Report Reveals Apple Employees Internally Unhappy With Plans to Show More Ads to iPhone Users

[contacos]

Google pays nearly $392 million to settle sweeping location-tracking case

"Google has prioritized profit over their users' privacy," said Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum of Oregon, one of 40 states to bring the case. "They have been crafty and deceptive."

www.npr.org

Funny, I literally just read this 5 minutes ago as well!

 

[wanha]

This news is hardly a surprise, as the Apple employees I know strongly believe in the company's mission.

And that mission does not include wh*ring out your users attention for irrelevant ads.

That said, I also understand Apple's problem here.

Investors demand growth forever more.

When you're already the biggest company in the world, it's not easy to find growth avenues to keep up with growth targets.

Advertising is a very slippery slope to be on, though.

 

[MrCrowbar]

Sigh... sign me up for Apple Premium then. How much is it per month to get no ads?

 

[Horselover Fat]

"Salespeople should use "audience refinement" instead of saying "targeting," "platform" instead of "algorithm," and "competitor keywords" and "brand defenses" instead of "conquesting.""

This is why 2022 (and onwards) will be like 1984.

 

[Leon Ze Professional]

Even with the expansion in ads, Apple has no ambition to grow its ads business to the size of Meta or Google, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by the report.

We shall see, I believe it will not be long now before Apple will try and match Google and Co.

 

[amartinez1660]

I mean a longstanding view held by many Apple users is paying a premium for the lack of ads. It's not a step in the right direction.

Exactly, what the heck, it’s probably that push bully-crybaby style: “ (…) Apple's advertising chief Todd Teresi wants to more than double Apple's current revenue from its ads business (…)”

My disdain for those “I want I want want”-style suits, as if getting there is free with no consequences, can’t grow any bigger. Of course they want, achieving those promises lands them massive performance based paychecks while leaving a wreck elsewhere.

I hope the internal backlash continues until this is stopped.

 

[Kierkegaarden]

I don’t think the ads in the App Store are obtrusive. They are marked as being an ad, so what is the big deal? I don’t see them showing up anywhere else except as rumors, so why doesn’t everyone just put their outrage on hold until we see the implementation?

 

[Htsi]

I don’t think the ads in the App Store are obtrusive. They are marked as being an ad, so what is the big deal? I don’t see them showing up anywhere else except as rumors, so why doesn’t everyone just put their outrage on hold until we see the implementation?

Outrage is what fixed stage manager/ battery sign etc etc
Ads are a big no no. Baiting and switching will cause many to start thinking about leaving the ecosystem

 

[tomtad]

Tim Cook on the other hand is delighted, so tough

Tim Cook GIF - Tim Cook Tim Cook - Discover & Share GIFs

Click to view the GIF

tenor.com

 

[Schnegg]

Apple needs to be careful, the ads business is in direct conflict with the whole privacy value proposition.

 

[bluecoast]

I agree with the majority of Apple’s employees.

The UX of Android is roughly equivalent to IOS now, and if Apple are going to start serving ads…

…Then what is the point of Apple?

Why pay that premium ‘Apple Tax’?

As for the argument that Apple has ‘no choice’ to appease Wall Street to make up for an earnings slow down - yes it does.

It could argue that it will see a small slowdown before new products come online.

It could argue that putting ads on iOS would risk damaging the Apple/iPhone brand in the medium to long term.

Finally, it is looking up to bolster already huge quarterly revenues by a few billion to serve up ads. It just seems money grabbing.

I don’t like the company that Apple is becoming.

In the first few years of him being CEO, TC was fond of talking about of having a ‘North Star’ and never losing sight of it.

Well it seems that TC’s North Star is making Apple a ton of cash with everything else being a distant second.

 

[Lee_Bo]

Agree, adds bad. If I wanted adds I could have bought Android or not installed content blockers in safari or pay for private relay each month.

Hmmmmm. Maybe this is Apple’s way of forcing private relay?

 

[subjonas]

Money is driving the company now.

If anyone thinks money didn’t always drive Apple, then they are naive. If anyone thinks only money drives Apple now, then they are cynical. The truth is pretty much always more complicated than we first think. If people want to describe situations accurately, then they need to stop thinking and speaking in such overly-simplistic extremes of black and white.

 

[Stiksi]

No one uses the app store for discoverability. After Apple started charging for visibility, you can’t really find the good apps from within the app store, you have to google them. I just use the app store app for updates, there’s no reason to do anything else in it.

 

[Wanted797]

Let’s hope this gets enough complaints that it dies off like CSAM.

 

[Abazigal]

This kind of article never really mentions just how many people are unhappy with this, which has the effect of making it seem like there are way more people against said idea than there really are.

 

[Jim Lahey]

In my mind Apple lost all integrity a long time ago. They’d sell their own grandma for a dollar just to make a cent.

 

[JippaLippa]

I'll still take iOS over android any day of the week, however the reasons for being happy to get an iPhone are becoming less and less.

The main reason why I didn't mind paying a premium was because the proverbial "apple tax" meant little data was harvested and no ads were displayed.

With the recent developments, privacy and rhe ad-free experience have been somewhat compromised.

How long until we'll see nasty sponsored content in the finder on macOS, like we do on windows 10?
When I do a fresh install on my windows laptop, i get tiktok, candycrush, spotify, facebook, instagram and other bloatware installed by default.

 

[bluecoast]

If anyone thinks money didn’t always drive Apple, then they are naive. If anyone thinks only money drives Apple now, then they are cynical. The truth is pretty much always more complicated than we first think. If people want to describe situations accurately, then they need to stop thinking and speaking in such overly-simplistic extremes of black and white.

I think the difference is:

THEN:
We exist to make money by making (mostly) hardware products that have a very simple value proposition - a superior user experience for a premium price.

This is a huge differentiator for us, as our competitors in Silicon Valley are essentially software/web ad businesses (who sometimes make hardware to aid their primary goal) who then make the customer the product by monetising their data and attention to sell ads to.

NOW: We make money by making premium products from the brand equity that we have gained in the last 20 or so years.

We also increasingly extract incremental revenue from our large user base ('services') as we see that our cash cow is becoming a mature product and will soon not drive the revenue levels that our shareholders have become accustomed to.

Yes, we are rumoured to be rolling out a hardware subscription service, but many of our users will likely hold onto their recent iPhones and not participate in this in the short to medium term (if at all) so this is a risk for us.

Also there will most likely not be another 'iPhone' - meaning a must have lifestyle changing device which we were first out of the gate with - until VR devices and software become mature and cheaper and that will probably take another 5 years.

In addition, we have probably left it too late to launch The Car as a category defining product as truly automatic driving is a far more difficult problem to solve than we anticipated. Also the car business is way more complex than the computer one with margins that are slimmer than we usually like. And now every other established car manufacturer is launching electric cars which will be 'good enough' for most people with Tesla at the top end already.

So therefore we need to further monetise our loyal customer base.

***

So yes, I'd agree with you, Apple has always been about the Benjamins - and Steve Jobs was as tough as they come.

But as I've mentioned above, the 'secret sauce' that Apple had - and just about still has - is now being diluted, IMHO.

 

[IllinoisCorn]

We care about Apple employees why?

 

[forzagaribaldi]

Where is the podcast hosted and which app are you using? That sounds like dynamic ad insertion by the podcast network. I’m in Finland as well and listen to many US podcasts, but I haven’t got a single ad in Finnish. That would actually require the hosts to learn some Finnish as they typically read out the ads themselves instead of accepting an inserted clip from whatever source.

Yeah, doesn’t sound like anything to do with Apple. I use Overcast and am generally in the UK but when elsewhere in Europe for any time I start to find that any injected ads are in e.g. German for episodes that have downloaded whilst I am in Germany

 

[msackey]

That’s good news, as I can’t stand ads. I don’t mind the occasional email from Apple pitching their services, but placing ads in the new weather app for example is just wrong.

Yeah. Totally not acceptable to put ads in apps like Maps or anywhere else.

Tim Cook needs to be right this ship. This is getting ******.

 

[msackey]

i can’t say i see this a thousand miles away, but my guts tell me Apple is not the company their PR machine wants me to believe otherwise. Thankfully, my enjoyment of using Apple device doesn’t have much to do with having no ads whatsoever (you need personal mobile firewall for that), for now.

Apple obviously has changed, to something old user never remember. It’s astonishing to see this change happening so fast and so powerful in our lifetime. This time it’s more ads. What’s next?

This is absolutely appalling to users like me who have been using Apple products since the 1980s. This ads thing has got to stop.

 

[msackey]

There should be zero ads on a platform sold to us as being the very opposite of the revenue model used by the likes of Google and Facebook. Apple needs to be reminded of its core values. Apple is now fully in the grip of the operations division rather than the design division. No wonder the design team is losing people. Jony Ive's departure is making more and more sense.

Absolutely!!

The platform itself should not force ads on to its users.

 

[whiteonline]

It's the poison apple that comes along with being a public company. Expectations of constant growth. Insane profits are not enough if the current insane profits are less than or equal to the previous insane profits.
Either create new customers or take the lazy route and slap ads onto the product.

Seems to happen as MBA's are overly empowered. Shareholders are prioritized, which isn't a shock since C-level compensation is heavily focused on stock.