alt Hacker NewsApple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results
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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? Steve Jobs was the original.
This makes no difference, because I can’t remember the last time I installed an app other than for the occasional airline.
From 2008-12 it was genuinely exciting to see what new apps were being released every day. Mobile games from that era had cultural impact. I bought $2 apps without a thought.
But Apple incentivized monetization above all else and killed that excitement. Now you can’t find a tip calculator that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription. A popular flight tracker is $60/year (or a $300 purchase). A flash card app costs the same. Apple’s curated list of “essential utilities” includes a birthday countdown that costs $5/wk.
I know every app will cost me hundreds over the span of just a few years for marginal utility so I simply stopped buying them. And I wonder if Apple’s push for more ad revenue is a symptom of that trend.
It recently occurred to me that it’s been years since it was possible to find some new and interesting app just by browsing the App Store, like it used to be when iPhone and Android were first introduced. Now I open the store knowing in advance what exactly I’m looking for and take care not to accidentally click on a lookalike.
To be be honest, the worst Google-like thing about the before and after is how you have to scroll down to see actual results. On my iPhone, I get half of an app showing below the full sponsored app.
Just makes me want to find iOS apps through other means than the App Store.
Not only are Apple's services bad, they've becoming inescapable. It's rumored that they'll add ads to maps as soon as next year.
Music.app is simply an ad for Apple Music, Books.app is like reading in a Barnes and Noble while someone from marketing looks over your shoulder and their TV app features their own shows to an overbearing degree — everything else is becoming more of an afterthought.
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 great, MacBook with Apple silicon are unmatched in refinement, iPhones are awesome but getting a bit stale. Apple Watch is awesome, but for sports Garmin are better. It is the integrated ecosystem with iCloud that makes the total system powerful.
Where to go? I love Linux with CachyOS on my desktop. Anything similar for tablets and laptops? I think KDE has something like connect that aims to do what iCloud does.
Services business is a slippery slope, everyone succumbs to the YoY revenue growth push and they all gravitate towards the same dirty tactics. They even tried turning the hardware into a subscription model but I guess it didn’t gain much traction.
Wont make a difference. People are already in the Walled Prison and moms/teens/lower-middle class people are shamed for not being able to afford the $50/mo to buy an iphone. They had numerous privacy and security issues that caused literal deaths of VIPs. Their quality is always 2nd best if we are being generous.
If they haven't switched yet, its not going to happen. Apple knows this. Late users are always punished like my parents who still have a landline and cable tv.
I'm a pretty liberal guy, I like democracy I like captialism but its stuff like this that is blackpilling me on private enterprise. No matter how much they have they continue to push the boundary and squeeze the customer. My cope at the moment is that its only americans and its due to a failure of culture. But im starting to the same greed in companies in my own country. I dont think worker owned enterprise is any better as they still have the same incentives.
the change is more subtle than I expected but this does seem like a step in the wrong direction
a bigger older problem is the number of copycat applications allowed in the app store. for example the listing for the official microsoft authenticator app (free and used in many corporate environments) is surrounded by results with similar looking icons and titles. these look a likes also work for MFA but charge a monthly subscription. not exactly a scam since they do work, but its obvious they are only there to confuse users into paying for something thats free.
I can remember, or perhaps imagine a time when the FTC would knowingly not look kindly on a situation like this, so Apple with its huge market share and revenue wouldn’t consider it. I imagine now it’s likely not a concern for the agency, and if it were, a political contribution would go a long way towards resolving any concerns.
With stuff like this, this is just a really bad idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46323041
You can't tell family to search for things in the app store anymore, I always provide direct links. It's just to dangerous otherwise.
>it probably helps increase click-through rates which ultimately boosts Apple’s revenue in its ads business
I assume that means it increases the number of times users install the wrong app (possibly with serious consequences)?
I find that's the case already. They also force you to go through their ad-splattered gauntlet, every time you reopen the app.
It's pretty much worthless, to me. I always use direct app links, from the developers' sites.
I shudder to think of it getting worse.
Oh, so the Google playstore since... forever. Or at least as long as I can remember. If you have a "search" feature on your <anything app> it should filter down to exactly what you would expect, no sponsored positions, no irrelevant apps as ads, etc.
Shame apple is going towards the dark pattern of ads as results.
Apple’s Ads business is around 8-10 billion dollars in revenue. Thats a tiny fraction of their overall revenue.
Not obvious to me that this is worse or as user-hostile as many seem to presume.
Previously the blue background made the ad result look more highlighted and more prominent.
Now it is just like the other results - not special or better.
Yes, the HN audience knows the visual convention indicates that the blue background represents an ad. Does your everyday user know that or do they assume the blue results are better?
This will always be a thing, the click metrics dictate it and to justify the costs to the company advertising and the low # of clicks, something has to be done to save the new revenue Ads give. They might as well add modal (psudeo popup) ads, because they will be there in 15yrs.
26.3 ß 2 still shows the blue background on my iPad.
If an iPhone is going to be as bad as an Android like that then what's the point. The "premium" feeling is eroded like this.
Ffs. Alright, what’s the best way for me to run Silverblue on Mac hardware these days with a full GPU-accelerated desktop experience? Is UTM any good? Any alternatives? I used to run Win 10 in Parallels on MacOS and it was excellent - that’s the level of virtualisation polish I’m going for.
After 25+ years, I see the direction of travel - I’m done with this bullshit. Yesterday my MacBook started ringing loudly in the middle of the cafe where I was working when a call came in. I switched off Handoff years ago, but a recent update has obviously silently re-enabled it.
I cannot have Apple just arbitrarily switching shit up for their own benefit on the machines I use to get my work done. And they are now unquestionably succumbing to increasingly baldfaced enshittification.
Do we need an “Ask HN” for developers stuck on / preferring Mac hardware, unwilling / unable to run Asahi on bare metal, but wanting a GPU-accelerated Linux desktop experience?
Feels short sighted. Every such change gets me closer to ditching the ecosystem altogether.
Do people actually use the app store? Are we not all just searching in spotlight and clicking the first app that comes up (as long as it has 100K/1mil+ downloads) ?
The lines where pretty blurred already. If you search for the exact name of an app, I think that needs to go first in the results, the ads can be the third or forth. Having ads show up before the "correct" app is incredibly dangerous in a world where so much of our digital life is in various apps. Often the people see is actively trying to trick people into installing the wrong thing, making the ad less visible is going to get a lot of people scammed.
How the hell Apple does not see this is beyond me. All of their fancy security in iOS is worthless if they allow people to be tricked into installing scam-ware.
Seriously? Already the only thing that makes ads distinguishable from results is that you search for "microsoft authenticator" and the first result is ... something else.
They do have an unnoticeable "this is an ad" tiny text somewhere. Are they talking about removing even that?
Liquid Glass was always about blurring the line.
What cant i search for paid apps
i don't remember last time i was in the app store.
One of the reasons ChatGPT is taking over google searches for a lot of people is that they also did this kind of shit.
These companies are overconfident.
Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.
Google does the same where an ad is the first result. :(
App Store's UX has always been a show of excrement, and its search is wonky as hell. I can't imagine myself use that to discover apps, after having been shoved tons of dreck results up my behind the last time I've tried it.
I'd rather ask for app recommendations on 4chan or Reddit than browse App Store.
Just a reminder that paid for gaming of the search results on Amazon is around a $60bn business for them.
Enshittification, the sequel.
Why must Apple do this?
They're already rolling in profits that dwarf the national budgets of most countries. And I say this as a shameless Apple fanboy.
Wow, how much greed will we all tolerate?
Apple annual gross profit for 2025 was $195.201B, a 8.04% increase from 2024.
And still, they feel they can do this? I have never seen a better sign of a monopoly in my life.
Wow! They force you to use their app store, and now they have the gall to trick users into installing ads—and there will be multiple ads.
This feels like a conversation about irrelevant matters the App Store ad design at the advent of AI integration? I see the future being AI suggesting or responding with an app or extension to add specific abilities or features based on stated objectives, i.e., just a package manager behind the scenes. I don’t see myself going to some App Store. I haven’t even “browsed” one in years because they all seem extremely static, having reached a peak saturation and static state.
Frankly, Apple could have probably just totally replaced the App Store a long time ago if they were not slaves to financial reports by simply integrating app search into spotlight more closely or prominently… pull down, search “ai app” (or whatever) and you’re provided with a list of app results that includes an install button.
App updating could and should have been integrated into the settings app.
These kinds of things will only increasingly start biting the Apple as Google has been forced to face the abyss of the death of the common search they’ve dominated for decades now. I don’t think Apple has faced that existential Grim-reaper yet… what do you do when the app ecosystem, OS UI/UX advantages, and even hardware quality has vanished through the cascading integration of AI? I don’t know that Apple has faced that yet or at least has been left blindsided, considering what I’ve been seeing from them.
The masters of UI design are showing us how to build an app store. /s
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 the organic posts in your feed, just with a small "sponsored", "promoted", or "ad" mark somewhere. Half the time the post is large enough that it takes up my entire screen and the "sponsored" mark is below and off-screen.
If you go on Amazon, the "sponsored" text is much smaller and light gray rgb(87,89,89) while the product text is near-black rgb(15,17,17). They want to make the sponsored text less visible. Sometimes it's even unclear if the sponsored tag applies to a single product or a group of products.
It's shocking that Apple hasn't done this trick yet when everyone else started doing it years ago.