It's literally the only way to download apps.

A platform that doesn't let you simply install a desired package without being shown ads is kind of crazy but it's basically industry standard for everything that's not Linux.

He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.

Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.

Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.

This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.

Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.

And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!

>but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade

So what already happens when you ssh into an Ubuntu server to run apt upgrade to manually update it. It turns out people don't care that much.

I think they do care. In the gaming community, Ubuntu has gone from about 40% to 10% marketshare since 2018.

https://youtu.be/Pwt216nn0zE

Now, you might say this is because of the influence of SteamOS, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that Ubuntu has been getting more popular overall.

Linux users have a choice while iOS and Android users essentially don’t.

I am talking in relation server market share since the ad is targeted towards people running servers.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Ubuntu server has lost marketshare to other Linux distributions, but I don’t know that I have any way to verify it.

$SEARCH_ENGINE engine is nowadays copilot or chatgpt, both ad-free if you use a simple ad-blocker.

ChatGPT just announced ads, right? AI chat will be even harder to ad block than search engines. It won’t be a simple matter of blocking ad domains.

For how long? Months?

4 years, 11 months, and 3 days. Guaranteed. So not an issue right now.

Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.

Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.

> It's literally the only way to download apps.

Is it? I don't think I've ever downloaded anything from Apple's app store. Hmm. What have I got? Chrome. Installed from website. GIMP. Installed from website. LibreOffice. Installed from website. VSCode. Installed from website. VLC. Installed from website. Zoom. Installed from website. Homebrew. Installed by using a command from a website. And then, a bunch of stuff installed from brew.

It is on iOS and iPadOS which is obviously what I was talking about.

Oh. Sorry. It honestly didn't even occur to me :-) I don't use those devices.

Other than all the scammy & microtransaction BS for the kids I’m always confused about this as well. I can count on one hand how many “new” apps I’ve installed in 2025 - one - the Bambu app for talking to the 3D printer.

I’ve got my banking apps, business apps, Strava, etc. the same now, for years. It would take a monumental effort from Apple for me to feel like “cruising” the App store, the idea is so patently ridiculous to me, I actually LOL’d thinking about it. Literally any other portable device is better to play games on - Switch, Steamdeck, 3DS, Atari Lynx, etc.

I have Apple Arcade as well (included with something else), I can’t even remember the last time I could be bothered to scroll that…

If Apple thinks more ads is a solution to some of their problems, things must be way worse than imagined over there.