alt Hacker NewsApple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
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Relatedly, Apple finally kicked me off the quick update bandwagon with macOS/iOS 26, and I was surprised to learn that no, Apple does not let you just say no to updates. You get a permanent red badge that you can only dismiss by fully turning off system notifications, you get nagged literally thousands of times, and if any of those times you don’t repeat your rejection quickly enough, it overrides your non-consent and updates. That’s all with updates turned off. HN comment sections had led me to believe that consensual updates are a pro of Apple over Windows and an example of Apple’s class, but they don’t exist, the actual software is everything people lambast Windows for.
I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.
They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.
[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html
[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck
Ironically: https://imgur.com/a/xHyiUzW
Yep, after being a huge Apple Maps advocate for years to family and friends, I have quit it completely after I got a pop up introducing new ads.
Mostly just using CoMaps now, or Google Maps if I need to look up business hours or get traffic info.
If Apple has ads too then I might as well just use Google for that stuff since at least it’s probably more correct…
It's just ao insane that a company that's sitting on a massive pile of cash and has been wildly profitable for decades still needs to do this. I suppose the valuation requires more growth, and they're out of good ideas.
I'll never forget when an employee at Samsung asked on their internal chat why the built in Weather app has ads, and they turned them off. https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-remove-ads-2735914/
Decent companies listen: I suggest contacting support; if enough people do it they might realize the errors in their ways.
I had a similar experience with promotional notifications from Hyundai: I suspect I'm not the only person who called their support saying, "I don't want ads from a $70,000 car."
It's lousy that you can't turn off the badge notifications for the Settings app, which is where they push this garbage. I'm still on iOS 18, and I just have to live with a red '1' on my Settings app because I haven't updated my OS. It also pokes me every week or two to update.
It's not Microsoft-level annoyance, but it's not the way Apple used to be, either.
Ads on Maps were inevitable. Google does it too. Those services just cost a ton of money to run. (I know the article talks about other ads too.)
They've had ads for years. Try not upgrading to Tahoe and you'll get a popup every week advertising their new os
Maybe they're trying to train people to be OK with the red notification badge and just accept unread notifications as part of life.
Funny to read claims like that on techradar, that showed multiple pop-up frames around the 'article' and on top of it. But they haven't added an image of that 'ads'. No you have to read and try to understand what happened.
That's not a new thing. I bought my first apple product (an iPad) last year and the free trials and nagging to set up iCloud cause the Settings app to have a red dot all of the time.
Their damn hardware is so expensive, they should never pass an iota of a thought about putting ads in their software.
My flip phone is a completely ad-free experience. I would recommend it for just that reason (among many, many other benefits).
With no channel for ads in your life, when you step into public spaces, you realize how much of our linguistic and visual spectrums are polluted by ads. The ad is always the same message too: "Buy this!" it screams as loud as it can, often trying to do so over the noise floor of other ads.
Remove ads from your life and behold the vistas of thought that open up, those previously drowned out by mindless noise.
The title had me thinking they had actual adverts open to advertisers. It's not, just someone winging about apple advertising icloud+ and some other stuff in their settings app where you can directly enable it. Come on you lot, this is fine, it's like the least ad driven mainstream commercial platform.
What are the free software alternative phones/tablets and how do we concentrate our support so at least one of them is successful?
I literally couldn’t read this page because of the amount of ads.
Yeah, I kept getting a notification about purchasing and extended warranty for my AirPods, which was annoying because it shows up in the same place as OS updates.
I really don’t get this. Apple is trying to sell you 2 or 3 addons that are really beneficial and great products that make sense.
I don’t need them, I don’t buy them.
But I really appreciate there being a button at a place that logically makes sense and that gives you the opportunity to make more out of your device.
AFAIK you can click them away.
It’s not as if there are intrusive popups or as if they are trying to sell you blackmarket ware.
It's not just iOS. Final Cut Pro on MacOS now regularly advertises iPadOS Final Cut Pro (which is a paid SaaS tool). Professional applications (arguments about Final Cut Pro X not being all that professional notwithstanding) that advertise like that are almost non-existent in the pro audio and video industry; an Apple pro app advertising, would have been heresy a few years ago.
And yeah, it drives me crazy. It's one more, wildly unnecessary, click.
Logic is one of the last tools keeping me tethered to MacOS. I've got 26 years invested in it, but the moment I open it up to record something and see an ad, it's over. Ardour and Bitwig will suffice, even if it means flushing tens of thousands of dollars of software down the toilet with it (the core suite of plugins I use).
I'm tired of unnecessary speed bumps in the creative process. It's why I no longer use a Roli Seaboard (what wildly awful software).
Apple continues down a course (addicted to ads, even their own) that I've seen few recover from.
There absolutely is a market for a new 'premium' smartphone maker to arrive.. But given the hardware prices currently, we are stuck with two companies who are purely now squeezing every cent they can out of us while destroying their experience.
Wow, I've joked twice in the past two days about Apple becoming Microsoft and it's completely true.
1. Can't turn off Siri easily, turns itself back on.
2. Apple search not things it should obviously being able to find, just like Windows search.
3. Ads in the operating system like Windows 10+
I don’t see them. Greetings from the EU.
Apple must be trying to accelerate making smartphones as unappealing and contemptible as cable television in the past 10-15 years.
There’s some irony here about an ad-filled tech blog complaining about ads.
I haven’t seen any of these. iOS 27.0, in the EU fwiw
The irony of this site having ads that cover 1/3 of my screen on mobile was absolutely lost on the author.
Comparing the Settings banner to the Start menu banner as seems a bit overblown. One you only see when you open settings, which is typically not daily or even necessarily weekly for most people; the other you see potentially up to hundreds of times a day, every day you that use your device. This article would have been a lot more meaningful if it had focused on the Maps app’s ads and the News app’s ads (by Taboola!), which do actively interfere with the quality of experience delivered and are enshittifying services provided, or the Game Center “try this other app” ads that float over other apps and can’t be disabled, in order to make the point that the badge ads were in fact the earliest harbinger of the slippery slope we always fear everything to be. Lacking any actual investment of effort along those lines, it reads more as wahmbulance chasing than meaningful news.
Haven't those ads been there for years? Pretty sure I've seen them for years.
I find it ironic that I am attempting to read an article that says what it says while 80% of the screen is ads and asking me to register to their notifications.
for the first time in many years it’s these ads that have me looking at Android devices seriously. it’s the fact that they can’t be easily dismissed that bothers me the most (although clearly annoying even if they were quick to dismiss)
The irony of this website being so loaded with ads that I can barely read the contents is palpable :P
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
I want to pay a premium for no built in adds and a more secure product.
If that goes away I will have no reason to buy apple.
I am a small developer on iOS and the App Store Search ads are super frustrating. When users search for my exact app name, apple shoves 2 full screen ads on top of the search results. Sometimes, it's 1 search results sandwiched in between 2 ads which makes the user miss it because they scrolled past the ads.
Often these ads are entirely unrelated to what user is searching for. And small developers are being discouraged when big companies are spending millions in ads to rank above them.
Also, most of the times, the ads are for apps I will never download. I constantly see ads for the Temu app which I will never use. Yet, there's no "don't show this ad again" button.
The ‘ads’ appear even if you are already paying for those services of the ads
Why put it in 'quotation marks'. It's ads, not 'ads'.
Where are these ads?? Are they when you open up a program?.
Techradar complaining about Ads while it's showing three different full-screen popups while trying to just read the first paragraph of the article is certainly a choice
This is not new, I remember seeing those for the whole year (till potential Apple care promotion expires) when you buy a new phone years ago, and yes, they stay for weeks or longer.
Thank goodness... I thought I was the only one complaining. Ever since Apple started putting ads in the App store, I started referring to them as an "ad company". Every time I search for, say, "Signal" and see the first result be a "promoted" link to "Whatsapp", my blood boils.
F*k any company that shows me ads on the hardware/software that I bought from them. ESPECIALLY if they were once NOT an ad company... and then transitioned to one.
I'm fine seeing ads if they were part of the original deal -- for example, the ad subsidized Amazon Kindles. But nothing is safe or sacred anymore. I am all but certain that if you paid for a Kindle with no-ads (ie: you paid the premium), you can be 100% sure that you will eventually see ads!
All contracts, all privacy policies, all terms of use... come with a clause to the effect of "we can change this whenever we want and by using it, you consent!"
Mark my word: very soon, every commercial OS will use shady TOS to train their AI models on every byte you have on your hard drive. ZERO privacy. And if Linux becomes popular enough, you can be certain that the ad companies will start financing open source projects so that they can pressure them to exfiltrate data.
I remember when I was young, there was an organization, Nielsen Media Research [1], that would seek a statistically significant number of volunteers whose television viewing habits they could monitor. They existed because it was ILLEGAL for cable companies to monitor and collect data about what you watched.
Others have said it, and I'll repeat it: this is NOT a problem that can be fixed with technology. People need to get pissed off and write their legislators, and those legislators need to grow a backbone.
In the meantime, the ad industry lobbyists will be spending tons of money to (1) convince legislators otherwise and (2) keep the masses ignorant of the scale of the surveillance apparatus they have created.
Is this a bigger problem on iOS 27? Should I continue to stay on 18?
The article then ends by displaying an ad for Apple products.
so let me get this straight you pay more than 1500 bucks for a phone and then you get ads delivered to said phone?
I didn't realize they were ads.... this is weird
I doubt John Ternus will change direction anytime soon, since it will look like he’s reversing the plethora of eyesore ads that Tim Cook added over his tenure.
But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!
From this article
> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.
From a recent post by John Gruber:
> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]
Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?
[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...