Will you be writing letters to Apple, its CEO, and board of directors expressing your genuine outrage?
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Apple Pauses Gambling Ads in App Store Pages After Developers Complain [Updated]
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Will you be writing letters to Apple, its CEO, and board of directors expressing your genuine outrage?
In the beginning I used to set myself a weekly budget to buy new apps and games.
It wasn't that much money the purpose was really on giving enough time to explore my purchases both the searching part and the using part.
At some point (probably when in app became a thing) it just dried out. Today the App Store only purpose is to download free apps to use other companies services.
The is one thing that is a major Apple fault that has always hampered the App Store (not so much in the beginning for obvious reasons).
Outside IAP (which doesn't really solve it) there isn't a simple way to charge for upgrades.
While the quote above wasn't directed to me, I'll add that what I did end up doing was writing feedback to Apple ( https://www.apple.com/feedback/ ). I don't know if that is an effective way to have them capture consumer thoughts since that link is really for product feedback (and note that there is no link specifically for providing App store feedback even though it is actually an Apple product!).
I encourage all send some kind of feedback to Apple. Let me know if there are other ways besides the feedback website to send comments to Apple!
Not that this is of your concern. No, I am not writing letters but I have written mails to Tim Cook and I use the feedback options on their web page.
Beside that, as a shareholder, I exercise my right to vote.
You realize that exactly this “whining” on Twitter was sufficient to get Apple to realize that it had made a mistake and reverse course, right?
It’s rare I see comments from you that aren’t along the lines of “if you don’t like it, dump all your current Apple kit.” That’s a ridiculous expectation of anyone who disagrees with what — even many of those expressing strong discontent here will likely concede — is a small part of the overall user experience. You know that, of course, but you pretend that doing anything less invalidates any negative opinion. Besides, if the competition is no better, all you wind up with is a race to the bottom driven by juicing profit at the expense of the user experience.
It’s also almost like companies, even publicly traded ones, should be motivated by more than just their bottom line to do right by their customers — including such major feats as not advertising gambling apps underneath a gambling addiction recovery app — but hey.
Nothing, I don’t use the app store other than to get what I need.
Yep. There’s no walk to the talk anymore.
If Steve came back and looked at the current state of Apple…
A child wouldn’t see a gambling ad, assuming the responsible parent setup parental controls correctly.
Developers complained to Apple. As they should as it directly affects them. Apple took note and paused (and will likely stop) gambling ads. The system works.
The whines here will do absolutely nothing.
"It’s rare I see comments from you that aren’t along the lines of “if you don’t like it, dump all your current Apple kit.”
Yep, that's exactly what I'd do if I was outraged.
You probably didn't see my post above asking if an outraged member would be writing letters to Apple's CEO and board of directors.
I suspect most won't. And instead just have a good whine, do nothing else, and call it a day.
What will you be doing to assuage your outrage?
Gambling and sports betting has become prominent in the US at least. Almost every tv station has ads for it now, and I've also seen almost every app I use commonly advertise betting and gambling apps. Companies and higher ups don't see an issue because there's big money involved in the space. It's just unfortunate to see Apple begin to embrace it because they do try to keep their product clean as much as possible, especially from adult content, from the App Store.
Knowing the average lifespan of internet outrage, I will give this issue about 2 weeks to blow over.
That Apple is willing to take notes shows that they are not blind to criticism, and remain committed to making App Store ads work in a manner that can both aid developers in discovery, while respecting user privacy. Apple doesn't always get it right on the first try. Just look at the Apple Watch and TV+, but give it time, and we get a fairly polished offering in the end.
As with many paradigm shifts, we very often exaggerate the short-term ramifications, while vastly under-valuing the long-term benefits of such a move.
While we are the topic of App Store ads, can someone verify this for me? I don't seem to be getting any more ads in the today tab, save for that one ad on the first day. Has Apple suspended that as well?
So far, doing a few quick searches, I get the following:
Search for overcast - see an ad for British Radio
Todoist - get an ad for Google Search
Things - some planner / journaling app called Zinnia
Grimvalor - mobile legends
Slay the Spire - Pixel starship (another game, but nothing alike)
Lumihealth - see an ad for the exact same ad above. 😂
Office - Brave private web browser
The default ad in my search tab seems stuck at Diablo Immortal as well.
So far, the ads do seem fairly tame. They are at least somewhat linked to my search results, even before the pausing of gambling ads. In fact, the only time I see ads for gambling ads is when I expressly search for those type of ads as a test in response the yesterday's article.
So yeah, I guess I am just not feeling the outrage on this one.
That Apple is willing to take notes shows that they are not blind to criticism, and remain committed to making App Store ads work in a manner that can both aid developers in discovery, while respecting user privacy. Apple doesn't always get it right on the first try. Just look at the Apple Watch and TV+, but give it time, and we get a fairly polished offering in the end.
As with many paradigm shifts, we very often exaggerate the short-term ramifications, while vastly under-valuing the long-term benefits of such a move.
While we are the topic of App Store ads, can someone verify this for me? I don't seem to be getting any more ads in the today tab, save for that one ad on the first day. Has Apple suspended that as well?
So far, doing a few quick searches, I get the following:
Search for overcast - see an ad for British Radio
Todoist - get an ad for Google Search
Things - some planner / journaling app called Zinnia
Grimvalor - mobile legends
Slay the Spire - Pixel starship (another game, but nothing alike)
Lumihealth - see an ad for the exact same ad above. 😂
Office - Brave private web browser
The default ad in my search tab seems stuck at Diablo Immortal as well.
So far, the ads do seem fairly tame. They are at least somewhat linked to my search results, even before the pausing of gambling ads. In fact, the only time I see ads for gambling ads is when I expressly search for those type of ads as a test in response the yesterday's article.
So yeah, I guess I am just not feeling the outrage on this one.
I do agree with this in that if you have a problem, send feedback.
tcook@apple.com still absolutely gets read and responded to.
Use your dollar vote to send as much of a message as you can.
If you’re a stockholder, vote and speak up.
I complain a lot about the current state of Apple, but if you think I relegate my complaints to whining on a message board, you’re sadly mistaken. I’ve gone further and spent countless hours trying to troubleshoot ongoing issues with senior Apple engineers after writing in regards to the plethora of software issues.
Whining on a message board indeed does little if it ends there.
I would say the iPhone, apple watch and iPad are all the best products in their respective categories.
Competitors are certainly permitted to exist but to create a unique mobile OS to compete with Android and iOS, a big issue could be in having enough volume to convince companies to developer apps specifically for your OS out of the box. It is a risk even the big players (Samsung, Motorola/Lenovo, etc.) unfortunately aren't willing to take at this point.
A good thing about Android is that it at least allows some OEM and user flexibility including variants/skins/ROMs, etc.
I've been thinking a bit more about my own strong reaction to Ads in the App store.
I think part of this is that in US society, we are living in a context of being inundated by promotions and advertisements in a way that drains energy by creating distraction that many of us are fighting against. For example, probably 95% of the postal mail I receive is junk mail that goes straight from my mailbox directly into my recycling container. Actual important postal mail that I receive is few.
All this type of inundation makes the App store a cheap place and a cheap experience. It also makes one feel that the App store is just bloatware and we can't get rid of it (because App store is integral to the iOS and iPadOS experience unless you are willing to jailbreak and I'm not willing to do that).
I don't know why Apple decided on this ads approach but maybe it is because there's big money involved. But the thing is, they don't have to monetize everything this way. Monetizing to that level makes a cheap experience.
Look at the airline industry. I believe in the US domestic routes, a long time ago, each passenger was allowed 1 checked baggage for free; international routes allowed 2 checked bags for free. Meals and snacks were either offered or not offered; it was not sold in flight. In the 90s the flying experience started to have a cheap feel to it with the removal of free checked bags, then no meals or snacks without purchase, and then seat pitch ever decreasing so that to get better pitch you have to pay extra, and then selection of one's seat is no longer possible without additional fee. Each time the airline industry finds a way to monetize an aspect of travel, they make it feel cheap because it is essentially making you ask, with each item that it is monetizing, "Do you want to pay for this?". Each time that question is asked, it requires user input which itself is energy sucking on the whole, and it makes a jab at the overall experience and thus "dumbing" it down.
With the exception of the Mac clone period and the Performa Mac period (I think those 2 were the same period, right?), Apple has not been about cheapening the user experience but rather it was a focus on solid user experience. The Windows platform for many decades now has the cheapening experience feel because of the way things come together, bloatware, crapware, monetization, ads.
Is Apple trying to go from Think Different to Think Same?
(Idiots. Is the core of Apple rotten?)
One of Steve Jobs' ideas back in the late 1990s was an ad-supported macOS where people could get new versions of macOS for free with ads or pay $99 each (at the time) for ad-free.
If Apple implemented something similar with iOS i.e., an ad-supported option (ads in App Store, Maps, etc.) with free iOS updates or an ad-free option for an annual fee, which would people choose AND for those willing to pay, how much would they be willing to pay?
Obviously choosing one over the other can depend on how annoying/intrusive the ads are but my guess is that despite a dislike of ads most would still go with an ad-supported option.
If Apple implemented something similar with iOS i.e., an ad-supported option (ads in App Store, Maps, etc.) with free iOS updates or an ad-free option for an annual fee, which would people choose AND for those willing to pay, how much would they be willing to pay?
Obviously choosing one over the other can depend on how annoying/intrusive the ads are but my guess is that despite a dislike of ads most would still go with an ad-supported option.
I just took a look in the App Store, and most of the time these "you might also like" ads have nothing to do with the other app.
I beg to differ with the bolded statement above.
Think back to the airline industry. Were you around in the 1980s and before? Anyone who has lived through the 1980s (and prior) and have experienced the airline industry as a passenger can tell you that the experience of airlines today is a sense of CHEAP. There has been ZERO benefit to the way the airline industry is run today from the passenger perspective. And while that was not about ads, it is about monetizing every little experience.
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Not everyone who complained and got Apple to change course is an iOS developer. Especially regarding complaints involving contextually inappropriate ads (like that which I mentioned), you don’t even need to be an iOS developer to be upset by it. People dealing with addiction and those advocating for them have every right to loudly complain to Apple on that front.
And indeed, given that Apple specifically paused campaigns for specific app categories (not a huge leap to assume the other undisclosed categories are also related to addiction), that’s probably what managed to move the needle. Not so much a podcast app developer upset that gambling ads were being shown on his app’s page, although I do believe that developers who object to these apps should be able to opt out of “You Might Also Like” advertising for these possibly objectionable apps, whether that’s based on category, content/age ratings, or both.
The earliest I probably took an airplane was probably in the 1990s, and even then, I fly very infrequently (maybe once every couple of years, when I have to accompany my students on overseas excursions, but never in a personal capacity). I can't say my flying experiences have been all that bad, but maybe because my school bothered to purchase decent seats for us?
At the end of the day, I still see airplanes as means to an end - to get people from one place to another.
Could be that Apple is getting ready for next year when they have NFL Sunday Ticket. Then they'll probably try to get a slice of the pie from every gambling app and become the modern version of Vegas.
Apple makes more money every single year than they did the previous year. They have hundreds of billions. They're worth multiple trillion dollars. The money doesn't "HaVe To CoMe FrOm SoMeWhErE....."