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.