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

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onemoresoop 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They don’t care and will likely make your review hard to get to.

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bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple doesn't care. Most people ignore the ads, which is why Apple can keep adding them to first-party apps without pushback. Rage-protesting ad campaigns probably pumps the Apple ads KPIs.

There will never be a mea culpa from Apple because this has long been their end goal. Tim Cook made it extremely clear that services would be an internal pivot for Apple. It's a lifeline for their quarterly reports, a neverending frontier of captive users that all pay a premium to participate in status games. Apple customers might be the most lucrative advertising audience in the world, all Apple has to do is "protect" them from the bad advertisements and expose curated, trusted promotions that Apple users are sure to love. Then they sell it as part of the trust ecosystem, so that anyone questioning the value of advertisements gets called a malcontent that wants to force Apple users into an wild-west maelstrom of disrespectful, uncurated ads.

This sort of false equivocation "oh-we-can't-fix-it" attitude is how Apple kept their App Store monopoly, and it's how they continue to deny ecosystem integration to respectful alternative software. It's an insult to capable users and the core reason why I had to leave the ecosystem. There is no reason to pay a price premium versus Microsoft if my OEM begs me to Try the new Safari! or Get Three Months of <garbage you don't want> for FREE! My blood pressure goes up just remembering the stupid shit that Microsoft and Apple imposed onto "my" computer.

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cheesecakegood 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, News is a collection of newspapers who pretty famously have supported themselves via advertising basically since forever, so complaining about ads in News to me is like complaining that a hamburger combo on a fast food menu includes soda. If you read the news, you get ads is a pretty normal social contract.

	▲	bigyabai 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, and the App Store is traditionally a place where advertisements appear above top search results. That's a normalized social contract, and it fucking sucks. It's a deliberately misleading design pattern that prioritizes ad sales over user clarity and immediacy. iTunes and Quicktime were never half as scummy as their modern counterparts are. If you continue down this road of legitimizing user-hostile design, you will sacrifice everything you love about Apple. It's a Procrustean bed upon which good apps are hammered into service revenue.