It's outrageous that once a great OS builder, is now resorting to pushing it's subscription services through it's OS. Imagine MacOS and iOS showing in menu ads, I hope Apple never stoops to this level.
Windows ads can be disabled pretty easily.
iOS App Store ads cannot be disabled at all and are often for utter trash.
The Microsoft Store is entirely optional, and app installs/updates can be entirely handled via winget/chocolatey (or installs in some other form). The iOS App Store cannot be avoided for installing apps or for manually updating apps, and its ads are more akin to forced ads in the Windows Update settings pane.
Where are you seeing ads in the main UI?
I occasionally see a small ad near the top of "Settings", usually for an Apple service. I don't recall ads on the home page or lock screen, or in the main Apple apps I use (Camera, Photos, Files, Health, Fitness, Watch).
I have never seen any ads anywhere in iOS. I'm utterly confused by this comment?
See https://www.macrumors.com/2022/10/22/apple-announces-more-ap...
1. The App Store is not a "core UI element";
2. Even if it was, it's reasonable to see ads in a _store_. It's somewhere you go specifically in order to buy things and see companies' offerings. It's in the name -- a store. Like others have pointed out, no other portions of the OOB experience have ads.
(The first one doesn't particularly matter, because I'm forced to use the iOS App Store regardless of how you classify it, the second of which I forcefully disagree with - I am opposed to any ads that I cannot opt out of seeing. I don't go to the store to see ads, I go to download exactly the apps I want, and to update apps I already have installed - in both of those situations ads are unavoidable.)
(And other portions of the OOB experience do have ads - as noted in my link, both the News and Stock apps, although I don't use either. And apparently soon the Maps app if it doesn't have ads already.)
Maybe there's some MDM that can be practically used to manage personal/household iOS app installs without the App Store? Happy to take suggestions there.
There are certainly things to complain about on iOS, but in this case you’re just inventing a non-issue.
I've prefaced all my comments on this subject by pointing out that I'm describing my experience. And in my experience, despite my best effort to avoid ads, I'm forced to see more (and lower quality) ads on iOS than I am on Windows.
It would also “make sense” for “sudo apt install firefox” to show me an Google-sponsored ad to instead consider Chrome.
Nobody is saying the App Store ads aren’t annoying, but I am saying that it’s nowhere near the same level of intrusiveness as these Windows changes, because you can easily avoid the App Store, and when you do open it you know what to expect.
I would love it if Apple provided an alternate method to install and update apps on iOS that didn’t involve the App Store.
The relative intrusiveness of start menu ads is, for me, much lower than the App Store ads, as the start menu ads (and its connectivity to the web in general) can easily be toggled off.
Also, if you signed in at some point and later sign out, the notification doesn’t appear. My work machine isn’t connected to an iCloud account.
For many years, I had hoped they'd pull an apple and run linux under the hood with a graphic shell that made it look like Windows. But times have moved on, and it will never again be an important enough product for them to fix in that manner now.
It's really just the shitty UI more than anything else. The ads and paid placement are an embarrassment, and they still have an inconsistent UI going back to Windows 8. I guess you could throw in telemetry too.
I have just as many gripes about MacOS - probably more. I have really disliked that OS for several years now. I feel like I have to conform to it rather than have it work for me.
These days, I'm a happy Linux user. It's not perfect, but it's the best of the big 3 for me.
These things make it mediocre. Sure, it's not the dumpsterfire filled with radioactive cobalt that it was back in 1995 or so when I started using it... but if that's the best it can say, it's sort of like Cleveland's "At least we're not Detroit!" tourism campaign.
> I have just as many gripes about MacOS
Me too, as far as that goes. Not a fanboy. But it's tolerable, and I'm mostly too lazy to get a linux install up to a point where it wouldn't make me want to tear my hair out. If someone could do that for me, I'd definitely like it better than Mac. Just too far down the list of priorities for me I guess.
Apple does this.