171–180 of 286 posts
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> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it. In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
THIS. Never promote the idea of "can you please not bother me with ads, there you go there is your extra $100, what, $200? okay sure". That's how mafia operates. Do not promote such.
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> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted. Here's a nice ad I ran into recently: https://imgur.com/a/sq1HFHK I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is. If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have t…
You say it's not marked as an ad, but in that image there's a clear blue "Ad" label. Are there cases where that label is not present?
But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
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It’s not just money left on the table, it’s a way to differentiate from the competition. When someone is trying to decide iPhones vs Android for their next purchase, being able to say “our OS doesn’t have ads” is big. I hear people complain about ads more than just about anything else. I think users should have 0 tolerance for ads in the OS. It’s the broken window theory. Once they start, if the users don’t revolt, t…
Well, my Androids do not have ads because I can install Firefox with uBO and Blockada to block ads even inside apps. I don't know if uBO works in Safari and I don't know if iOS allows for something like Blockada. In doubt (and for other reasons,) I'm on Android. However I'm not the typical user. The typical buyers just want an iPhone or do not want one, like they want one brand of shoes or a brand of bags, no technic…
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> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads Newsflash: the first slot in an app store search is an ad that is not marked as such. Your extra $100 are already wasted. Here's a nice ad I ran into recently: https://imgur.com/a/sq1HFHK I was trying to install microsoft authenticator and the first "result"... I don't want to know what that is. If they add more ads at the top I suppose I'll have t…
OMG, this requires it's own submission here on HN, I suggest you do it, this egregious. How low has Apple sunk. This is "the luxury brand" people.
Apple is just another runner in the race to the bottom, and they're trying their best to catch up to 'the leaders'. One thing I've noticed with the Play Store is that top-level advertised app results are, more often than not, totally unrelated to what I searched for, and therefore completely useless as both a suggestion to the user and an 'opportunity' for the app creator. In fact, it usually invokes a 'this app must…
What baffles me is when people defend this broken wallet garden to be used by their grandmas. Surely they won't be able to tell which one of the 20 ChatGPT apps is the correct one in search results.
One would think it's good search that helps users find what they want. But noooo! It's ads!
Ads help users! One has to love this kind of orwellian language. And one has to wonder if it's ever written in good faith? Or is everyone lying as a matter of course, to people who know perfectly well they're being lied to.
Is it even lying if you know they know you're lying?
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> I’d rather pay an extra $100 for the phone than have ads all over it. In all likelihood, we will pay an extra $100 AND have ads.
If that happens then people will just switch to the less premium, fully ad supported platform, Android, because the platform have just become commodities. It might increase profits in the short term but it will hammer the brand.
Publicly-traded companies fairly consistently follow a particular arc. At first they produce something people like, and thereby become popular. This is often before they go public. Then they grow for a while, until the market becomes saturated. But they're a public company, so they're still expected to grow. And if you can't get more users, the only thing you can do is extract more out of each one.
That's enshitification in a nutshell.
People often suggest things like "consumer protection" regulations, but then you get malicious compliance and regulatory capture. There are only really two things that work:
The first is that the company is still controlled by a founder who actually cares about their reputation. This works pretty well when you can find it, but it tends not to last. Eventually people die or retire.
The second is competition. Not a duopoly where they each point to the other and claim there's an alternative while mirroring every bad act of their partner in crime. Actual competition, where the market share of new companies that have only entered the market in the last 5 years isn't zero. This is why e.g. Costco can be rated higher than Comcast by an amount represented by the difference in altitude between a scenic view at a local park and the depths of hell.
So that's where you want to direct regulatory efforts. Breaking up companies in concentrated markets, repealing regulations that raise barriers to entry or allow incumbents to lock out competitors, etc. Because once a company is beholden to Wall St, the only thing that can keep them honest is real competition.
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Enshittification is Inevitable.
Perhaps, but it exploded in the tech industry as soon as Steve Jobs died. Whatever his faults, he had a high bar for user experience, a massive megaphone, and the respect of journalists, industry leaders, and the public. Apple's market differentiator, under Steve Jobs, was that it wasn't shitty. Jobs would regularly mock competitors publicly for the way in which they 'enshittified' their products (in words of the tim…
Worse. The bad actors have become the authority figures.
As someone who works in tech for a career it's honestly a bit of an existential crisis. I actively work on a SaaS product but would never even consider paying for SaaS any more myself.