But what's worse than an ad is that too many times these apps are actually scammy. A whole host of apps with almost identical and misleading names, icons, banner pictures, descriptions, developer names, and so on.
Ok, I search for Netflix and you show me Prime first is one think. But showing me a scam app is a different offense altogether. And it doesn't matter if your phone costs $600 or $1600 you'll get served up to the scammers just the same.
This is an example of a company whose financial incentives are in direct conflict with the interests of their users, and so they choose to be complicit in borderline fraudulent auctivities.
You piled a whole lot of arguments, but doesn't change the fact that it's still clearly labelled. Besides, you only need to notice this box once to be able to tell whether something marked the same way is an ad or not in the future.
You're absolutely right on the real problem: it's allowed to present itself, totally convincingly to the average / naive user, as Microsoft sanctioned.
Btw, I'm checking now, the label "ad" is not there, it's just highlighted. Or is it that blue tag? I thought that signified in-app ads? Shouldn't the highlight itself have a label? Probably this is some A/B test optimized BS, that tag was the option where most people WRONGLY clicked on the stuff they didn't search for.
When I came from Android I first couldn't figure out why app store search was so bad. Dumb me, expecting the highlighted option to be something most relevant to ME and MY search, no it's most relevant to some paying company and can even be a scam. And you and me can reason through this, but my kids get this BS as well, the grow up with this as normal.
You search for something, you don't get what you search for. This is our normal.
Absolute disappointment on day 1 with iOS.
My next phone will be something like FairPhone with e/OS or Sailfish. Or I'll wait for that Graphene hardware partner stuff to finally be revealed. I'm so sick of this bs. You pay a lot of money for something and they slap you with ads. Same on smart TVs, my Philips Hue system (hundreds, maybe thousands of euros I spend on that), ads ads ads.
But it really pisses me off when I spend money on something, and then after that it enshitifies (ie Philips/Signify Hue).
Ah well, being annoyed by and pissed off at iOS just makes me spend less time on the thing, so that's good.
Maybe it's clear to you... or you work in marketing and have a different definition of "clear".
Note that this is a screenshot from a hi dpi iphone that went through a few upload/download/reencode cycles [1] so it lost all density information. On the real phone screen the "Ad" thing is extremely tiny and unnoticeable.
[1] Downloaded it from my work chat where i posted it as a warning to my colleagues a couple days ago.
I want all the ads to go away, and misleading apps should be removed from the store and certainly not promoted via ads… but I also don’t want ads to be flashing and being annoying in the name of being “clearly” market. Some people won’t notice anything, no matter how obvious.
Not on my phone. Set to dark mode.
These responses are a bit surprising. I wonder how people would have responded if this were about Android.
As someone who uses both Android and iOS (the dual usage being in large part because I develop software for both) if this were about Android I wouldn't be surprised in the least, but I do find it surprising for Apple to increasingly allow for this sort of thing.
IMO the major positive differentiators Apple has over Google as a phone OS provider are the perception of protecting user privacy and also not plastering ads everywhere. This example weakens both of those perceptions at the same time.
So (for me) its not about Apple being worse than Google when it comes to this stuff, its just surprising they are willing to be as bad.
In any case, I don't have a horse in the race to cheer for. Google's major positive differentiator has been flexibility for advanced users to run what they want with minimal OS interference, and Google has been tamping down on that, so from my perspective both appear to be destroying their previous benefits to meet somewhere in the worst-case (for end users) middle.
That is, in the most deceiving way they could think of while still being able to say they marked it.
> One of the differentiators between iOS and Google was a lack of ads
> Increasing ads, or having them at all, really erodes the user experience
> Apple managed to become the most valuable company in the world without ads
