When I first got my iPhone, I searched for Youtube on the app store. The first result I got was tiktok - an ad that takes up a third of the screen. Its a terrible UX and confused the hell out of me. I seriously thought Apple was supposed to be user-friendly and anti-advertising...
It... says "Ad" in a alt-colored tag, has a completely different background. Only one ad, vs. google.com, which can show up to 4 identically-styled ads.
Apple isn't anti-advertising, they're anti-tracking, pro-privacy. They're not in the business of selling ads anywhere near the scale that Google is -- the App Store ads in particular are simple, and they cancelled their iAd program a few years ago.
I realized that after looking at the result for ~5 seconds, but I still think its a dark pattern and it could easily induce someone into installing that app by habitually clicking the 'get' button. I guess it just shocked me that the one of the first things I saw on an iPhone was an Ad.
But yes, looking at ads on the Google Play Store recently tells me I made the right decision to switch to an iPhone.
I've been looking to switch from Google Pixel to iPhone but I still see the same shit on the "other side". On iPhone you still get an advertising ID in your OS to track you that you can't disable. You still get ads in system apps. It's like a veneer on top of the same crap.
Why wouldn't they? Apple is in the same business Google is of selling ads and in-app payment processing for apps on their platform. In one respect, Google is better than Apple for warning you ahead of time when an app contains ads. That's not an endorsement, mind you. There's other things Apple does better than Google. But there's no "good guy" here. Only less-bad guys.
Very thin distinction here given that they can still be purchased by advertisers and Apple has every interest in being the only company monetizing on their platform so the number of parties seeing this is irrelevant if the point was the surveillance problem.
'Ads you see on the App store or Apple News' and 'ads on the the entire web' is very substantial distinction, as is the scope of the surveillance involved. Another one big one is - you can turn the Apple thing off.
This is a pretty naive argument and distinction as well.
It's pretty obvious Apple doesn't have financially valuable properties on the web but they have plenty in their application ecosystem.
In Apple's view Apple News is how people consume news, not go to the web where the user experience isn't custom tailored by Apple. Apple News is barely different than Google AMP that everyone rages against, try to get someone to share a link to a piece of news from Apple News and it will come with the ask to subscribe or download it.
So in Apple's ideal plan almost every place where today ads are displayed will be inside Apple News.
And hey, I wasn't aware there exist another App Store where people can buy applications or in-app purchases on iOS.
And yeah you can turn FLoC off too both today and when it will be in production.
Lastly, when did the argument move from "advertising bad, tracking data always bad, targeted advertising terrible" to "if Apple does it then I'm good with it"?
when did the argument move from "advertising bad, tracking data always bad, targeted advertising terrible" to "if Apple does it then I'm good with it"?
It'd be a lot cooler if you could respond to my actual argument without namecalling and putting words in my mouth. For one thing, it's rude; for another, it doesn't contain much of a counter-argument.
You said the distinction between what Apple does and Google does is 'thin'. The distinction is Apple does this in two specific services of their own, one of which is completely optional and in both cases, the cohort bucketing and tracking can be turned off. Google is putting it in the browser people use to do just about everything on the internet. A roughly similar thing would be Apple adding cohort bucketing to Safari. They haven't. These seem, to me at least, some significant distinctions. Why do you think they aren't?
I replied. You are considering Apple's system better despite the fact that Apple's goal is to re create the web environment in their own apps so they can monetize it in their platform.
So your argument is maybe valid (I don't think so, tracking is tracking and this isn't just contextual targeting) only now, as time goes by and Apple accumulates more power your argument is back to being invalid again.
This shouldn't exist in your operating system at all.