don't have the Dunkin' Donuts app installed
2. You saw the Dunkin' Donuts app icon on your homescreen
---
If it's an App Clip suggestion in your Siri App Suggestions widget, you can disable this behavior in a couple of places (depending on what you care about):
I don't mean to suggest that Apple is free and clear of guilt. They often add new options with their preferred value as the default – rather than a user-focused default.
However, I don't think this is caused by advertisements in the same way that Smart TVs suggest things.
Tim Cook emphasizes personal privacy in every interview I've seen with him, and he seems genuinely affected and passionate about it. He's also backed tough fights with the FBI and DoJ. I don't mean to reduce a gay person to their sexuality, and I'm no psychoanalyst, but every person I know who was a gay adult in the 80s and 90s has a very personal sense of how important privacy is and it has a very material color to it.
Well maybe Tim Cook could turn over a new leaf by refusing to help China hunt down ethnic and sexual minorities in their country. Maybe show a little backbone, if this is something he feels strongly about.
It's an open secret that Chinese authorities have access to all domestic iCloud data without a warrant, which is often used to profile political dissidents and the Uighur populations that Apple relies on to build their iPhones. This is only possible because Tim Cook agreed to move the nation's iCloud datacenters into Chinese territory. So, when Tim Cook says "Privacy is a human right", what he apparently implies is that not all humans are created equal. It's certainly an ugly hill to die on, but it also makes it incredibly hard to believe that Apple has an ideological attachment to privacy when they bend over backwards for China more than any other FAANG member.
I just turn off all the toggles for personalized suggestions from Siri and targeted advertising and don't worry about it? I don't receive anything targeted to me as far as I've seen.
I believe the toggles are fairly visible under Settings > Siri, and then I'd probably search for Privacy and Advertising and do toggles there too.
To be fair, I rarely have location services turned on either. Mostly just cause I enjoy looking at the maps more than I enjoy getting directions as opposed to a big concern about being tracked. I find I learn the areas I'm in better that way.
I feel obliged to push back on the "gay people would respect privacy better" narrative with a couple notable counterexamples. J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn.
I have to add that attributing virtue or vice based on nothing but personal demographics in this fashion is overwhelmingly likely to lead you to some bad conclusions.
That sounds like a location-based app suggestion, not an ad. iOS will suggest an app that is used a lot at your current location. (Edit: Siri uses other signals as well to suggest apps. You can turn off the whole thing by removing “Siri App Suggestions” from your lock screen.)
I get in my car. The weather app is suggested to me, because I oftentimes, when getting into my car, want to check the weather. This is innocuous; definitely not an ad.
I get in my car. Candy Crush 2 is suggested to me, because I oftentimes, when being driven around by my wife, play games.
At a surface level, one could argue: Candy Crush did not pay for that impression, its not an ad. On the other hand; Candy Crush does pay Apple 30% of every transaction in the app; and that service fee includes not only access to market on the iOS App Store, but also, critically, access to be installed at all on iOS. Developers pay Apple to be allowed to install Applications on users' phones; any installed application could be given preferential display by iOS in suggested applications, location based suggestions, etc; Apple has a monetary interest (30%) in suggesting applications which would generate revenue for both them & the developer; the algorithms which power these application suggestions are black-boxed and poorly understood by consumers.
Similarly; I drive up to Starbucks, and iOS displays the Starbucks application. The innocuous argument is: arrive at location -> many users open this app at this location -> presenting it is convenient. The "weirder" argument is: arrive at location -> Apple wants to keep Starbucks happy, in the App Store, and using Apple Pay -> presenting it is monetarily beneficial to Apple & Starbucks, Starbucks knew that their app could be presented like this and approved of it, and thus its an Ad. Critically, there's nothing different about these two situations beyond intent, and to some degree that just speaks to the fact that we live in a capitalist society. But I label the situation "weird" for a reason. And "weirdest"? Arrive at location -> There's a starbucks & a panera bread right next to each other -> iOS can only recommend one application, so which does it choose? This is where being explicit about "this is an ad" actually matters; its no longer a matter of convenience or "wow that's cool", its a matter of "a billion devices are now pushing their users to make getting coffee at Starbucks a little bit easier than Panera", and that's not ok even if the intention is totally ethical.
I think there's an argument, maybe not a strong one but extant nonetheless, that any "preferential display" iOS exhibits toward one app over another, anywhere on your phone, is advertising, simply due to how intertwined their megacorporation interests & reach is with how money flows through their platform.
Whether if they're ads or not, these preferential display recommendations also end up entrenching the top apps, which doesn't exactly help discoverability for new players.
If the app is monetized then apple makes money if you use the app. It’s in apple’s interest to advertise things to you. Doesn’t matter if it’s paid for.
That's different from what the OP was saying, which was seeing a Dunkin Donuts app recommendation, while he was in a different city, and didn't have a history of going to DD.
So your thing is not an ad, just an unnecessary reminder. I imagine after going the first couple of times, you don't need navigational assistance to get there.
So iOS is obviously not spying on its owner in ways that matter. If OP ordered from DD, Apple got that transaction and iOS started suggesting DD to OP across devices, that would be insidious enough to stop me from using Apple tech. Dumb location-based triggers are nothing, though I don't have them on because I need fewer distractions.
What feels as spying to me is, for example, seeing a specific medical care ad on YouTube after I talked to a friend about a health issue using a completely unrelated chat app or even IRL. There are clearly a lot of moving parts, a bunch of data stored outside of my device, and if it's not already tied to my identity it's likely de-anonymizable.
I at least personally appreciate it because when I get in my car after class (to drive the place I drive 90% of the time after class–home) it'll push an ETA onto my lock screen. It's not always right but it's generally very predictable (and can be disabled).
But did Dunkin’ Donuts learn your address and buying habits when it paid for that advert? Apple could be serving you accurate ads that rely on collected data, while only telling DD that an ad was sold to Apple’s idea of a relevant viewer and let them judge if they want to buy more. I think we need to distinguish this, perhaps you are with the walled garden spying. Do you trust the option to reset your advertiser ID?
You're most likely right about what Dunkin' Donuts know. I'm less confident about what Apple themselves know. Apple have people talented enough that they can build a privacy-preserving back-end too so that their operators and staff have no way to know where I was. I hope that is how it works, but I've never seen it explained that way. If Apple end up on the wrong end of broad subpoenas to find out who was near abortion clinics ... getting better recommendations for donuts wasn't worth it.
> Apple end up on the wrong end of broad subpoenas to find out who was near abortion clinics
I would be more concerned about ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile, who have real-time data on where every connected phone is all the time and a FISA court can always serve them with a secret warrant.
Also, what you are describing is not Dunkin paying Apple for an advertisement. If it is, then it would be huge news that Apple is pushing non Apple ads to its devices.
> who have real-time data on where every connected phone is all the time
Not really. They know which mast it's connected to and can do signal strength triangulation. Their location info is a lot less good than what the device makers with wifi map data can give you, hence why every so often we get a news story about how Uber knows where you are a lot better than a 911 operator does.
In rough Apple parlance, the base level of privacy means understanding where your personal information is going and being able to consent or reject access and sharing of personal information.
If Apple built an advertising platform that made entirely local decisions on what ads to show, anonymized information on ad display and anonymized attribution, that consent prompt would be to either have advertisements chosen locally based on device-held information, or have advertisements chosen solely based on context.
You sound like such a typical HN user it's hilarious . Not everything is so cynical. Apple has a history of putting users first. Do you really think they're going to jeopardize the likability of their own OS to the masses?
Everything is a tradeof. I replaced my thinkpad with an air because my thinkpad, while far more servicable, was far heavier.
Apple has traditionally removed things before other companies did (both the floppy and optical drive). This angers some people, which is understandable, but others don't mind and again, it is a trade of for a thinner laptop.
Removing the headphone jack is also a trade of: recent iPhones have survived extended stays in water, which is just not possible if there is a headphone jack.
Your preferences may be different, in which case their products aren't for you.
As for crippling competing web browsers on IOS, you can download chrome and firefox from their app store. They aren't crippled in any way except that they have to use the same browser engine apple uses. Which has two effects: random websites don't get to ask me if they want to send me notifications and it prevents Chrome from completely taking over the internet.
a) Laptops are serviceable and manuals/parts are available to self-repair them.
b) Headphone jacks are simply not useful for most people with the popularity of Bluetooth. And those that need them can use Apple's class leading USB DAC dongles.
c) Web browsers are such a significant security vector that I am fully in favour of heavily sandboxing them and restricting what they can do. I like my web sites to be different from my apps.
They're already doing things that Mac OS users from lets say the era of Jaguar would find utterly tasteless.
I use iTunes match for my music but for 6 months last year once a month opening their music app it would force me to dismiss an Apple Music trail before I could play MY files.
App Store already has a pile of ads and paid placements before you get to the exact name match.
End of the day they don't have a product visionary at the helm they have a bean counter.
Apple has a history of making choices that jeopardize the likability of their platforms with the masses (eg headphone jack, removing Touch ID) They also have a history of getting away with it.
> jeopardize the likability of their platforms with the masses
You don't represent the opinions of the masses.
The fact that Apple iPhone sales continue unabated factually and objectively indicates that Headphone jacks and TouchID are not significant issues to warrant customers switching platforms.
Everyone I know primarily use wireless headphones and love FaceID. If they don't have wireless headphones, they just pop the little adapter onto the end and go on with their day.
What I mean by jeopardize is that these changes taken on their own would be seen as bad by many consumers, it is only because apple also provides an alternative (however expensive) that they end up getting away with it in public opinion (and sales).
You really think that most people prefer wired headphones than wireless? How many Android users - mostly on low end phones since high end Android phones also don’t have headphone jacks - actually prefer wired headphones?
You also act as if iPhones only work with AirPods and not any cheap Bluetooth headset you can pick up from anywhere.
Even Apple sells low end Beats Flex headphones for $50 that have the W1 chip with the special Apple sauce.
I have a pair for traveling that I don’t have to worry about falling out.
They're becoming even more of a luxury fashion brand. Enough people are willing to pay the higher prices that they come out ahead, but that's not about being "likable".
Where are these people in the US? They aren’t the 60%+ who are buying iPhones. They also aren’t the ones who are buying the Google Pixel, or high end Samsung Galaxies.
I'm a little confused by this author feeling like they are pulling back the curtain on Apple & Ads. Apple hasn't been anti-ad (though their products have way fewer ads than the competition. I installed Windows on a new machine yesterday and oh boy I was not prepared) but rather they are pro-privacy. Their recent crackdown on ad networks wasn't "we hate ads so we are going it make harder" but instead it was "you all are leaking customer data like a sieve and that's not ok".
The problem with most all the ad networks out there is they are not good stewards of their data and will sell it (directly or indirectly) to anyone with the money to buy it. Personally I hate ads but I understand their place in the world and if I have to see ads I trust Apple way more than Google or whatever fly-by-night ad tracking company is out there. The problem has always been that the advertisers had way more access to the info about the customer (and sometimes the customer's PII/unique id) than I was comfortable with and they would share that indiscriminately. If Apple is the one holding that info and if they design their system in a way that protects it then I don't personally see this as a problem.
You mean Apple played the tracking and Anti Ads cards with all of its PR submarine articles and marketing, how Apple is not an Ad company and doesn't sell ad ( not true then and not true now, to the point the App Store Head questioned whether putting Ads on App Store search would go against Tim Cook's public image ). Fuel the public discourse against data collection AND Ads, push the narrative on all forms of media ( including Social Media ) how every single ad is tracking. ( You may want to read Benedict Evan's piece on Ad and Tracking ) And only to backtrack when the whole Ad industry questions Apple's motive on why are they all of a sudden Anti Ad? ( Tim Cook, somehow, for some reason, had to made a few public statement on how Apple is not "Anti-Ads". )
The whole tracking and Ads PR strategy got to the point where Ad is evil on HN. It wasn't "Personally I hate ads but I understand their place in the world ". It was simply I hate Ads. ( People working inside Ad industry rarely comments on HN anymore ) And when other players in the industry does "targeting" Ads, it is tracking. When Apple does it, it is "personalised". [1]
I guess the pandemic had people forget how Apple started their grand strategy play against Facebook.
I still cant believe nearly 20 years later how Apple has outdone Google's "Do No Evil" hypocrisy.
You're doing what the parent comment says, which is conflating Apple's pro-privacy behavior with "anti-advertising" behavior. You're far from the only one, to the point that folks like Tim Cook regularly talk about this.
"We’re not against digital advertising. I think digital advertising is going to thrive in any situation, because more and more time is spent online, less and less is spent on linear TV. And digital advertising will do well in any situation. The question is, do we allow the building of this detailed profile to exist without your consent?
"We think that some number of people, I don’t know how many, don’t want to be tracked like that. And they should be able to say they don’t."¹
Apple has never disparaged advertising as a revenue model for developers. They even have regular WWDC sessions on the topic². What they have been very vocal about is user control.
Apple's pro-privacy behaviour was their message, explicitly speaking. But ultimately the market received it as "anti-advertising". The best of marketing isn't telling you what to think, ( pro-privacy ) but leads you what to think ( anti-advertising ). And Apple was happy to play along with it.
They were absolutely against advertising, or more precisely Facebook's advertising revenue.
The two example you show were already well pass 2020. As I said Tim Cook had to make a few statement about how they are not anti Advertising cough. after the damage was done. And only after the Ad industry were furious.
> Apple's pro-privacy behaviour was their message, explicitly speaking. But ultimately the market received it as "anti-advertising".
I hear what you're saying — privacy protections impact anti-privacy business models, absolutely — but I'd argue that it's not "anti-advertising" in the sense that more digital advertising dollars are being spent to target iOS users in 2022 vs. 2021.
> And only after the Ad industry were furious.
It's ad networks' fiduciary duty to hate this. My response to them: Suck an egg.
Right, if Apple doesn't let people hyper target it's not necessarily a privacy issue. Main issue with Facebook ads is when you interact & identify (e.g. click an ad and sign up[0]) you are confirming to some advertiser that their campaign targeting applies to you.
If this ever changes that will be a big privacy issue.
[0] Advertisers can also identify you if you only click (and don't sign up or otherwise identify yourself) via some other data source like their own data, a third party service
They aren't benevolent but there is such a thing as a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm fine with people making money off advertisement as long as they aren't selling my data directly and the number of companies I trust to do that is very low. In a lot of ways targeted ads and the like can be beneficial, it's about connecting people selling something the the people who want/need that thing, the problem is when data companies can just hoover up or buy that data and do gross things with it.
That's fine, but then you shouldn't give your info to apple at all. Or google, or facebook, or microsoft, or amazon, or ycombinator, for that matter. The fact is, unless you want to be a luddite (which you aren't, you're here, with an account, at least) then you have to trust at least some of these companies. So the question is, which ones can generally be trusted, and which can't? I personally trust apple more than facebook, ycombinator more than amazon, etc. Your ordering might be different, and that's fine, but you're drawing a bright line there, which only hurts yourself.
> So the question is, which ones can generally be trusted, and which can't?
Let's see... pretty much any of the companies listed as PRISM-compliant back during the Snowden leaks?
It's fun to be pedantic about security, but Facebook and Apple both phone home to the NSA at the end of the day. Quibbling about these differences is a zero-sum game, since FAANG's lowest common denominator is total surveillance.
I don't think we need to trust these entities in order to interact with them. Unfortunately some information has to be leaked to engage with modern society, it is just a matter of trying to minimize it to the extent possible. It isn't trust, it is an exchange.
They have consciously chosen to give up dozens of billions in potential revenue, because it would be against their customer's interests. That's got to count for something.
The article posted by a business entity with an agenda of its own, you mean?
It’s but one of many subjective takes by someone who earns through clicks, grabbing attention, instigating circular discourse online.
I have no obligation to support this author’s position, OR Apple’s rhetoric. I judge on the technical implementation; Apple earns through hardware sales and fees for services charged directly to service users.
Whether you agree with the price they set for those things is irrelevant; technically speaking the bulk of their revenue comes from hardware sales and direct charges for services.
Their competitors could do that too. They could charge for a phone and take a cut for app distribution, sell storage services. They don’t, because they don’t want to compete with Apple; they want the public and courts to force Apple to change.
That they went a different way of generating revenue and it bit them in the ass is not Apple's problem. Those businesses made their choices.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. All this rhetoric about those “poor” wealthy businesses being screwed by Apple are actually mad they picked the wrong path to revenue.
Apple and Google held back generations of children who got phones instead of computers. They did this for profit. They should be fined for contributing to the delinquency of minors.
All the whining about whose sports team is best belittles the tremendous disservice these profit seeking monsters have done throughout the advent of true portable computing.
As the article points out this is almost certainly about advertising within their own sites, apps and stores. In which case competing and networks are irrelevant.
It can be both true that they have potential privacy problems with a product, and that they have given up dozens of billions in potential revenue due to privacy concerns.
Tile predated AirTags for nearly a decade and is still worse on privacy today. If you want to argue that consumer-level trackers shouldn't exist, that's fine, but it's not at all unique to Apple.
Personally I don't think it's a solvable problem, and they shouldn't exist at all.
> yes, I agree, if it can't be done in a way that can be abused, it shouldn't be a product.
What about knives, alcohol, cars, escooters, power tools, rope, bleach?
These are all products that can be abused. Should they also not exist?
There will always be a new product that can be abused. Education and threat of punishment keep a lot of people from abusing them. The same can be true for AirTags.
Any half-competent EE can throw together the equivalent of a Tile or AirTag with off the shelf parts nowadays. That genie is out of the bottle and has been for years and years
Google does not "sell data" directly to anyone, so only the 'indirect' part of your comment applies.
Even then, Apple's changes have little impact on the "selling data" aspect of things... the real thing that they prevent doing is sale attribution, which is critical for advertising business and not really all that privacy invasive.
Apple has provided frameworks and technology specifically for pro-privacy sale attribution, and continues to be invested in efforts to support standardization of such techniques.
Sometimes it could be "YouTuber advertising", where instead of a YouTube ad, the advertiser directly pays the YouTuber to market the product.
Doesn't require any of my personal information to target me (targeting is based on the YouTuber's audience and metrics I'd assume), and I have made multiple decisions to purchase a product or not based on this advertising.
I currently pay for YouTube Premium, so I guarantee you I am not conflating this kind of advertising with YouTube's regular advertising.
I would correct that to "it’s the reason on-line advertising is believed to be efficient."
I’ve been seeing reporting over the last several years that suggests that a lot of the belief in sales attribution to ads or even specific interactions on-line are tenuous at best.
For big organizations that have the capacity and data, online advertising becomes a ROI optimization game, and one that they perform quite well at.
For a random business that wants to advertise online, without the infrastructure and data capability to back it, they will struggle to compete unless they exist in a segment full of similar peers. When the former happens, we see articles about how PPC doesn't actually work, etc.
Reality is that it takes engineering work and infrastructure, coupled with some data capabilities to unlock real value in the online advertising space.
As noted, online advertising brought all sorts of insight and visibility over traditional 'offline' marketing channels, but with that comes more savvy competitors that will do all the data things you're not.
Google is also responsible for the Android and Chrome platforms. In both cases, my impression is that they have long tolerated, if not promoted, ecosystems open to third party data collection of the more abusive sort. While Google may protect data gathered through maps, mail and their many other properties, their stewardship of Android / Chrome greatly diminishes my trust in their organization.
It's fair to say that Android is a big attack vector. Google is responsible for leaving the door unlocked, sure. But the data that's stolen is not Google's data. It's independently grabbed data.
So you can use Googles platforms to gather data, but you won't be getting what Google has.
I'm not sure it is incorrect. Google doesn't sell the data sure, it sells indirect access to it by selling targeted adds based on the data. They abuse the data on behalf of others, but it's still getting abused.
I think you can say they built the first huge, impactful non-classified pile of surveillance data dedicated to advertising, and thereby set the bar for corporate behavior with this sort of thing. Of course it is inevitable that slimier outfits came along later and were worse. That's a predictable and expected outcome in any market niche.
I'm a bit of cynic and I think part of Apple's privacy push is that they see the writing on the wall - advertising is way less valuable than the current customers of advertising think it is, and by removing a bunch of the "targetability" of said advertising they can get closer to the more profitable advertising of yore (where you couldn't directly track all metrics all the time).
Third party general interest websites generally don’t care where their advertising dollars come from, which is why they outsourced it all in the first place.
If anything, they would probably prefer advertisements at least tangentially related to the content so that their readers don’t get creeped out by some Amazon product following them around the internet.
Third party websites can more or less only serve Google ads, or from some tiny competitor like Carbon Ads.
Every other ad product is walled-garden specific. Facebook ads are shown only on on Facebook properties. Same with Twitter, Amazon and Apple. You may see ads for these companies on third party sites, but they are being served via Google Ads.
If anything, they would probably prefer advertisements at least tangentially related to the content so that their readers don’t get creeped out by some Amazon product following them around the internet
Which is what Google initially promised web site owners: Targeted advertising. That's why it's called Google AdSense. Because, thanks to Google's crawling ability, it was supposed to sense the content of the page and place appropriate ads there.
Only later, as Google's managers became more greedy, did it become ads for forklifts on granny's sausage-making recipe page because must... wring... every... last... penny... for... rhetorical... shareholders... Gah!
> Anyone running a small business in a niche space knows that targeted advertising works.
My partner runs a small business in a niche space and spends a million/year on ads.
She doesn't need customers to be tracked across sites or long term information maintained about their interests or behaviour. She really just needs to sell ads via (a) direct searches and (b) retargeting people who have visited her own site.
What do you think is the practical difference between “track[ing] across sites” and “information maintained about their interests and behavior”, and “retargeting people who have visited her own site”?
It doesn't, or shouldn't, involve a third party knowing about what sites I've visited. If the baker knows I go to their bakery every tuesday, that's normal; if they know I go to the butcher's every wednesday, that's creepy.
“We just attach a beacon to everyone who visits our site so that when they walk in front of billboards our ad is shown but we’re not like trackkking users.
Anyone who is seriously in the advertising game knows how to measure the incrementality of their advertising spend.
There isn't some vast conspiracy of people paying way too much for useless advertising. Advertising works, this is why people pay for it.
Apple's changes don't really prevent people from targeting onsite ads... what they do block is the experiments advertisers do to see if their ads are working (ie. on-platform incrementality studies).
> Apple hasn't been anti-ad (though their products have way fewer ads than the competition.)
> Personally I hate ads but [...] if I have to see ads I trust Apple
You don't have to see ads. There have been and still are operating systems with no ads, and Apple is absolutely swimming in cash. There is no necessity here— Apple is not integrating ads because they 'have to', and we don't 'have to' see them because we don't have to use operating systems that integrate ads.
Someone down in the comments was waiting for the Apple defense squad to pop up and say that this has been in consumer's best interest the whole time, and there you are.
of course they do it because they care about your privacy, and not for their revenue. Of course.
Apple is better than other big tech for sure, but don't let them fool you into believing they actually care about your privacy, because they don't, and they often use privacy as a an anti-competion weapon.
Apple tried before with ads in iOS. Right now it seems like they advertise only in the App Store but adding more ads to the core OS would be bad but I could see a play where you get free Apple Music and tv+ but you just have to tolerate ads (and I would switch to that).
They advertise in Apple News too. I don't think they've ever released a real number but estimates are that they did $3-4billion in advertising revenue in 2021. Not big by the standards of GOOG or META but growing fast.
IMO Apple is pro-privacy from competitors and 3rd parties. They are not pro-privacy from Apple itself and the governments that force them to disclose things.
There is a lot of tracking from apple you just cannot opt out of from apple straight out. A lot of logs are just uploaded and you can't stop it from the device itself as a setting, such as battery analytics and more. Just investigate what comes out of your iphone & mac still data wise even when you opt out of things you are given as an option.
You cannot open an apple id without a phone number or other strong identifying information, even if all you want to do is download free apps. iPhones are mostly unusable without an Apple ID.
Apple does not give you an option to not have any encryption keys kept in escrow by apple, like they do with iCloud and iCloud backups. And backups are on by default, including the contents of your iMessage logs. They don't keep your iMessage keys in escrow by default, so they've always been capable in not doing that. They keep iCloud data within China, so the Chinese government probably has continuous full access to whatever is on iCloud for Chinese users, because apple keeps the iCloud keys in escrow. The same goes with the NSA in the USA, because we all know those governments invest enough to fully compromise apple's data centers. Apple could chose a design that allows users to avoid the key escrow and make these government spy agency jobs much harder. The examples go on and on. But they are very good in not highlighting these facts.
For anyone curious about what's being sent when device analytics is allowed to phone home, that's found at Settings > Privacy > Analytics & Improvements.
They’ve been building ad tools because that’s what developers have been asking for as a way to surface their app.
Otherwise all developers had was a situation where only Apple’s algorithms decides which app is similar to another app, which is largely generated through user searches/behaviours (something that is easily exploited as seen on amazon with the “customers also bought” exploits). That left developers with limited ability to surface their ad honestly and absolutely no way to feature event-based activities, expansions and other promotional industry norms.
HN won’t like it because it’s Apple - but this largely improves the experience for the developers. While consumers get relevant ads without the unscrupulous on-selling of data.
Will this really improve the experience for the average developer, or will this be a way for those with deep pockets to blanket the platform with ads and drown out small-time indie devs even more?
It feels like a more lasting solution not based on being able to buy eyeballs would be making the search experience on the App Store more robust and modernized. To fix the solution with an UX upgrade. That feels more like an Apple solution, not by adding more ads into the mix.
I don't hate Apple; I've worked there myself, continue to be a shareholder (and thus have vested interest in its fortunes), and given the way the industry works, may return there eventually. But I find blind faith in the company from die-hard fans both misplaced, and frankly, distasteful. As with any organization, Apple is deserving both scrutiny and critique, and it is wrong to dismiss critique as hatred. And the image of Apple as a scrappy underdog beset on all sides by haters is two decades out of date by now. It's a corporate giant that deserves as much skepticism as the others.
> Improve the UX which they do regularly and introduce ads which developers have been screaming for.
If ads can be better, then developers will like them. But I question the supposition that developers have been screaming for ads, given that the status quo with App Store ads is situations like this:
Granted, that's from two years ago, and any new ads rollouts would presumably be of greater quality. It's just that track record doesn't inspire a lot of confidence, and really throws into question the idea that developers really want ads. How do you prevent the big players with the biggest marketing budgets from buying up all of the space? I'm not going to pre-judge the feature, but I do believe some healthy skepticism is warranted.
If App Store ads follow even a modicum of some of these feature requests, then perhaps they will really be what developers want.
Shifting the topic and implying i’m some sort of fanboy doesn’t address the argument. Indeed blind faith, i.e making assumptions before something is even seen, works both ways. Since i see a lot of critique that is literally based on an ad opening. Do you realise how ridiculous this sounds? I don’t care about anecdotes plucked from twitter, anyone can form a counter point with a whole other set of tweets.
What I’ve said, all along: It’s a privacy preserving ad product, an already announced solution to not being able to feature events, upgrades, expansions which currently doesn’t exist.
Getting caught into an irrelevant philosophical debate on the virtue of ads does reveal your bias, regardless of who you say you are.
I have shifted nothing. I am clarifying where I am coming from. I am explaining that my words come without "hatred" for something I am incentivized not to hate. That implies nothing about yourself, but it does explain why I take the positions in conversations in threads like this. To accuse someone of hatred addresses no argument.
If you are unwilling to accept the experiences of developers who are out there, and claim that developers have been clamoring for ads without showing evidence, and discount evidence clearly presented to you, then it seems like you have made up your mind and there is a deadlock.
> Getting caught into an irrelevant philosophical debate on the virtue of ads
I have not been caught into any of that. I am simply expressing that the ads that have been present when it comes to exact search results matching have led to a subpar UX, as seen by many, and this is a known situation, which you are unwilling to accept. Thus we are at an impasse, so I am willing to table this conversation until the actual ad product is revealed and in public. That said, a willingness to reject evidence out of hand is clearly representative of bias. And that's absolutely fine! Human beings are all inherently biased. We are not the machines that we are talking about. We ought to recognize our biases, accept them for what they are, and transcend them.
I just tried it out myself and even though the search bar suggests "papers please" as a query, the results truly do not immediately yield the popular game with that title.
If Apple wants to offer ads, perhaps that will make up for the shoddy search UX. But it seems like a poorer solution than simply improving App Store search functionality.
>HN won’t like it because it’s Apple - but this largely improves the experience for the developers. While consumers get relevant ads without the unscrupulous on-selling of data.
No. Developers are forced to only use Apple ads, as any possible competing ads have been completely demolished. Instead of having a market of possible partners Apple is forcing it to only be them.
No. Anyone can link into the app store with an ad from any provider, and this still happens today.
This is ads inside apple’s own app store.
The same way that I can’t use anyone else to place an ad in youtube.
Your argument is utterly farcical.
Advertising itself is not necessarily bad, but it is how it is done. All FAANGs are growing their shares of the pie.
It is time for someone to do it right. Abusers have lived for too long, we need someone to beat them at their own game. Apple is rightly positioned to do so.
The article doesn't make it clear whether this will be applied to the App Store only.
If this is the case, apps are not a life-necessity in the information era - unlike information (search), shopping (e-commerce), or communication (social media).
They do not intrude our everyday living unless we intentionally look for it. Every other kind of advertising does so and thus are open to abuse.
Apple is positioned to expand their ads business and take market share from their competitors. "Doing it right" doesn't have a good enough ROI, especially in tech.
Apple managed to make the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and iPad without an advertising business so yeah being maximalist and saying "This industry has nothing of value to add to our company" can result in great things.
How many billions do you think Apple spent on advertising to get to this point, what do you think? Seems like that's a tremendous amount of value for Apple, as a customer at least!
To some degree, I trust both Apple and Google but for different reasons. Apple is pushing privacy tools, and within limits of government suponenas they do a reasonable job. Google has a business of using your data to advise advertisers how to sell you stuff, but if you go on Google’s privacy settings page you have a fair amount of control. Personally, I let Google track my YouTube use for 90 days in order to make good suggestions and turn almost everything else off (Google makes money from me from buying content, paying for YouTube, and GCP).
I really respect people who self-host their own data platforms, etc. but I don’t have time for that.
> I really respect people who self-host their own data platforms, etc. but I don’t have time for that.
Exactly how I feel when I see the myriad amounts of threads/comments from people here who are self-hosting things in the name of privacy, control, "stick it to the man", etc.
Because it is hugely profitable? Look at Facebook and Google - billions and billions in profits from selling ads. Now Amazon is following suit too.
Apple are well poised to do this (some might say well poised to abuse their position...) so it would be almost irresponsible to Apple shareholders not to pursue this, since they have a responsibility to their shareholders.
1. It isn't terribly successful and dies a quiet death as do a lot of non-consumer Apple initiatives
2. It's wildly successful and Apple shifts its focus to the pursuit of ad revenue...which will gradually erode privacy controls and the pristine experience Apple is known for.
This may sound like hyperbole, but if this takes off, then we'll look back on this as where it all went wrong for Apple.
> “Our platform runs and delivers advertising auctions to match supply (customers) with demand (advertisers), focusing on technical components including Campaign Management, Bidding, Incrementality, Dynamic Creative Optimization, Matching, Auctions, and Experimentation
Silly me, I thought that in a supply/demand scenario you are meant to pay your suppliers, not just harvest what you need from them without spending a cent.
Monetization of everything.
Users are “paid” in the sense that they use apps for free. App developers instead of charging a user a download fee, show users ads.
You’re also taking industry words and using them in weird ways. Supply is available ad slots, demand is advertiser dollars wanting to fill those slots. Demand pays suppliers but it goes through tons of intermediaries (brand, agency, agency, dsp, exchange, ssp, agency, app/website) plus a bunch of vendors get tiny percentages during the dsp/exchange/ssp phase
I don't know about you, but for me it was obvious from day one. Amassing a huge heap of personal data, bar access to it for all competitors and not to exploit it themselves means to leave a tremendous pile of cache on the table. Shareholders won't understand that. Apple just badly needs revenue to justify its' 10 years exponential growth.
> Whoever gets the job will be asked to “drive the design of the most privacy-forward, sophisticated demand side platform possible,” per the post.
Why would someone who can do that go to apple, instead of launching her own company? Has it become impossible to build new things on the internet independently now?
I, for one, would welcome an Apple attempt to create a better digital advertising paradigm focused on users and that respects/protects privacy as much as possible.
As an optimistic college freshman in 2000 (dating myself, I know), I had the privilege of taking a class where once a week, a successful business entrepreneur would come in and expand our minds about a company/product/vision they had created.
Being the height of dot com frenzy, I still remember one class where a guy described how the Internet offered the potential to revolutionize advertising in a way that would be a win-win for everyone. He described a world where ads might even be enjoyable to watch because of the Internet’s potential to show each viewer/user ads relevant to them: because every beard trimmer ad shown to a woman was wasted time for her and money for the advertiser.
So far, his predictions have broadly become true, but stick with me.
The coolest part of his vision to my 18yo self was that each of us would have a personal ad software agent running on our PC/TV (the most personal devices at the time) that learned our desires and went out and found ads for stuff we might want. It was a completely different paradigm to the ad model of the day and one that was potentially privacy protecting because your personal ad agent would be the automated broker for your time and attention, and everyone would want this because a good agent would delight you with new services and products that you found useful and maybe didn’t know you wanted. There would be a healthy market of personal agents to choose from, too, because the costs of switching were minimal and companies would complete to create the best personal agents.
Alas, the optimism of the early Internet morphed into magic Google and Facebook/Meta pixels, and we got personal ad agents, but they are oligopolies with extreme network effects that are incompatible with privacy.
The Brave browser has come closest to the vision described by the dot com entrepreneur who spoke to my class, but I’ve always wondered whether anyone else would create personal ad agents, and of all the candidates, Apple is probably best positioned. I’m curious to see how they do it.
Turns out, rather than trying to figure out what you actually want (whatever that means), it is a lot easier for advertisers to tell you what you should want and to trick you into thinking the whole thing was your own idea.
It is wild that Apple even slightly risks their platforms with ads. They have always been tasteful with the small amount of ads they allow, but why even risk it?
I wonder if this is to offer a free tier of AppleTV and Apple Music. whole DSP would not really be required if it was just for something like the App Store. Typically a DSP is for something like TV and radio.
So I like Apple a lot. Given there are only two choices of phone (iOS or Android), IMHO Apple is way better than Google in terms of privacy.
Apple sent shockwaves through the ad industry by making third-party ad cookies opt-in [1]. This has a material impact on, for example, Facebook's business, arguably to tune of $10 billion [2].
So a demand-side platform ("DSP") would be an incredibly significant move by Apple. A DSP is really one side of the coin of programmatic or real-time bidding ("RTB"). The other side is the exchange of supply side platform ("SSP"). RTB exchanges started as a way of selling remnant inventory in the display advertising space but have grown significantly since then.
But why this is significant is that the big player in display advertising is Google and the centerpiece for that is the Doubleclick Ad Exchange.
So Apple could be positioning itself to take a shot at Google's dominance of this space just like they have been doing to Facebook.
If so, Apple needs to be incredibly careful here because if they offer advantages to their own DSP or exchange they may well run afoul of anticompetitive behaviour.
Disclaimer: Ex-Googler (and I worked on the Doubleclick Ad Exchange many, many years ago).
If Apple is forced to allow 3rd party app stores or the installation of unsigned IPAs, does that mean browsers running different engines can be developed for iOS?
If you think Apple cares about privacy after the CSAM thing, I really don't understand why, yes they are a bit better than other big tech companies, but they are in no way "Privacy-respecting".
> Sources within Apple, a company notoriously shy of making public statements, have briefed media outlets with news of more advertising opportunities for those eager to promote their wares in the App Store.
> The planned ad placements include two additional slots in the App Store with a promotional placement on its “Today” tab where the paid-for slots will feature alongside editorialized content. The other planned ad placement will feature on app product pages where ads will be served under a tab that reads “You Might Also Like.”
We'll see if Apple's ad efforts extend beyond the App Store but even so, the incentives here are all fucked up. Why bother making App Store search better and cleaning up spam/scam apps when these problems enable a new revenue stream in the form of paid placements?
Incidentally, is the App Store yet another venue where you need to buy ad placement for your own product's name lest it be taken over by your competitors?
> We'll see if Apple's ad efforts extend beyond the App Store but even so, the incentives here are all fucked up. Why bother making App Store search better and cleaning up spam/scam apps when these problems enable a new revenue stream in the form of paid placements?
All commercial vendor app stores are trash fires. We need anti-trust action to force the ability to subscribe to alternative app stores. There's just no incentive to improve them once users are locked in and as you say there are often perverse incentives to do the opposite.
I'm really glad both power users and developers on the Mac roundly rejected the Mac App Store. I actually do use it for things like communicator apps and other limited-scope apps since auto-updates are nice, but if Apple pushed app-store-only for Mac or even made installing apps outside the store too hard (pushing via dark pattern) it's one of the things that would drive me off the platform.
I realize there are security benefits but like I said the App Store is a trash fire. They all are.
I don't think I've relied on the app store search for anything except exact matches in half a decade. The greatest feature of the app store is that it handles app links. I just use search engines to discover apps then click the links to open in the app store.
I still do wish they weren't quite so abusive in other ways of their monopoly - their pricing, and dev tooling fees, are pretty outrageous.
I'm not sure the average person is going out of their way to look for an app in the app store to solve their problem. I think they are just searching for something on Google, and if an app is recommended they might install it.
Or maybe this job listing is a coy to throw off the competition. Am I to believe that Apple would post a job listing for such an important position instead of using their vast professional network to hire the right person for the job in-person?
As an actual DSP (Digital Signal Processing) person I can only manage
a weary sigh at what looks like dog poop all over the tidy lawn of my
acronym space.
Yeah, it’s unbelievable how much we have accepted being constantly marketed to.
Our brains don’t ever get any downtime to just be. Sometimes, it is insidious - e.g., in my apartment building’s WhatsApp group, we have a neighbor who regularly posts content by dairy brand called Country Delight promoting contests for kids. I feel she’s getting paid to do this because she’s the only one who puts out this content.
Our HOA has monetized us residents by entering into an MOU with MyGate to allow promo events by brands inside the community on Sundays. In return, they get a discount on their yearly MyGate charges.
This has nothing to do with a "walled-garden" approach. Removing the walled garden essentially allows what you're so smugly against.
Of course, this can be abused. But the problem isn't having a walled garden. The problem is monopoly and duopoly. There aren't any real options.
We keep beating around the bush of the reality - anti-trust is what's needed. Not squabbling over details and feeling good about arguing with kids about apple. I mean, go ahead, pat yourself on the back, but we're still in the same place. The EU can add a selector for a browser or tell apple to change their input jack but that still doesn't solve the problem - the market is anti-competitive because there is no competition. Walled garden or not doesn't matter if there are only 2 competitors.
The good thing about ads is that it's a cancer that nobody wants so even anticompetitive actions such as pushing all the other players out of business is beneficial as it just leaves one adtech company to block as opposed to dozens/hundreds.
I don't disagree, but my point was that if Apple switches to ads and pushes all other adtech vendors out of the market, all you'd need to do is to switch to literally any other manufacturer than Apple. In a way they'd be doing you a favour by killing off this disgusting industry.
>I do not understand what a demand-side platform is and the article does a terrible job of explaining it.
The intended audience for Digiday (the domain of this thread's article) are people already interested in the business of digital ads and marketing. Therefore, a common industry term like DSP is assumed as baseline knowledge so explaining it would be redundant and tedious for their readers.
It's when the article is re-posted to an aggregator like HN that it seems like "demand side platform" is poorly explained by the author. HN readers like us were not the intended audience.
EDIT to downvoters: I have no idea what you're downvoting. If you think my information is incorrect about Digiday, please post the correction.
Definitely not made up. It's basically a platform to allow advertisers to manage bidding on ad impressions in real-time, among other aspects of their ad campaigns.
- demand are the buyers (people who spend the money)
- supply are the sellers (people who has the goods)
- online digital ads are typically sold and bought in a marketplace style system
- demand are the advertisers
- supply are people with the "goods", in this case, ad placement slots such as websites, newsletters, apps, app stores.. anywhere the advertiser can find audience and put an ad.
- demand side platform is a platform for the advertisers to connect with the supply.
Apple already has ads in the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News, etc. So doesn't it already have a "demand-side platform" for the businesses that purchase ads for those mediums? Or am I misunderstanding the term?
Its always weird when people jump from "I don't understand something" to "no one understands something, they must have made it up" without any effort to verify that its not just you. Like is it arrogance?
You can clearly find the term almost immediately defined here for example https://bfy.tw/TOgI
You've hidden a LMGTFY link behind a URL shortener. Please don't do this, there are better (and gentler, kinder) ways to get your point across other than tricking people other than the parent poster into clicking the link.
They own the platform. Keep us locked in the platform. Then sell our minds to advertisers.
Incumbents can't grow any larger without eating their users eventually. Maybe with proper antitrust action we would see a new generation of healthy upstarts. New search engines, new devices, new everything.
While I agree with your sentiment, in this case what Apple is rumoured to be planning is no different than what happens in retail today. For example, your grocer sells their 'end cap' shelving space (end of aisle--highly visible product placement). Not only that, grocers have moved to stocking their inventory in a highly inefficient approach so that average consumers need to walk every aisle to fill their cart (the Apple comparable is a bad search experience, to lead consumers to paid placement instead).
Apple is doing what we already experience in the physical world. If you dislike Apple's changes then the fix is going to have to be general consumer protection laws that apply in real world spaces as well as digital.
The analogy here breaks down because the App Store is not a physical space with "aisles" and "endcaps". The only realistic way to navigate the App Store's millions of apps is with search. It's ok to place paid results for searches like "todo list" or "calendar". But if I search for "Fantastical", I better get "Fantastical.app" as my first result. Not some unrelated bullshit that a competitor has placed there. The latter is the equivalent of me reaching for the Corn Flakes at the store and some guy popping up and shoving Cheerios in my hand instead.
This type of behavior is new and the patterns were developed by the advertising giants to favor their revenue streams.
It's trademark disparagement. It lets platform monopolies take even more revenue from disenfranchised businesses. Businesses that in turn have to cede more control over their storefronts, brands, and operations to these hitherto unrelated tech companies.
Because of the dominance of advertising as a revenue model, new entrants may actually be worse than what we already have. Before the forest gets a fire we need to make more room for software business models besides "ad-funded". My favoured approach is regulation that would make tracking mandatory "opt-in", but anything that makes collecting and selling user data less lucrative would be good.
