The App Store is an absolute sh!t hole of an experience. Irrelevant ads, impossible to find anything decent. It’s the internet of 1998 pre google.
AppRaven is better for finding things
2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
271–280 of 286 posts
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#272> Search is the way most people find and download apps on the App Store, with nearly 65 percent of downloads happening directly after a search This is misleading - does it mean people are searching for an app that they already know about and want to download - chatgpt, samsung, gmail etc. Or searching for a topic or problem and see what apps are available - LLM, camera, running etc. I rarely do the latter - using web…
Just to add yo this, the way the AppStore is set up, if you know you want to download the app “MyLocalCoffePlaces7thAppThisYear” and you search for it with the exact name. The first “Hit” will most often be an add for that exact app. And you’ll click it, despite the “natural search result” 5 rows below. This of cause is exactly the intention because the add click means apple gets to charge the app owner for the inter…
I make a point to do exactly not that. Its so seldom relevant or attractive and its almost reflexive at this point.
By default, appstore will show you the scummiest, subscriptioniest, privacy-invasive apps in hopes you'll be lazy and click but thats never been the answer for me. All the gems I found I had to look quite hard for which pisses me off
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#273I searched for "Sparkasse" on the German Apple App Store, the good old staid conservative public savings bank. The top result was an ad for Crypto.com: Buy BTC, ETC, ...
Search it in DuckDuckGo or your search engine + ios unless you were just doing an experiment to see if you would get the expected result
Appraven has collections which are pretty handy, like actually curated lists
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a label and it rights "Ad" right under the name and description. That we're even debating that this is clearly labeled as an ad is crazy talk.
That the first result is clearly marked as an ad is an opinion. One I don't agree with.
It’s not an opinion, the law states that ads must be “clearly” labeled as such, so if you disagree and think Apple is breaking the law, feel free to report them to the FTC and see how far you get.
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that. What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either. Besides th…
I still think the Rio Karma looked good and it had a good interface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Karma I've still got it somewhere but the HDD has died.
The Karma looks interesting – not ugly, not pretty, but kinda unique.
I had a Rio 500 [1], which I wouldn't call ugly, but certainly not beautiful and it felt like a cheaply made plastic box, even though it was expensive (64 MB flash!).
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts. And indeed his arguments for slavery were some of his weakest precisely because they were uncharacteristic rationalizations. I completely agree that if you go back far eno…
> His arguments were generally driven by logic and reason, not rationalization. Rationalization is generally only necessary for adopting views that seem ostensibly inappropriate, which would certainly include these sort of 'naturally repulsive' acts. I think that's an after-the-fact assessment of what his treatment of the subject was, which we arrive at because of our modern morals. In his time he, and his audience,…
No, his arguments were materially different in this case. Most of his arguments came from first principles and worked outwards from some baseline; in particular - what is virtue and how virtue, itself, leads to satisfaction in life, and onward to how this can apply to systems and politics in general. But slavery he treated in an entirely different, practically ad hoc, fashion starting from slavery and then trying to shoe-horn in a justification along the lines of what you alluded to already with e.g. natural order and it being an inescapable inevitability.
It was a complete, and poor, rationalization. He even added, almost as a disclaimer, that there was not a complete overlap between 'natural' slaves and legal slaves, giving himself a plausible out to explain the endless examples of the repulsiveness of the institution by applying a no true scotmans fallacy, 'Ahh yes, I would agree with you there. But that is because that is not a natural slave, but merely a legal one.' And this is not my opinion alone. It has long been considered notably weak, especially from an otherwise brilliant man.
And I think that leads into your next issue. I don't think higher intelligence makes it easier to treat morality as a fiction, but rather even average intelligence, without discipline and virtue, makes it very easy to engage in self delusion and cognitive dissonance. Even those conditions are hardly a guarantee - Aristotle certainly had and strived for both discipline and virtue, yet the desire to rationalize what we want to be true, even if we know it is not, is a never-ending struggle that's easy to fail.
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#277I’m really not a fan of this direction for Apple. One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads, which make the experience feel more premium. Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience. Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads. Adding them after hitting that milestone feels either greedy or desperate, maybe a little of both. I know…
The crapification pathway where Services can place ads in Product 1) neutralizes a historical Apple differentiating advantage and 2) is probably going to increase monotonically. :(
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reality forces people to do that. When 90% of people do whatever they use programs for via mobile, you (as in, a business who wants to succeed) are forced to make an android and an iOS app.
Plenty of apps are Android only or iOS only. The only "force" is that businesses see these platforms as worth it to make enough money to be a return on investment.
Yes, accessing more than half of the market in US and about 25% of the worldwide one is surprisingly something businesses want to do.
Of course businesses do it because it's profitable. The point is that the market is ridiculously controlled while you are pretending that businesses can make _free_ choices, while for many of them they are not free or in some cases not even choices.
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they do care. In the gaming community, Ubuntu has gone from about 40% to 10% marketshare since 2018. https://youtu.be/Pwt216nn0zE Now, you might say this is because of the influence of SteamOS, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that Ubuntu has been getting more popular overall. Linux users have a choice while iOS and Android users essentially don’t.
I am talking in relation server market share since the ad is targeted towards people running servers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubuntu server has lost marketshare to other Linux distributions, but I don’t know that I have any way to verify it.
Re: 2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously? I haven't noticed it. Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear". Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable. [1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning…
The whole background of the ads are also a light blue, in contrast to the white background of organic results. I want all the ads to go away, and misleading apps should be removed from the store and certainly not promoted via ads… but I also don’t want ads to be flashing and being annoying in the name of being “clearly” market. Some people won’t notice anything, no matter how obvious.
> The whole background of the ads are also a light blue, in contrast to the white background of organic results.
Not on my phone. Set to dark mode.