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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising for The Verge but they make giant leaps to go from "Carrier-installed adware" to:

> Apple has echoed this idea, talking about how it sees a more feature-rich lock screen as a way to help you use your phone less.

Yes, because those are totally the same thing /s

You would have to be brain dead to think that Apple would ever ship a phone with ads like this on the lockscreen by default. Apple is opening up some APIs to allow apps to provide widgets (aka complications) for the lockscreen and more customizability but to just to "But, by opening up this space, these companies are offering apps and advertisers a chance to get even closer to you." is just bad reporting and silly.

I mean sure, the user might be install shitty apps that show ads but that would be 100% up to the user and not something pre-bundled to increase longtail revenue for Apple.

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Wasn't that the reason the iphone was only released on AT&T at first? The "smart phones" before iphones were riddled with adware and other carrier installed garbage.

Which, at the time, was nothing short of a miracle (no carrier installed garbage). If carriers could go back in time I'd bet they'd do everything in their power to collectively reject that deal because they gave up a ton of power.

Yep. AT&T (really Cingular) was desperate and needed a hit product to grow. They made a deal with the devil (from their perspective) to give up control in hopes of getting sales & users.

The successful carriers like Verizon told Apple no due to Apple’s demands. If they knew how big it would be they may have agreed but that was unknowable.

Still it was the end of the absolute lockdown carriers had on smartphone software.

Anybody who reads The Verge is just wasting their time. They’ve gone downhill very fast, articles are like tech tabloids.

I'm not sure Apple deserves that much benefit of the doubt.

I've found myself hunting through iOS settings to hide News on that slide screen to the left.

It was definitely put there by Apple and I'm confident they were paid to put it there by those chasing advertising dollars.

If you are talking about the "Today" view (one screen to the left of the first home screen) then it's press and hold to delete a widget (just like for apps). I would bet a good bit of money no one paid Apple to put the news widget there, Apple probably did it attempt to get people to use their news app more and eventually pay for news+. I'm perfectly ok with all of that, especially since I deleted it immediately without issue. That said, if I was going to use a free or paid news service then Apple News+ would be high on my list for a number of reasons.

I agree, removing it was easy enough.

My contention is that Apple is not above using your screen real estate for promotion by default.

I get that, I'm just saying there is a world of difference between unremovable (or hard/paid to remove) carrier-installed lockscreen ads (or start menu ads for that matter, looking at you Windows) and a widget on a screen that I'd bet 50% of users have never seen and can remove in <5 seconds. Personally I never use/look at the today screen.

I would take the over on 50% of people seeing it.

Apple sends notifications for those news stories on your Today screen ;)

You first say that you had to go “hunting” to remove the widget but somehow removing it was “easy enough” in the next post? Something seems a bit hyperbolic between these two posts… which was it? Easy to remove or so hard you had to go hunting?

All of my comments have focused on how Apple is not above promotion by default.

My use of the word 'hunting' was very casual and completely secondary.

Long press -> remove

They make it incredibly easy to remove widgets

OK, but it's still an attention grab that's there by default?

So is the stocks and weather they show, the photo from Today Last Year, so is the phone being physically present… I mean what do you want?

Discoverability is hard, and Apple makes it easy to get rid of UI you don’t care to see.

I've never used News and have no plans to use it and yet it occasionally popped up alerts until I finally got off my ass and dug through the giant list of notifications to turn it off.

"Hunting"? It was "settings" -> "news"

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