Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy

Where are these ads?? Are they when you open up a program?.

This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.

Is this a bigger problem on iOS 27? Should I continue to stay on 18?

Can't have ads and tell me you're privacy focused.

The article then ends by displaying an ad for Apple products.

Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice

In a few years, Apple will be indistinguishable from Microsoft when it comes to dark patterns, and all the mystique/enchantment will have faded away completely. That's just the works of the """free market""".

Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.

F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.

I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!

All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"

Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.

I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.

Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.

In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Media_Research

so let me get this straight you pay more than 1500 bucks for a phone and then you get ads delivered to said phone?

I went to Apple to de-Google, 5 years in and I just went to GrapheneOS to de-Apple (and re-Google just a bit too much for comfort but ok).

The Appstore is a cesspool, and now these "ads".

Why does it always happen? I bought Hue Lighting some years ago. It was all lean and nice, and now when open the app I almost always get an ad for some new light they want to sell me. So dirty, so cheap. Is it all just a race to the bottom? I just avoid the app and use Home Assistant now (when there is no button, because I also avoid using my Phone to control the house).

I'm on my Linux laptop now, being productive. It's so clean. Really still love it as much as ever, thanx for staying the same, and clean, and respecting me. I forgive you the horrible battery time ;)

A true Microsoft-like moment for Apple.

We really need to tackle the cancerous nature of "advertising" as a problem at the civilization level.

The one I have is also lying to me, it says: "Activate iCloud Storage - An iCloud storage upgrade is ready to be used with your Apple Account "[email protected]". Continue"

I then click "Continue" and it's an upsell decoy, pay to upgrade.

I'm sorry but that message to me reads like I have been granted an upgrade not that I have been blessed with the opportunity to spend my money on more juice.

Really disappointed at this one, I like and use Apple, but this is off brand and has a really bad taste.

its funny reading an article like this and seeing 5 ads across it

I didn't realize they were ads.... this is weird

But Apple must enshittify all Apple products because it increases shareholder value. Else an activist shareholder will arise and accuse Ternus of dereliction of duty.

True, it’s short-term profits, but that’s all that matters. Nowadays.

Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.

> Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy

When you have willingly agreed to live your cyber life exclusively in the inside a golden jail, don't complain when the COs decide to collectively abuse you.

I've suffered the iCloud ads for almost 2 years at this point. You can't dismiss it, or if I can... the badge only disappears for a day and then it's back. I wish I could turn off iCloud completely, I have no use for it and do not want it. It sometimes hijacks files that I wanted to keep local-only.

If it wasn’t broken I wouldn’t mind

An article complaining about adds serving me add for their own service scrolling a page down.

Are you fucking kidding me

It's a little disingenuous that I can't toggle notifications for Settings.app off in the Notifications section of Settings.

can we all switch to gemini the protocol not the AI i cant even read this article how did we do this to ourselves

What are you talking about? Apple users love ads. Dial it up a notch, force users to only watch ads. They'll pay twice as much.

the quotes around the word ads are pretty infuriating.

Enshitificaion!

"Just don't look at the ads! What's the big deal?"

[dead]

Apple promotes other Apple products in Apple products. End of the world. This yellow press is annoying. "Journalism". All this outrage to fullfill daily quota of text output.

And clickbaity title to go with it. As if there are temu ads on the lock screen.

This is exactly the moment Elon has been expecting to launch his always connected phone, offer superb quality, with unique features at a price even higher than Apple and I know for sure it will make inroads in their market share. Give devs all the tools and the ecosystem will surpass both iOS and Android, just like Huawei is doing in China

Options is all we need, and tools to customize them. And just like Blackberry or Nokia, they will learn the hard way