More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad

https://daringfireball.net/2025/06/more_on_apples_trust-eroding_f1_the_movie_wallet_ad

by dotcoma • 1 year ago

977 636 1 year ago

I feel vindicated for when I said that the moment Apple's line stops growing, they'll resort to monetizing their users like the rest of big-tech to increase their shareholder returns, and everyone here was like "Nooo, my sweet innocent publicly traded trillion dollar corporation would never betray me like that". Give it a few more years love, now they're boiling the frog.

rafaelmn3• 1 year ago

What do you mean start monetizing ? I get adds for their Apple Arcade trial on top of my iOS settings main screen.

I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.

jb19912• 1 year ago

You are correct that, just like in politics, you have to pick the best among problematic choices, which will often be Apple.

mrweasel3• 1 year ago

For the desktop, I could probably just use Linux, but you're right, in terms of eco-system, where would I go?

Phones are even worse. You basically stuck on iOS and Android and I honestly see no situation where picking Android wouldn't be worse. You have a better selection of phone, and you could run /e/OS, Calyx, or something else, but that's just a hassle. I'm not a big fan of the direction iOS is developing, it tried to do way to much and the UI has become a mess.

jorvi• 1 year ago

The biggest trick they ever pulled was changing Music.app into Apple Music, and on first app start showing you a "hey, want to try Apple Music? Tap here" fullscreen.

That single-handedly unlocked a huge cohort of boomers and other tech laypeople that had never tried Spotify or any other music streaming platform before.

It was smart and also a huge abuse of market power. Apple Music would have bombed without it. The only reason they didn't get in deep shit for it was that Apple doesn't have nearly the market capture in the EU that they have in the US, and in that time period the US didn't do antitrust against tech companies.

rglullis3• 1 year ago

The M Pro series processor (...)

even if it were the best processor to ever exist, it's not something that we can not live without.

Linux is a part time job

It has been good enough for the past 15 years or so.

Toritori12• 1 year ago

As shitty as it is, Chromeos doesnt seem to have a lot bloatware to me.

seszett• 1 year ago

I don't really understand, I don't get ads on my Android phone?

And I'm not sure what you mean about ecosystems either, yes you do need a Google account to download apps from the Play store, but you also need an Apple account to use the Apple store as far as I know.

In my experience it's easier to create a second Google account than a second Apple account.

Now I'm not representative of most users, like all HN users probably. But at home, apart from my M1 Mac (running Linux because I hate macOS) my other machines are Intel n100-based. They work fine.

denkmoon• 1 year ago

Ah, sweet vindication. Eventually the only company that doesn't do (all the) bad thing will start doing bad thing.

What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?

fsflover4• 1 year ago

but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future

No, but you should be always ready to jump the ship, always research reasonably good alternatives and never go deep in their walled garden. Ideally, you could even support the efforts to bring the freedom with your money or time, like GNU/Linux phones.

latexr9• 1 year ago

and everyone here was like

Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.

now they're boiling the frog.

That’s a myth.

according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

tcshit• 1 year ago

Spot on!

jb19912• 1 year ago

Did they learn nothing from giving everyone a free U2 album that nobody wanted, and the backlash from that?

x62Bh7948f• 1 year ago

It was such a long time ago that the people who made the mistake have already retired, maybe.

msh• 1 year ago

Most of the top management from that time is the same people today.

abcd_f2• 1 year ago

U2 stunt was Jobs' idea. He was a life-long fan of them.

Edit - it wasn't, my bad, see below.

JimDabell10• 1 year ago

I think this is a lot worse than the U2 thing. Operating systems bundle free stuff all the time. Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.

The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.

This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.

This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.

daqnz• 1 year ago

Completely disagree, for many people it was the only track in iTunes. And when things triggered iTunes to play it played that.

I was in an older man’s car last year. It started playing the album. He remarked “oh that always plays, I don’t know why” as I reached for the volume.

A decade later that album is still annoying people. Bluetooth triggered play or something like that and the only music on the old iPhone started playing.

lycopodiopsida• 1 year ago

This damn U2 album still appears in my smart playlists in Apple Music from time to time - it is insane that I can’t delete it completely so many years later.

al_borland4• 1 year ago

It was only able to be removed after the backlash. Apple had to build a tool for it, and users had to be connected to tech media enough to know that existed. And if they didn’t do it already, it’s too late.

That doesn’t sound easily removed to me.

account425• 1 year ago

Even the Windows 95 CD had a Weezer music video on it.

Lol I had completely forgotten about that, thanks for reminding me. Going to have to find a copy with that lovely MPEG blocky quality.

eviks4• 1 year ago

destructive to all the hard work other teams at Apple have done to make Apple Wallet actually private — and, more importantly, to get users to believe that it’s private. That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.

What's the downside of consumers getting their perceptions closer aligned with reality? Which side are you on?

eptcyka• 1 year ago

John Gruber has long been an Apple advocate, not saying this to detract from this post, but rather to add context to those who do not know this.

bambax3• 1 year ago

That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.

That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?

drysart• 1 year ago

Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising. Companies ultimately serve whoever they make their money from; and none of the other big tech players have a comprehensive business model where the end user is the customer instead of the product.

And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.

The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?

charcircuit• 1 year ago

Privacy and advertising are not mutually exclusive.

JimDabell10• 1 year ago

And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.

I just want to highlight this because Hacker News can be incredibly dismissive about this.

Apple’s focus on privacy is a competitive advantage. Consumers value it, and Apple’s competitors have business models that undermine it.

Even if you think Tim Cook is the literal devil and Apple will do absolutely anything for a buck, Apple’s focus on privacy is still relevant.

Privacy is valuable to Apple. It’s a wedge they can use against their competitors. Google doesn’t make their fortune selling hardware, they make it selling ads. Privacy is something that gets in the way of Google’s profits.

Because Apple are in this position, it’s profitable to them to champion privacy. It’s something they can do that’s valuable to customers that their competitors are at a disadvantage with.

You don’t have to be a fan of Apple, and you don’t have to trust Apple. All you have to do is believe they want to make money. Being pro-privacy is profitable to Apple, and so they act accordingly.

bambax3• 1 year ago

lack of openness

Lack of openness means lack of privacy. If we can't install apps on the side that have proper adblock filtering, then all the promises in the world are hollow.

matthewdgreen• 1 year ago

Apple needs to show revenue growth every single year. Their hardware and services businesses will eventually tap out, and then they'll start mining their users for data and advertising. It's a miracle they've managed to avoid it for so long, but they will eventually be forced to. It will probably coincide with Tim Cook's retirement, unfortunately.

hibikir• 1 year ago

The fact that they make money doing something doesn't stop hungry PMs and VPs from pushing other revenue sources.

Amazon used to sell us items, now ad sales are a big part of their storefront's revenue. Cable used to not have ads.

If you aren't paying, you are the product doesn't also imply that if you paying you are definitely not the product. To the modern exec, everything and everyone is the product. I an surprised that gig economy apps aren't also selling the eyeballs of their workers, making them watch ads to work.

blibble• 1 year ago

Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.

have you used the app store in the last few years?

I search for my bank and the first results are a load of scammy crypto app ads

then my actual bank app is at result number 3

this is the sort of behaviour I would have expected from Google

eviks4• 1 year ago

Because Apple makes its money by selling you hardware and services, not by selling advertising.

and by selling ads, seriously, just open their app store.

And because it has positioned itself

And they can continue that while simultaneously doing the opposite. There is no law against inconsistent behavior

Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?

Yes, of course, that's easy to find via a 5 sec google search

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/12/24128640/microsoft-window...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-an...

triska3• 1 year ago

Quoting from https://www.apple.com/privacy/:

"Privacy. That’s Apple.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."

So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.

tropicalfruit• 1 year ago

"advertises" is the key word here

passwordoops• 1 year ago

From industry analysis:

"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.

And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."

The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea...

369548684892826• 1 year ago

That's true until it isn't, just like "Don't be evil" was for Google.

gumby271• 1 year ago

Privacy. Except when you want to install software on a computer you own, then Apple has to know about it and approve of it. That's Apple.

It's wild to me they would claim privacy as some human right while making the only computer in the world you can't actually control without their involvement.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

Marketing.

andrewinardeer• 1 year ago

I'm sure at some marketing meeting at Google, a VP racing for pole posiiton has wanted to green-light the idea of putting advertisements in their Wallet app.

With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.

As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.

Kwpolska2• 1 year ago

Google was there first. During Euro 2024, the "transaction successful" screen displayed some football-related animation.

TheDong3• 1 year ago

Was it an ad or an easter egg, like the "google.com" logo animations you get on new years and other holidays?

Did it send a push notification or bother the user? Got a screenshot or reference, since a quick google doesn't uncover it?

theginger• 1 year ago

They have been doing that for years for all sorts of things usually seasonal but sometimes other stuff

avhception2• 1 year ago

While Google may or may not refrain from putting ads in their wallet app due to this incident, the aggressive ways that they use to get me to use the wallet app have been off putting enough.

Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".

Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.

ryandrake5• 1 year ago

To be fair, the “Yes, Maybe Later” pattern can be seen throughout Silicon Valley. Tech companies, by and large, cannot accept “No” from users.

lozenge3• 1 year ago

Have you tried going to "App Info" and "Disable" for Wallet?

aucisson_masque• 1 year ago

I love these choices, yes or yes later.

They do the same on my windows computer, ever time I open edge and every time I open a new tab !

This is the kind of behavior I wouldn’t even tolerate in real life, they are really taking us for sheeps.

lozenge3• 1 year ago

Google already has ads in their Wallet. https://madeby.tfl.gov.uk/2025/03/31/google-pay-tube-challen...

mslansn2• 1 year ago

Google Photos, which comes installed by default on all Android phones, sends notifications asking you to print an album with your photos through a partner.

lmm2• 1 year ago

That doesn't feel like a comparable violation. I've bought more than one (physical) photo album that came with a flyer in for ordering more copies.

altairprime2• 1 year ago

Did we ever find out what happened at Mozilla that allowed that trust-destroying Mr. Robot advertisement to happen? There seems to be a trend (n=2) of Marketing spending consumer trust for one-time media engagement clicks.

detaro• 1 year ago

Not in detail afaik. The impression I got was that they somehow just didn't consider that people not looking for it would notice, and per the statement at the time (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/retrospective-looking-gl...) the review process was too focused on privacy vs the big picture.

altairprime2• 1 year ago

Yeah, that’s the non-answer post that I remember. Ah well.

efitz• 1 year ago

I think a conclusion has been leaped to that is not necessarily true.

If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store), then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening? Certainly none is required.

It’s still annoying AF and it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2. But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”. Instead I conclude “iOS leadership are greedy jerks with defective long term memory”.

triska3• 1 year ago

I think the article rightly speaks of "trust-erosion" in connection with this incident because, in addition to the showing of ads being subject to the suspicion of surveillance, it raises the question how seriously we can take a wallet app that shows ads or does anything completely unrelated to its designated and propagated purpose, something that is not the reason why this app is used and in fact detracts everyone from the intended use of this app.

The breakdown of trust is already in the question "What absurdity comes next from such a sensitive app?"

latexr9• 1 year ago

If everyone is getting the same annoying ad (in both wallet and App Store)

Not everyone is. I’m in the EU and did not get it. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was only in the US.

then what individual user tracking or surveillance is happening?

That’s not at all what most people (including this article) are complaining about. It’s about an ad in an app which should never ever ever have them, the targeting is really low on the list of priorities compared to the rest.

it’s clear they didn’t learn their lesson from U2.

The two cases are nothing alike. They both involved Apple and backlash, and that’s where the similarities end.

But I don’t jump to the conclusion that “Apple is spying on me”.

Again, that’s not the major issue most people are complaining about.

keiferski3• 1 year ago

Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.

I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.

More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste

dubcanada• 1 year ago

Jobs has been gone for almost 15 years. From what I know Ive had nothing to do with anything but design aesthetic.

I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…

keiferski3• 1 year ago

The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.

bobbylarrybobby• 1 year ago

The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.

dkersten• 1 year ago

I know Ive had nothing to do with

Ok you haven’t but what about Ive?

ryandrake5• 1 year ago

The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!

andyferris• 1 year ago

I agree that was weird - but it was never forced onto your device unless you chose to download that album (it would be like saying a particular album was "forced" onto your spotify when they are ALL available and free - this was just the first "spotify"-style album designed to be streamed not purchased).

iambateman• 1 year ago

I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.

Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.

matthewmc3• 1 year ago

That album still shows up today in jarring ways in Apple Music when you use the Create Station feature because it was on everyone’s phones and their algorithm still isn’t good enough to recognize when one of these things is not like the others.

qwerpy• 1 year ago

They learned from this but still couldn’t help themselves. There’s massive full screen ads in Apple Music to “preload the F1 the movie album”. At least it’s a choice to load it or not this time, but it’s still extremely disappointing that people paying for Apple Music get shown these ads. I had recently canceled my Spotify subscription because of sponsored content in their app.

jmsdnns3• 1 year ago

Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.

Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.

chii• 1 year ago

Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.

Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.

bluedevilzn• 1 year ago

Jobs created iAd. He hated bad ads.

Here’s him announcing and talking about ads in WWDC: https://youtu.be/eY3BZzzLaaM?si=Dttc5eJJ1B7Zf3sB

jameshart• 1 year ago

Jobs paid for some of the most iconic ads of all time - 1984, Think Different, Rip Mix Burn, dancing iPod silhouettes, I’m a PC…

Nemi• 1 year ago

I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.

hshshshshsh5• 1 year ago

Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.

bombcar• 1 year ago

You almost need (not going to be definitive because some big companies just need to execute the same operations for hundreds of years) a Jobs or Gates or someone who doesn't believe their own bullshit and is willing to say "this sucks, we're shitcanning it."

Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.

breckenedge• 1 year ago

Happens at small companies too, especially those owned by private equity.

soderfoo• 1 year ago

Visionaries and solution oriented devs can’t deliver the kind of quarterly “profitability” that careerist, KPI-chasing, promotion-hungry product managers love to promise.

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

Until a company fully supports the combination of top-class engineering + top-class user experience to the exclusion and expulsion of political parasites, this is inevitable. Unfortunately, the ever-expanding blind profit chasing, at the exclusion of everything else, kills the chance of that happening.

surgical_fire7• 1 year ago

You described any regular workplace.

You are not supposed to find joy in work. Work is something that you do so you can afford to find joy elsewhere.

jwr• 1 year ago

Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.

That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.

jama2116• 1 year ago

They did loads of tacky things back in the day, we’ve just forgotten about them.

croes5• 1 year ago

You‘re holding it wrong

renegade-otter• 1 year ago

You mean the old classic way of doing business where the company focuses on the product and the customer and not the shareholder? What a shocking and novel idea.

necovek• 1 year ago

Until it shows up in the bottom line, they will have all the metrics and data they need to continue pushing this way.

The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.

AdamN• 1 year ago

I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.

somenameforme4• 1 year ago

Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.

The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.

So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.

gizajob• 1 year ago

Nokia.

drob5182• 1 year ago

Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.

Workaccount2• 1 year ago

Probably more hardware while trying to recreate the "your friends and family will leave you out" effect of iMessage.

sillyfluke2• 1 year ago

I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for

What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.

ericmay5• 1 year ago

I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.

Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?

Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.

iwontberude• 1 year ago

2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.

steveBK1234• 1 year ago

Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.

Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.

iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).

One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.

hedora• 1 year ago

As far as I’m concerned, they don’t make smartphones anymore.

Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3.

(My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)

hliyan• 1 year ago

Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.

JimDabell10• 1 year ago

Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting.

iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...

https://www.demandsage.com/iphone-user-statistics/

andy992• 1 year ago

If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy).

Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.

Apofis• 1 year ago

I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.

hopelite2• 1 year ago

I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement.

It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.

supportengineer3• 1 year ago

You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.

scarface_742• 1 year ago

There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant.

And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.

Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

Apple is an ecosystem company.

heavyset_go• 1 year ago

Apple wants to be a services company that sells smartphones.

v5v3• 1 year ago

Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point

Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.

Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.

Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.

So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.

So they can sell to all of them.

hcarvalhoalves• 1 year ago

Company takeover by bean counters and clowns. It happens with every company, sooner or later.

Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.

ttcbj• 1 year ago

I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.

Schiendelman• 1 year ago

Anything looks worse when you see behind the curtain. The question is in comparison - who produces technology you want without that behind the scenes behavior (or being dependent on someone else's behind the scenes behavior!)?

librasteve• 1 year ago

Tim Cook needs to get a grip on this. If Apple loses the privacy advocate reputation, then they will lose a lot of customers.

newAccount2025• 1 year ago

Will they though? Where does a privacy-conscious consumer turn? The only other serious option is Android, where Google will eagerly track all the things.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 year ago

I doubt it. They might lose a few nerds but no casual consumer gives a shit.

ls-a• 1 year ago

Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.

epolanski3• 1 year ago

The company is donezo to be honest.

Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.

And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.

Fade_Dance6• 1 year ago

Apple services revenue has gone from 10 to 30 billion within the last 5 years. They are seeing extremely strong services growth.

mr_toad• 1 year ago

They have a huge chunk of the smartwatch and tablet market.

caycep• 1 year ago

one would've hoped w/ Angela Ahrendts Bosom St John but I guess not a cultural/operational fit.

DidYaWipe• 1 year ago

It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.

But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.

Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.

Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?

diskzero2• 1 year ago

Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.

My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.

When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.

SSLy• 1 year ago

Phil Schiller

Rings a bell.

Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/5/6.html by way of https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/05/23/apple-turnaround/

lapcat2• 1 year ago

I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.

Was it common for lower-level employees to take part in C-suite meetings and arguments?

destitude• 1 year ago

Ive wanted to get rid of all the ports on everything! Thank goodness he's gone and we now have MagSafe, HDMI, and SD card readers back on portables.

prewett• 1 year ago

I loved MagSafe, but after the USB C power, I don't love it. USB C power could go on either side of the laptop, and if I stepped on the cable it still easily disconnected, but MagSafe only goes on one side, which frequently means the cord needs to wrap around the back.

skeeter20202• 1 year ago

Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.

surgical_fire7• 1 year ago

There was that event where everyone's iTunes suddenly had a U2 album on it. I don't really see a difference.

Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.

keiferski3• 1 year ago

I would consider that the beginning of the problem - and it happened shortly after Jobs died.

yomismoaqui• 1 year ago

Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem

Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.

https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...

roughly• 1 year ago

Nor should you. OP should’ve said Apple without Jobs - Ive had artistic taste, but not product or human taste.

diego_sandoval• 1 year ago

When I saw that photo I thought someoneone on X had made it as a joke.

I realized it was official as I read your comment.

thrashh• 1 year ago

A lot of people like Apple because it was built on Jobs’ taste and they liked Jobs’ taste.

With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.

That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.

graemep3• 1 year ago

Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.

Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:

1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!

2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.

3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".

Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!

alwa4• 1 year ago

I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.

This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.

And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!

This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.

Zafira• 1 year ago

I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.

Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.

Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”

Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.

The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.

sails2• 1 year ago

They are also marketing “nearby” coffee shops in the Home Screen stack widget which is pretty invasive, I’m surprised not to hear about it

basisword• 1 year ago

They're not. The Maps widget shows you nearby businesses. You can remove the widget.

1oooqooq2• 1 year ago

so, they're not and you can remove the thing that doesn't exist?

natch2• 1 year ago

My maps widget randomly took me to some BS Apple movie scene location with a bunch of movie branding right in the maps UI. There was nothing nearby about it. It was like two continents away from me.

sails2• 1 year ago

Turns out they are

https://www.reddit.com/r/ios/comments/p147sn/apps_like_yelp_...

jrockway• 1 year ago

I'm glad that people are mad about this. I got the ad, went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was. I was kind of surprised.

For me it's like "oh, I didn't know Wallet was an advertising app", I thought it was something I paid for with the purchase of my phone. But I was wrong. It's just adware. "We'll store your boarding pass if you'll let us spam you about movie tickets." Do not want. I disabled notifications. Now a year from now, I'll be searching for some pass in my wallet. Someone will say "don't you get a notification when you get to the venue"? I'll be like "no I've never seen that work". Multiply that by everyone, and suddenly the buzz is "Apple Wallet doesn't work. Trust my money and credit cards with something that doesn't work? No thank you." And now people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.

Really dumb. Huge mistake. It makes me sad that they don't care about their own brand. "We won the smartphone wars, let's cash in!" Winning is temporary, but losing is forever.

latexr9• 1 year ago

went on here to see if 1000 people were complaining, and nobody was.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44368854

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44371872

Now a year from now (…) people are buying a Garmin watch for Garmin Pay instead of an Apple Watch for Apple Pay.

Talk about a slippery slope fallacy. No, that will not happen. At all. There’s a better chance that this year will be the year of Linux on the Desktop.

ickelbawd• 1 year ago

As it so happens I’m using my framework laptop with fedora linux almost exclusively at this point. That was not the case a year ago. :)

ksec2• 1 year ago

The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet. It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads, talk about privacy as fundamental human rights, and then have targeted Ads, in a place / software / services where no body expected it to appear. And not everybody has the Ad, so by HN / Reddit / Internet definition that Ad is targeted.

The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.

latexr9• 1 year ago

It is the fact that Apple openly attack Ads, condemns Ads

What? No they don’t. I wish. Where did you get that idea? Apple loves ads. They do a ton of them and sell them to you. You can’t do an App Store search without seeing an ad right at the top, and the bottom, and the sides, and under your pillow. It’s absolutely littered with them.

What Apple rails against is the tracking and invasion of privacy. Which incidentally ads do a lot of. Even Safari content blockers are ingrained in that philosophy: it’s not about blocking ads, it’s about blocking things that invade your privacy.

ksec2• 1 year ago

The App Store Search and iCloud Ads are relatively recent thing. The focus on tracking and invasion of privacy is also a refined version of it. Their whole PR campaign from 2017 to 2020 against ads. ( And it was more targeting Facebook Ads without saying it. Which Apple plan to destroy ) Somewhere between 2019 - 2022 They literally have to come out and said to say they are not against ads but only against tracking because the whole Ad industry was furious so they have calm things down.

Here is another angle. If Apple could successfully destroy the In App Ads industry, which they earn nothing from, and force those value into subscription, who will benefit most? Remember Apple tried iAds and earn a percentage of it but failed.

People should at least read PG's Submarine [1] to understand how modern PR and media works. Once you have that understanding the lens of reading anything about Apple becomes a little different.

[1] https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

encom• 1 year ago

Apple is absolutely fine with tracking and privacy invasion, as long as they're the ones doing it.

hosteur• 1 year ago

The problem isn't sending an Ad to Wallet.

Yes it is

croes5• 1 year ago

They attack ads they are not getting paid for.

account425• 1 year ago

Similarly, they "solve" privacy problems by routing traffic through their services.

gyomu• 1 year ago

Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.

You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.

Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:

1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/

2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?

bix62• 1 year ago

I didn’t have a proper guess for 1 but I was correct on 2. The answer to 1 is rather disappointing.

To keep the guessing game going: what percent of Apple is owned by institutional investors?

pratnala• 1 year ago

What is the answer to 2?

HenriTEL• 1 year ago

During Jobs era obviously design was a first order concern.

Then Cook took over but still Jonathan Ive stayed as head of design until 2019.

Ive was replaced by Evans Hankey and Alan Dye who were under Jeff Williams, the Chief Operating Officer.

Talk about a downgrade!

danaris3• 1 year ago

Ads and privacy are not fundamentally opposed.

The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.

From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.

(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)

rsync• 1 year ago

"Ads and privacy are not fundamentally opposed"

I agree with this.

There was a (brief) period when website advertisements were simple, first party hosted image files. IIRC, the first text ads on metafilter (2001 ?) were just strings in the same HTML file.

You may like or dislike these things but they were not a privacy concern.

madeofpalk3• 1 year ago

I don't think you have it right here.

Was this a targeted ad? Apple doesn't openly attack Ads - they are actively hostile to privacy invasive technology, which I don't think this runs foul of.

The problem isn't that Apple has ads, it's that Apple pushed an ad through Wallet. And in the Settings app. And in all the other untasteful places they spam with these ads.

827a• 1 year ago

Some people received the ad, while others did not (I did not). I don't think we fully understand what has caused some people to receive the ad versus not; maybe its just simple probability, or maybe its something more personal like usage of the Apple TV app, active TV+ subscription, having movie theater apps installed, or search interest in F1.

jay_kyburz• 1 year ago

Yeah, everybody is taking about the Wallet thing, but there is a giant ad for F1 in Apple TV right now that says it can only be watched in cinemas! WTF

ctime• 1 year ago

I didn’t see any ads and nobody I know did. This may be a feature in ios26 (the next version in beta) that got leaked out to older versions? Ie a bug)

Ios26 specifically enables promotions in wallet which is viewed as a feature that can be enabled/disabled

reliablereason• 1 year ago

Probably depends on where you live, or some other thing apple knows about you.

mbreese• 1 year ago

I saw the ad. iOS 18.5, in the Midwest, with notifications allowed for the Wallet app.

I didn’t find it too intrusive, but it was surprising. It’s probably not a road Apple wants to go further down.

natch2• 1 year ago

and in the maps widget

KingOfCoders• 1 year ago

As I've said for the last ten years about Apple and ads, as soon as the momentum slows down, they will put ads everywhere and sell your data next if it keeps revenue growth up.

lobochrome• 1 year ago

So - the gruber shadowban has been lifted eh?

Chuzam• 1 year ago

That's what I thought as well :D

zbentley2• 1 year ago

What’s this referring to? What drama did I miss?

epaga• 1 year ago

https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/the_website_hacker_news_i...

codedokode2• 1 year ago

Chinese phones show ad in notifications, obviously Americans see it, get jealous (what a difficult spelling!) and want to do the same.

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

Chinese phones are way more aggressive in showing ads. They have graduated to showing ads via the Live Activities feature, or push notifications with the Time Sensitive bit on to bypass Do Not Disturb.

There are a lot that American companies can learn from Chinese ones in showing ads creatively. /s

Zufriedenheit• 1 year ago

I am probably not the average computer user. I didn’t even receive this notification, but just reading about this makes me reconsider switching my devices from Apple to open source software. I have every possible ad blocked and I have been a happy user of Apple devices so far. But this behavior feels so scammy and cheap, not worthy of a premium brand.

throwanem• 1 year ago

This year for the first time I started carrying an Android along with my iPhone. I've had Apple phones exclusively since I got my first smartphone in 2012, and before now never had a wandering eye. But the moves Apple has made lately make me realize it is time to make sure I'll have a ripcord to pull if I need one.

It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.

Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.

em500• 1 year ago

Apple Wallet is in the App store, and the F1 ad debacle directly violates App Store guidelines https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/)

  >  4.5.4  Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

aqme28• 1 year ago

Interesting. I feel like this clause is violated very often by major apps:

Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

foooorsyth• 1 year ago

I’ve said several times before that notifications should be reportable as spam directly to Google/Apple, just like email spam reporting.

Google tried to tackle this with notification channels, but the onus falls on the developer to actually use them honestly. No company trying to draw attention back to their app with advertisement notifications will willingly name a notification channel “advertisements” or “user re-engagement” or similar — they’ll just interleave spam with all the non-spam. This API from G hasn’t worked.

kccqzy2• 1 year ago

As soon as I see one violation, I turn off the notification permission altogether. For example the Amazon shopping app can't send me notifications.

discostrings2• 1 year ago

Uber violates this. At least as of a few years ago, there was no way to get notifications about driver arrival without also getting special offer and Uber Eats spam notifications periodically. Not only was there no opt-in consent, there was no way to turn them off without disabling the status updates.

It's particularly bad when apps with legitimate time-sensitive functionality do this.

I denied the app the ability to send any notifications on principle, and now it's very annoying to have to check the app to see the driver status. It makes things worse for both me and them and I use it less as a result.

nixpulvis3• 1 year ago

The Boston parking meter app violates this FFS. Love getting Nift gift card promotions randomly from the app I'm forced to use to pay the meter /s

miki1232112• 1 year ago

Tinder and delivery apps definitely don't follow these rules.

msgodel2• 1 year ago

In fact that's the main selling point for developing an iPhone app rather than a web page these days.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

I can hardly think of an app that uses notifications and doesn't abuse it that way. I pretty much block them as standard.

mvdtnz2• 1 year ago

I hope this impacts current or future lawsuits regarding anticompetitive app store practices. It's a clear example of the unfair playing field Apple runs.

Nextgrid• 1 year ago

For better or worse, Apple doesn't enforce this on third-parties either.

alwa4• 1 year ago

Lord help us if “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” and the remedy (or the portent [0]) is throwing open the platform to everyone to advertise this way…

That element of “well it’s different when we do it” is what’s so unclassy here. And, like… so weirdly un-self-aware.

And all for a coupon for a garden-variety movie?! The movie doesn’t have anything to do with Apple, other than being made on their dime. What a strange purpose for which to piss away your perch above the fray.

At least save this intrusion for when you’re pushing a magical new self-driving Apple Car or something!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/report-apple-is-expl...

al_borland4• 1 year ago

A lot of companies violate that policy, and it quickly leads me to uninstall the app when they do.

I didn’t get the F1 ad though (at least not yet).

I have seen Apple abusing notifications in other areas to push their subscription services though, and it a problematic trend. It makes them look cheap and desperate.

croes5• 1 year ago

They are for third party developers. Apple can and will do whatever they want

nevitablentropy• 1 year ago

Never knew this before - OfferUp is a huge violator of this where they will push notification containing only advertisements with a loud notification that is identical to those used when someone makes you an offer. There is also no way to disable those promotional notifications without disabling all notifications from the app.

ugh123• 1 year ago

unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI

Have we not already agreed to this in one of the million TOS prompts that Apple shows us? sad

valleyjo• 1 year ago

Uber does this all the time to me. It’s so frustrating. I allow notifications from uber when I don’t from most apps because they are useful when a ride is incoming. Yet I get random spam notifications. I wish Apple would stand up for their own rules and do something about it but since they don’t even enforce this rule on themselves what hope is there

burnte2• 1 year ago

Apple Wallet is in the App store, and the F1 ad debacle directly violates App Store guidelines https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/)

It would only violate App Store guidelines if Apple forces itself to agree to, and be bound by them. I think it's arguable that they probably do not, and so they didn't violate the guidelines because they're not bound by them.

kulahan2• 1 year ago

Wouldn’t the guidelines apply to anyone using it who doesn’t have specific, legal, written exemptions? Not to say they don’t have it, but simply hand-waving “well they wrote it so it doesn’t have to apply to them” doesn’t seem quite as simple to me. I could be wrong!

yencabulator• 1 year ago

And how do you think EU will react to Apple giving themselves such privileges over others?

m463• 1 year ago

you probably agreed to it in the 1000+ pages of privacy policy you get at the start of setting up an iphone. And there is not one checkbox for opting out.

I've always wondered why apple feels entitled to do stuff like say "privacy is a right" while simultaneously collecting enormous amounts of data from your phone.

I think back to the dan ariely investigation into dishonestly showed that disclaimers (like license agreements/privacy statements) are pretty much the gateway to bad behavior. it's like carte blanche to do whatever they want.

klysm• 1 year ago

Why would apple be subject to these guidelines?

gdubs2• 1 year ago

Because they designed those guidelines for the best user experience.

Sylamore2• 1 year ago

Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.

The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.

pants2• 1 year ago

What an awful app too. It doesn't refresh the current temperature without force-quitting and restarting. Not as bad as my water heater app though. Couldn't get it to pair after 30 mins of headbanging, finally got through to their support who told me that the app usually doesn't work and they don't know why, and that I shouldn't bother trying.

anitil• 1 year ago

I refuse to allow any smart device in my house. Even my oven is getting out over its boots lately

Croak• 1 year ago

Rules for thee not for me

nyc_pizzadev• 1 year ago

I got this ad, and ya, I was truly bewildered to get such an ad and then shocked that it came from my Wallet. I then spent the next hour searching how to disable this new marketing stream and it looks like nothing can be done. Anyway, glad to see I’m not alone here.

manchmalscott• 1 year ago

They have added an option to disable marketing messages in the wallet app..... in the new iOS 26 beta. which uh, really makes it look like they were not planning on doing this just this once.

thamer• 1 year ago

This is what it looks like, the switch is for "Offers & Promotions": https://i.imgur.com/wodOoBo.jpeg

From the Wallet app, tap on "…" at the top right, then "notifications".

bfrog• 1 year ago

I have a fundamental fear that Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads.

If I wanted Ad spam I would've used Google.

bitpush• 1 year ago

Apple will lose itself the day it chases profits with Ads

That shipped sailed many years back. Apple runs a highly successful ad network. It is just that most people are slowly starting to realize the true colors of the company.

busymom0• 1 year ago

They already make lots of money from ads on the App Store homepage and search. Small developers like me have a hard time competing when there's megacorps spending millions on App Store ads to rank higher.

memset• 1 year ago

I got this ad too.

I increasingly use wallet for everything - multiple credit cards, show tickets, transit tickets.

Is there an alternative? Android?

surgical_fire7• 1 year ago

I use Google Wallet for some things because I am an Android user, and sometimes the most convenient way to pay for shit online is using the mobile wallet. I just happen to hate Apple more than I hate Google.

That said, both Apple and Google are shit companies that should jot be trusted with this. I with there was a third option

Also, please not FB. I have to be careful with what I wish sometimes.

briandw• 1 year ago

The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users. We paid for a product that tried its best to sweat the details and deliver the best experience possible. UX was king. Apple made hard choices and delivered minimal, thoughtful and delightful products. The motto was "less but better".

Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.

pornel• 1 year ago

Apple has reverted to being a regular company. Everything is a potential revenue stream, and decisions are made based on next-quarter ROI. They needed the movie investment to meet the targets, so they've synergized with the Wallet team.

komali24• 1 year ago

Google too.

I wish the fact that every company enshittifies in the end would wake us all up to the fact that rampant unregulated capitalism just doesn't work before it's too late to make any changes at all.

eviks4• 1 year ago

That's just a myth, they've had way too many obvious flaws with conscious self-interested barriers to users' ability to fix bad UX for this to be even remotely true

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

They put U2 album to all iPhone users

yowzadave• 1 year ago

This is worse. The U2 thing was a "gift", albeit an unsolicited one that many people didn't want and were annoyed by. This is just a crappy ad.

grishka• 1 year ago

Except the way some system notifications worked on iOS was always disrespectful. The kind where you unlock your device with a clear goal in mind and a modal alert pops up telling you that your battery is low, or that something "important" happened to your Apple ID, or that a system update is available, or asks you to set up iMessage again, or some other shit that of course has no relationship to what you're trying to do this very moment. It's rudely diverting your attention, interrupting your train of thought. That isn't respectful by any stretch of imagination, and they've been doing it since at least iOS 6.

Long-time iOS users like to dunk on Android but even Android doesn't do this. All these things are notifications on Android, so you could deal with them on your own time.

nexuist• 1 year ago

This is a legacy design decision all the way back to iOS 1 before notifications existed. SMS messages used to be delivered through the same modal system. I believe the Apple ID and update messages are now banner notifications, and the battery alert gives you an easy way to turn on Low Power Mode, although I agree there should be a way to make that a banner notif as well.

nullify88• 1 year ago

The Apple of old had a deep respect for their users

The same Apple that tried to convince everyone they were holding their phones incorrectly resulting in Antennagate?

righthand• 1 year ago

The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.

Well at least it’s acknowledged Apple privacy is only perception and not actually secure or private.

sneak3• 1 year ago

No, people really believe their nonsense marketing. The whole “FBI vs Apple” soap opera they cooked up after the San Bernardino shooting thing convinced a lot of people.

Meanwhile Apple preserves a backdoor in the iMessage end to end encryption (in the form of non-e2ee iCloud Backups) for the FBI.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-...

(iCloud e2ee availability is irrelevant; nobody has it enabled.)

sneak3• 1 year ago

By default, the home screen of an Apple TV shows video ads for Apple subscription content, also.

binarymax• 1 year ago

Ads are annoying but I at least understand that on Apple TV you'd see ads for entertainment content. Having it show up in Wallet is a complete disconnect.

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

They did what?

t8sr2• 1 year ago

I have never said and rarely thought this before, but I really hope the person who came up with / approved this idea got fired for it. It’s rare that you see something so unbelievably stupid and destructive of the shared pool of trust, which Apple spent 30 years building, only for one self-interested PM to blow a chunk of it up for no gain.

If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.

jader201• 1 year ago

Then you’re in agreement with the article:

I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.

dustbunny• 1 year ago

I think the person who came up with this shouldn't be fired, the person who _approved_ it should be reprimanded.

There's some intersection point between who "owns" the wallet and who is coming up with ways to generate marketing revenue.

Whoever lives at that intersection point is the real shot caller here aren't they?

Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box. But the person who is filtering those ideas is the critical lynch pin.

lupusreal• 1 year ago

Why not fire them both?

Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas,

If an idea is that bad, at the very least they should be transfered into a role that doesn't involve coming up with good ideas, since obviously that is outside of their skill set. And what's the argument for not firing the chain of people who approved it? Their job was to stop bad ideas and they catastrophically failed.

t8sr2• 1 year ago

Yes, but there’s nuance. We each assume a version of events and nobody really knows. In my experience, big tech companies attract a certain type of person (among others) who will not only think of stuff like this, but actively fight for it and consequences to the long term be damned. VPs who actually approve this stuff will have limited time to think about it and a lot depends on the proposal.

This looks like a group PM level decision. Bluntly, at that level we get paid enough to exercise good judgement.

inetknght2• 1 year ago

Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box.

No, you fire people for generating ideas that are shady and against your own policies.

kortilla3• 1 year ago

You definitely fire people for pitching ideas that are against the ethos of the company. Otherwise you have no culture. It shouldn’t come down to one approver on the wallet side to see how dumb this was

partiallypro• 1 year ago

The thing is, while we care about it here at HN, most people don't really care. Apple is a cult among consumers and they aren't going to switch even if they started putting in way more ads. They know, similar to Windows, that they have an ecosystem lock in and people aren't going to escape it.

al_borland4• 1 year ago

People think they don’t care, or they tolerate it, but it still has an impact on the experience. It comes in the form of fewer glowing reviews, fewer recommendations to friends, more complaints and less forgiveness for problems. The pressure builds up over time, and then they snap.

Windows is the perfect example against the claim that Apple should be comfortable to abuse their users. Windows marketshare has been steadily dropping for the last 15 years. People are tired of the abuse, and slowly but surely leaving the platform. We now have people like PewDiePie making videos about switching to Arch Linux and self hosting, large companies offering employees a choice of Windows or Mac… things that would have sounded extremely unlikely 10+ years ago.

I’m pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, having been in it since 2003. I could transition out of it within a week if I had to. There are some things I’d miss, for sure, but I’d live.

jasonlotito• 1 year ago

Tim Cook is in charge. This wasn't decided in a bubble. A single person can't do this. It takes a lot of people to do this. A culture that allows this. This wasn't a mistake. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't even the first time.

Tim Cook did this, and anyone that can't put the blame on him is lying to themselves.

al_borland4• 1 year ago

You’d think he would have learned after that U2 album disaster 11 years ago, clearly not. He’s been doing this kind of stuff since he took over.

It seemed like Jobs used the products and was trying to make stuff that he would want to use. Cook seems like he doesn’t use any of these products, and is willing to sacrifice the user experience to try and make a few extra bucks.

It seems time for some new blood leading Apple. A product person who can get the company back to the core of trying to make insanely great products that people want to use, without compromise.

madeofpalk3• 1 year ago

destructive of the shared pool of trust

Will there actually be any short, mediumm, or long term consequences for Apple? What real, tangible trust has Apple lost that could lead to meaningful harm to them?

The only thing I can come up with is people who hold Apple to some kind of high-minded ideal, that they constantly run foul of for other reasons already.

kridsdale32• 1 year ago

Apple does a lot of things that are not allowed by any of the 3p developers. Someone like EU could look at that (for instance in this case a direct to consumer marketing channel that they are using to favor their own properties) and say it violates the DMA.

Google is being forced to take Google Flights links out of Search results, for instance.

danaris3• 1 year ago

Threads like this one are a short-term consequence for Apple.

People here, discussing it, a) demonstrate that they find the act to represent a breach of trust, and b) spread that understanding and opinion among those who read it.

That's not, in itself, a direct consequence for Apple, but it is something they need to be, and I genuinely believe are, worried about, because losing trust in them is precisely the kind of thing that will get people to stop buying their products. This is especially true given the way they've positioned themselves as a more trustworthy actor in the privacy field.

croes5• 1 year ago

if everyone acted the way they did.

Everyone with the power like Apple does

timewizard2• 1 year ago

Apple should be sued for this. This is their responsibility. They built it, left it unsupervised, and allowed the obvious to happen.

This is not the fault of ONE low level worker and there is no reason to punish them and then walk away like you've accomplished /anything/ meaningful in the long term.

These are precisely the types of public cases that should be brought against them. It would lend a lot of aid to the anti trust efforts against them as well. They clearly privilege themselves and see the devices and app store as their asset, not something they maintain on behalf of customers and developers.

jonplackett• 1 year ago

It shows they must be REALLY worried about this movie. All the reviews I’ve read say it sucks. I’m an f1 fan and from what I’ve read it sounds all pretty dumb and fake.

x3n0ph3n3• 1 year ago

It was fun in IMAX. It's not cinema

zitsarethecure• 1 year ago

I saw it last night. The cinematography of the racing sequences was interesting. The races they actually depicted were not, though. The human story line was trash, just a really hokey "old guy uses gut feeling to beat young people using science" movie plot. And Pitt did himself no favours in this movie with his acting.

bhickey• 1 year ago

I assume that this was approved by the CMO or at very least at the VP level. Previously I was the eng TL for house ads at a big co. We would've run anytime vaguely controversial all the way up the chain.

epolanski3• 1 year ago

This company really is turning into the new IBM or something. No innovation whatsoever and more and more money squeezing the users.

I'm sad they make the only decent laptop out there, for everything else I'm glad to be out their crap wallet garden.

vitaflo• 1 year ago

You could say this about all the large tech companies now. They're all just boring Megacorps.

Fade_Dance6• 1 year ago

NVIDIA is fairly unique and interesting.

supportengineer3• 1 year ago

My fantasy is they create an entirely new product line called something like “Chunky” or maybe “Thiccc”. The idea is that it would have plenty of user replaceable modules. Everything would be swappable. The battery, the memory, the drives. Of course, this would still be a premium product. It would have expansion modules for things nobody has thought of yet. It’s a new market with unlimited opportunities

mNovak• 1 year ago

You should look up Google's Project Ara. I was really excited for it at the time (2014), but alas, it never made it to market.

danielschreber• 1 year ago

Fairphone?

steveBK1234• 1 year ago

I think its rather telling about the state of Apple that Gruber has posted some fairly negative (for him) posts in the last few months.

This is coming from a guy who generally fawned over every new iterative release as if it was revelatory for 20 years.

linhns2• 1 year ago

But admittedly, they still have the only good laptop on the market

dlivingston• 1 year ago

Downvoted but you aren't wrong. "Good laptop" meaning "few or no compromises" on EVERY component in the device.

dimal• 1 year ago

I think Apple may be in the process of being enshittified. Stuff like this, their complete failure to do anything useful with AI, the anti-accessibility of a Liquid Glass, and the simple observation of how many things in the Apple ecosystem don’t “just work” is making me feel like giving up on it.

I spend an enormous amount of money on Apple products, and increasingly they lead to frustration and anger at the thoughtlessness and plain shittiness of them. I’m really wondering why I bother. They clearly don’t have my interests in mind.

jcoder• 1 year ago

I'm trying to remember if anyone complained like this about the Apple Card offers in Apple Wallet. For some reason advertising their credit card is completely fine, but advertising their movie is where people get out the pitchforks? Not defending either, I think both are egregious. I just think it's interesting.

karel-3d2• 1 year ago

Living in Asia for a while, this stuff is so mild... all these "super-apps" are always so annoying with cross-promotions that are impossible to turn off. It's true that they are usually not yet having root level access.

linhns2• 1 year ago

Asian here, always surprised when these apps keep putting their money into those promotions and getting almost nothing back in results.

ericyd• 1 year ago

It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you.

Wait, there were/are people who believe Apple Wallet doesn't track them in some way?

Fade_Dance6• 1 year ago

Yes. Apple has a fairly good user security track record.

linotype• 1 year ago

If Apple starts putting ads everywhere, I might as well switch to Android and save myself a thousand bucks every three years.

lukeschlather• 1 year ago

I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act that includes Smartphone notifications. And gatekeepers like Apple should probably simply be banned from placing any advertisements in push notifications.

The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.

And of course Google practically invented these things.

inetknght2• 1 year ago

I feel like we need a CAN SPAM act

I feel like we need a CANT SPAM act.

kevincox• 1 year ago

We just need to expand it to all forms of communication. Smartphone notifications, web notifications, phone calls, carrier pigeons, town criers and messages in a bottle. Doesn't matter what the medium is. If it is unsolicited commercial communication it shouldn't be allowed.

account425• 1 year ago

Don't forget billboards and similar advertisement space.

usernamed7• 1 year ago

This is why i have ALL notifications disabled, no matter the app. Companies, including apple, cannot help themselves but abuse it. Which is insane because it's a useful part of the phone functionality that I have to entirely disable because of greedy disrespectful companies. And there are no controls given to put us back in control.

Apple has lost their taste and lost their respect for users.

logic_node• 1 year ago

Feels like a small thing, but it’s definitely a shift in tone. Curious if this becomes a trend in Apple’s UI decisions moving forward.

conradev• 1 year ago

I was watching the Phillies game the other day, like I usually do, except it was Friday, so Apple owns the rights to the game. It's not the usual announcers, but fine, I can watch it on Apple TV+.

I remember getting a commercial for Ed Sheeran's new song for Apple's new F1 Movie which I can listen to on Apple Music and just ask Siri to play it and wanting to throw the remote at the TV. Apple just really wants to watch baseball with me. I prefer my crappy local OTT ads.

taylodl• 1 year ago

The irony is Apple is spending a fortune on their Secure with Apple marketing campaign, the one that ends with the Apple logo turning into a lock that clicks shut, and they’ve undone that, plus some, with the F1 campaign. This is a blunder of epic proportions and is illustrative of a company no longer in touch with their core identity and principles.

tapsboy• 1 year ago

Microsoft recently pushed Minecraft movie backgrounds for Teams users, including Enterprises

wilsonnb3• 1 year ago

They’ve had Minecraft backgrounds in teams for a while, since 2020 or 2021 at least

timewizard2• 1 year ago

That Apple can be trusted in ways that other “big tech” companies cannot.

This is pure nonsense. From someone with the experience to know better. It's amazing to me that people could say this out loud.

The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private.

The "perception of privacy" is _all you have_. You don't even have access to the technical details!

I’m 99.9 percent certain this F1 ad was just blasted out to zillions of Wallet users indiscriminately

Stop making excuses for the trillion dollar gorilla in the room with you. You don't understand it. You've anthropomorphized it to a point of pathos. It's going to rip your arms off. It's just a matter of time.

edfletcher_t137• 1 year ago

The perception of privacy is just as important as the technical details that make something actually private. I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.

Spot on. Look at it this way: would SJ have allowed this to happen? Absolutely not. And if it somehow had happened while he were still there, he would've unquestionably (and quickly) fired the responsible parties.

burnte2• 1 year ago

Apple also pushed a notification through the AppleTV app. I thought I had all notifications turned off (I turn off notifications from most apps on all devices, just because you think I need to see your messages doesn't mean I think that and most apps do not need notifications). Quite irritating. That was the point where I decided I would not see F1 in theaters, and if I ever do it'll be free streaming.

jtokoph• 1 year ago

You may never see it because Apple holds all of the streaming rights.

tonymet• 1 year ago

I ended up buying tickets but the Fandango checkout flow had so many pitfalls that I doubt this converted very many people .At least 10 screens including one saying “sorry you can’t use Apple Pay to redeem the coupon” (you had to go through a further checkout and then choose Apple Pay ).

They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .

DrTung• 1 year ago

Reminds me of the push of U2's 'Songs Of Innocence" into everyone's iPhones maybe 10 years ago.

4ndrewl• 1 year ago

C'mon, it's not like they dumped a complete album in your music collection!

bdelmas• 1 year ago

I thought they learn their mistakes from the time they gave a U2 album for free on iTunes (but forcing everyone on iTunes to have it). It’s the same thing here but worst with ads. Pushing their stuff in our personal apps and lives without our permission, free stuff or not. But they still made the same mistake…

aggregator-ios• 1 year ago

I’ve held the opinion as an Apple Fan for the better half of the last decade that Apple is lost. When looking at their product decisions and what they’ve decided to ship, it shows.

- iPad is a confusing array of what that device is for. Is it for professional creators? Or consumers? Is it a PC? Or is it a mobile device? For the first time since its inception, it got a window manager at WWDC25. And yet, no support for any other apps outside of the App Store (EU excepted). Not a single creative professional uses it in the workplace. Not a single engineer uses it for development. And yet, a 11 iPad Pro with the trackpad+keyboard is more expensive and less capable than an M1 Macbook

- iPhone: They are absolutely scared to change anything on here because the current culture at Apple is one of "do not change what brings us the most profits". Year over year small improvements, and rising phone costs. OS 26 brought about... a confusing design change. And while some analysts are fooled into thinking that this is preparation for their VR glasses, and even if that was remotely true (it's not) the analysts forgot that half transparent displays still obscure your vision. So that's not it.

- Developer experience. There was recently a post on Hacker News about how the developer exhausted every avenue and was left with OS level behavior that only Apple could change or fix. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901619 The comments ripped Apple apart. And you know what the response was? Apple finally helped them. But look at the second blog post where the developer posted it's resolved now. Not a single detail. They signed NDAs, and the post was essentially "we can't give any details because secrecy, but Apple helped us. They're great!". I can guarantee you 100% Apple forced their hand, and in fact Phil Schiller has said publicly that they are not willing to help you if you "cry to the press".

Xcode reviews on the Mac App Store are scathing. Swift? Chris Lattner left months after Apple released Swift. And at the time it seemed like he just wanted to focus on something else. The details of why he left at the time was very hidden and hush hush. And guess what? It's come out in the Swift forums. https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr...

Horrible.

Performative nonsense. Their events are full of carefully chosen words and phrases that showcase a dead culture. One where you can't have any creativity beyond the new presenters and their fashion. Awkward corporate events that aren't fun anymore to watch as they release mundane features like "shake your mouse to make the cursor bigger!".

AI? They spent 2 years removing the "hey" from "hey Siri". Everytime you turn off Apple Intelligence, a software update will force it back on. It still can't handle simple queries. And the UX even more confusing. There's a lot to lambaste in this department, but all of it has been said already. WWDC25 didn't address any of it. The interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak was even more awkward and telling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo

I want Apple to be good. I want them to make great products again. I want them to innovate. But I guess I'm the fool for wanting a corporate entity to be good and cool.

gdubs2• 1 year ago

I know the "what would Steve say" thing is tired, but seriously you can just imagine him on stage:

"And ads in the operating system? YUCK."

dankwizard• 1 year ago

It actually only sent the notification if it detected in your wallet you had enough to cover 1 x ticket from your local theatre. If you didn't, the Notes app will notify you once it is free on streaming.

moqizhengz• 1 year ago

This stupid ad is officially the end of an era. Apple died.

leakycap• 1 year ago

Apple seems to have lost its way. I feel the only reason they still advertise Privacy is that they're stuck with it at this point, or they'd be another Samsung or Google.

I miss the world when Apple had a point of view and vision that served to move things forward, not just stocks/revenue up.

albert_e• 1 year ago

Android apps blatantly misuse notifications to push inane ads and promotions

Android provides a "notification categories" setting where user can trun some type of notifications on and other off.

Most apps I use fall into two or three buckets --

1. There is just one "default" notifications category ... so it is all or nothing.

2. There are a few categories named very vaguely with no way to actually discern what is useful and what is junk, and they also use them inconsistency.

3. There are tons and tons of notifications categories - list keeps changing frequently - so There is no way you can set and forget. So whatever you may do, ads still sneak through.

Where/how can we start pushing back on this irresponsible behaviour and shame these billion dollar brands for abusing customers and treating us like fools.

If someone has already given this form of abuse a name and a prominent online post -- maybe we could make it more popular and raise awareness.

MrDresden• 1 year ago

"Like, what if you recently bought tickets to see another summer blockbuster movie? Using Apple Wallet? And then you got this ad? It’d be completely sensible to be spooked by that, and conclude that Apple Wallet is tracking you."

I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.

Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.

Tijdreiziger7• 1 year ago

if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.

[citation needed]

dostick• 1 year ago

More on Apple's Trust-Eroding 'F1 the Movie' Wallet Ad

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