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Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

9to5mac.com

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Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#491

Post by efilife »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #13
atonse wrote: post #8

More and more evidence that the a-holes with spreadsheets are taking over at Apple and they’re completely devoid of any ideas on the software side. I heard someone randomly say that they should replace Tim Cook with Scott Forstall. I chuckled at the idea but this might be a great idea. Apple is having its Ballmer moment. Google did too before AI lit the fire under their feet. Who is going to be Apple’s next Nadella?…

Can we use "ensheetification" to describe this phenomeon? (sure I'm not the first to use this word)

I hope this takes off

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#492

Post by Dylan16807 »

morshu9001 wrote: post #477
Dylan16807 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wasn't there to read the text, the screenshots say everything. That's the exact kind of attitude that will make people miss an "obvious" marker. And I wouldn't call that tiny thing on the third row of text obvious. Even knowing it said 'ad' somewhere, it took me several tries to find it.

> That's the exact kind of attitude Apparently not though, I saw it said ad. Maybe you missed it because you were focused on the wall of text instead of the UI.

> Apparently not though, I saw it said ad.

It's not like it's a guarantee. And being the "kind" of attitude doesn't mean you miss the exact same things in each situation. It didn't bite you here but it's a risk elsewhere.

> Maybe you missed it because you were focused on the wall of text instead of the UI.

I was looking at the ads the whole time, but I was intuitively focusing edges and the corners and the fine print at the bottom but the actual marker was tucked into the middle very small.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#493

Post by rafaelmn »

apparent wrote: post #252

The search results in the App Store are ridiculous. Sometimes I search for an app by name and have to scroll through dozens of other apps before finding the one I had searched for. App Store search is as broken as Apple Mail search, if not worse.

But Apple must take 30% of your revenue to maintain this level of quality. Don't you know that your parents using an Android would get scam infested phones because having unlocked app distribution prevents this kind of quality experience.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#494

Post by p1necone »

torben-friis wrote: post #311
mdasen wrote: post #21

This is what basically everyone else has done over the past decade. Google used to put a different background behind ads in its search ( https://www.fsedigital.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Google... ). It made it really easy to tell what was an ad and skip over it quickly. Now it's a lot harder to quickly notice what's an ad and what isn't. Sites used to have banner ads. Now they show posts that look exactly like t…

>It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago. They sell a walled garden. If shit gets inside the walls, we might as well come out. I’m not willing to pay the apple tax any longer. Let the ad sellers pay if they’re the main costumers.

This feels inevitable for any 'unique' company that lives long enough for leadership to retire and starts hiring replacement c-levels externally.

Those external people are going to run Apple just like whatever other companies they were running before. You need to keep the vision alive and promote people internally who understand that vision to keep running the company.

Being publicly traded probably doesn't help either.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#495

Post by Hackbraten »

izzydata wrote: post #461
bethekidyouwant wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, do you like what android and Microsoft are doing ?

I want to see a movement of people using dumbphones or no phones at all. Anything you do on a smartphone can be done later on a desktop computer and a landline phone.

I left the Apple ecosystem three years ago and have been daily driving a Linux-based phone ever since.

I’m still dealing with the fallout even today. There are tons of things in 2026 that you can no longer conveniently do without an Apple or Google mobile OS. For example, you’re out of all the group chats. No more WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. You can’t have those on a computer unless you have the account tethered to a phone.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#496

Post by morshu9001 »

wkjagt wrote: post #454

Does anyone know when it started to be "ok" to disguise ads as search results? And I don't mean making them look more similar, but including them at all, even as the top results. I'm genuinely wondering how this started because it feels like such a bad idea, but everyone is now doing it anyway because we got used to it by adding it to our list of noise to filter out when interacting with anything connected to the int…

Google had sponsored links for as long as I knew about it, at least 2000. That section was at the top back then and is like that today, but there were times it was only on the right side.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#497

Post by anthk »

pjmlp wrote: post #271
anthk wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Windows 98 with IE bundled in Explorer and Active Desktop.

It was ahead of its time, now we have people shipping Electron all over the place.

I think IE, ActiveX and the like were reused in tons of VB5/6 applications... at least with zillions of Spanish shareware, such as amateur games, crossword puzzles, home agendas, book databases and the like. They worked smooth enough, but in a crazy insecure way. Today it's the reverse; Chromium/Blink can do sandboxing but they bundle everything. Video and audio codecs, HTML renderers, a JS engine, a CSS engine, TTF rendering engines, 2D drawing engines, their own window and process managers... half an OS.

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#498

Post by alex1138 »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #439
lorddumpy wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than blue bubbles, you aren't leaving behind much nowadays. Apple is now lagging in general usability vs competitors, Siri as one glaring example.

I think parent was referring to how challenging it is to move data (files like photos and other types of files, all of which are only accessible through apps with those specific capabilities) out of the Apple mobile ecosystem and to something non-Apple-ish. This is still true even if you use a Mac as an intermediary (if you have one), which also implies that you're probably going to be using iCloud to sync those as w…

I wasn't aware of that, that's pretty awful

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#499

Post by drnick1 »

TheDong wrote: post #237
asdff wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "degrade the experience" you mean you get a text that says "TheDong liked $message." The horror! Maybe people will go back to just sending a thumbs up emoji.

By "degrade the experience" I mean: 1. Unable to remove members, or change member's phone-numbers without recreating the entire chat and losing continuity / bothering everyone with noise about these changes. 2. Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school. 3. Unable to send high qualit…

> Green bubbles, so if your teenage child talks in the group chat at school and one of their classmates sees the green bubble, they'll be bullied for the rest of the time in school.

Wth, is this even a real thing?

Re: Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

#500

Post by spockz »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #356
spockz wrote: post #112

This is very unfortunate. To me Apple was the last corporate standing that is not doing ads nefariously. If this is changing what is next? I’m aware it is a slippery slope argument, but this has to do with trust. Apple’s advertised stance on privacy and security and ads always has been believable (to me) because of their business model and that they made it the distinguishing feature. Now, what is left? iPads are gre…

As with security and privacy, the only real solution is user choice. On Android, if you don't like the app store(s) that came with the device, you can use another one or none at all. On iOS, you have to get apps from the App Store.

This only holds if you don’t need/want/care for banking apps or things like Netflix. More apps are requiring hardware and software attestation like my sibling mentioned.
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