That's how you self select as a high value ad target

People pay the mafia protection money because it's cheaper than fighting the mob and it makes the mob go away for awhile, and in the long run, we're all dead. Most mafia-like entities don't have an inexorable existential drive to take it all, they just charge what the market will bear.

And if you think there's a definitional difference between a government, a corporation and a mafia that stands up to any objective measure and isn't based entirely on social cues and special pleading, I think that's an extraordinary claim you have no evidence for.

Go lead a maoist insurgency or don't, but the fingerwagging moral appeal is worse than useless.

Perhaps not even that is completely safe long term, as companies can introduce a locked down dependency, reverse policies (see Google's recent sideloading stance), or find some other workarounds.

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, they will keep pushing them.

I find I don’t use the App Store much anymore. I used to browse it all the time, but it feels like one giant advertisement now.

Cannot wait for ads to slip into my iCloud storage.

> 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.