The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware | Hacker News Reader

The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware

mjtsai.com

I think it's probably worse for people in the US, but I am certainly getting sick of news promoting articles that i can't see unless I pay for news+. Quite often the article headlines are bigger than a screen and it doesn't tell you it's apple news+ until you either tap into it or scroll past it. It's cheap, and I expect better from Apple.

I was also thinking about getting a news+ subscription when I buy a new ipad - waiting for a new model to come out - now I'm wondering if I should bother with either.

I don't even mind occasional ads, to show me what i'm missing, but they should be clearly marked as such.

A platform offering you more of it's own services feels distinctly different from a platform selling your data to advertisers or displaying their ads. Does Win10 still have casual gaming ads in the system menu?

Offering and offering and offering and offering. There's no way to say "I don't want this", you will get "offered" (meaning: advertised to) all the time when using these apps that previously worked just fine.

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

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

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

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

If I could replace the default music player I would.

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

How is that an ad?

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

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

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

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

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

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

> It's not like they toss an alert when I open Spotify to ask me if I'd rather use Apple Music.

Yet. They do throw an alert when you launch Chrome to ask if you’d rather use Safari[1], so your example doesn’t seem far off.

[1]: http://danieljwilson.me/2019/10/16/a-catalina-double-standar...

This discussion is about iOS. As far as I know they don't do that there?

YMMV as the old saying goes. I use my phone to listen to music, send & receive text messages, take pictures and videos, and record musical ideas. My iPhone lets me do these things without getting in my way and it's been doing it for years (I don't upgrade unless I have to and so far my iPhone SE has been doing the job for nearly four years now).

I never though of the red dot around on my service menu (get iCloud) to be an add. Now, I’m pissed because it is exactly that. I still have a Gb free, why is it notifying me that I need more space. I will never use that space.

>I never though of the red dot around on my service menu (get iCloud) to be an add

Yet I see comments regularly criticising Microsoft's embedded one drive ads(not by you in particular, in general and not that I support that either).

That's the insidiousness of Apple's marketing, they've sold their products as a brand, ecosystem and lifestyle so well, nobody notices every time they use an Apple device, they're essentially not only being constantly marketed to, but are walking advertisements themselves.

Being locked down in a curated, walled off ecosystem controlled by the purveyor of your device is the epitome of being trapped in a bubble of constant marketing for their products.

How far we've come from the days when everybody lost their shit because an os vendor bundled a web browser with their os.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is wrong with Health.app on iOS 13? Honest question cause nothing changed for me from iOS 12 (UI changes aside). People in that twitter thread are talking about how they they removed the 'Steps' but it still shows up for me.

I think they're mad about the "Apps" section on the Summary tab. But I don't really get the complaints or see it as an advertisement; it's at the very bottom and users may genuinely be wondering how they get more data into the Health app, and a curated list of apps that do that is useful.

God I am so tired of iOS Music constantly showing me ads for their streaming service. I've been paying them to ITunes Match my collection between my Mac and my phone/tablets for years and yet it keeps on trying to upsell me to their streaming thing. And sometimes it just brings up a blank screen over the music instead and hangs for a moment; sometimes that becomes a streaming service ad, sometimes it just hangs until I close the whole app.

I am betting that OSX Music will start doing that too if I upgrade to Catalina - one more reason to put that upgrade off until absolutely necessary.

Apple isn't alone in this though. I've been opening up the Kindle app a lot less lately ever since its home view changed from "here are all your books" to "here are some of your books and here are some books a lot of people are pre-ordering that we think you might wanna buy and here are some books we think you might wanna buy", especially since they launched that new view the same week a book with Trump's angry orange glare prominently featured on the cover got a shit-ton of pre-orders. Exactly what I wanna see when I'm looking for some relaxing bedtime reading, thanks Bezos.

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

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