The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware | Hacker News Reader

The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware

stevestreza.com

30 pointsnotlukesky20 comments

At first it might appear to be a dupe, since that has the same title, but that is actually an article that links to and summarizes the current submission plus links to and summarizes a bunch of responses from others, including a few well known people.

Yep — as a matter of fact, this one would have been the right article to post here on HN.

that is brilliant: Apple Music has ads about the Apple music service. Apple Arcade about the arcade service. The App store about App store deals. Apple Card about the Apple Card product. Ok, note taken.

Now checking my android phone, main screen just there on the top ... oh hey google in a multicolor G ...

yes they both qualify as adaware. The difference seems that the Apple approach is at least context-aware. You don't get random ads or suggestions system-wide. You get ... newspaper ads in the newspaper app, or music ads in the music app.

I honestly wish we had the same on the android front. Google is decidedly much more invasive these days

The only thing that I found suspect about Apple's behavior has to do with the push notifications. But even then, it does seems like you can turn them off.

From the Article: "If you subscribe and then cancel, Apple sends invasive push notifications asking you to re-susbscribe. These are on by default without a permission request. This is, of course, against the rules they lay out for other developers."

Apple Rules: Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information.

I mean, I just uninstalled my Apple Music app..

Yeah, this is what I don't get. Nowadays you can just uninstall any Apple app you're not using so I don't see why the big fuss?

As far as I know, if you want to be able to sync music from your computer or use a third-party, non-steaming music app you must have Apple Music installed as well.

Indeed, at least the “ads” in Apple’s apps have a chance at being useful. If you don’t use the app or don’t want to see the ads, remove the app and install your preferred alternative… boom. Done. You won’t be bothered again.

I don’t know I see the issue here unless Apple is supposed to abstain from taking a piece of the services pie, because how weird would it be if they offered services but didn’t mention it in iOS at all?

And if you use neither of the mentioned apps you get no ads. At least in my experience.

They do have two invasive notifications that they should fucking tone down though:

1. Prompts to upgrade your OS. I once got one while i was driving and using the phone as GPS, and I pressed the wrong button (because I was paying attention to the road, duh) so I had to pull in the next parking area and wait for the OS upgrade to finish. This is major assholery, Apple.

2. Prompts to set up 2FA. No, I won't enable that because I don't carry all my Apple devices with me and what use is a 2FA code on my tablet that I left home when I'm a few hundred km away on a weekend trip?

And since I'm whining, I'd like the option to use the pass code / face recognition only to authentificate Apple Pay payments, not for the whole phone.

The google logo counts as an ad for you? Or does google actually show ads on stock-android?

Is there such a thing as stock Android?

Anecdotically, I have an Android phone that I use for development (i.e. it sits on my desk most of the time). Every time I turn it on I get notifications that I have updates available or something has been updated or whatever - with the google logo - that I cannot disable anywhere.

I also get some of those from manufacturer supplied "helpful crap" but I suppose we can't blame Google for those...

By stock I meant OEM. People on XDA call the OEM image stock.

In that case the "stock" Android is full of spam. From Google and from the manufacturer.

The Google logo instead of a plain search bar is an ad. Imagine if your browser had one in the URL bar: it'd be ridiculous, and very annoying!

Well, it searches google, doesn’t it? I’m not trying to be argumentative, I really don’t know, haven’t run what’s preinstalled since day 3 of my very first Android phone. I know Firefox shows me the DuckDuckGo logo when I enter a search term, so it seems reasonable to me.

edit:

> Imagine if your browser had one in the URL bar: it'd be ridiculous, and very annoying!

Just checked, Chrome does that, I guess that was your point ;)

I never understood the argument that Apple was a privacy-focused company, specifically because they enable so many companies that are the complete opposite. For example, I could use Facebook on a desktop browser which won't out-of-the-box have location services, bluetooth information, and contact lists available. By virtue of using an iOS device, you are more likely to provide far more information to companies like Facebook than you would be on a browser. Apple willingly provides APIs to apps to pull this information. This enablement this leads me to reasonably believe they don't actually care about privacy.

Browsers have had location access APIs across all operating systems for a while now. Chrome at least can surface Bluetooth and USB information to sites (not sure about Firefox, but I think it can too). The only thing that’s missing on desktop browsers is contacts access APIs.

Putting that all aside, there exist legitimate uses for those APIs, and just because Facebook abused them doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t exist. Lack of those APIs wouldn’t be seen as privacy friendliness, it’d be seen as a feature deficiency and would push people to other platforms.

It just means that the platform in question has to put reasonable limits on access (“Allow access only while app is open”, “require permission again after X days”, etc) and users need to be more discriminative as to which apps/sites they approve access for.

I think if you consider the amount of damage Facebook has done to society, it's clear we shouldn't be prioritizing the legitimate use cases for things like contact list access when weighing the negative externalities.

Oil, for example, is generally useful for automobiles and transportation. Should we completely ignore the climate consequences of using fuel since it makes getting around convenient? The pros have to be weighed with the cons. The marginal value of saving a couple minutes via functionality like contact list imports, or reading bluetooth data, is not worth the downsides that come with it.

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