I haven't noticed this at all and I wonder if you're mistaking curation for advertising? When I open up the App Store I get a panel written "games we love" and a listing of indie games that are clearly not paid for ads. The ads in search are visibly marked as ads, and while I don't particularly like ads in general, they are pretty easy to avoid.

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16bitvoid 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

On iOS, if you open the App Store and click on the Today tab (it's the default tab if you kill and reopen), there's ads interspersed with curations.

For me, the second tile is an ad for Upside, some cashback app

	▲	slopinthebag 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Mine is Moneris Go, and the top review is titled "Garbage App!!!!" lol Honestly the last time I remember using the App Store was years ago and I can't recall if they had ads or not. Imo it's distasteful and I wish they didn't have them. Still leagues better than the fucking ads in the start menu which caused me to give up on gaming and Windows forever.

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TheDong 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If I open the app store and search "Gemini", the first result is "ChatGPT (advertisement)"

If I search for my bank, I get another bank. If I search for "Wordle", I get a bunch of ad-supported spamware (both the ad and non-ad results) before the real NYT Games app.

The app store has ads in search results. This is the primary way that my technologically inept relatives end up with the wrong app installed btw, is by searching and clicking the first result, and getting complete trash adware.

Apple should be ashamed of selling out their users.