Apple currently brings in roughly $4 billion from advertising and is forecasted to bring in as much as $30 billion by 2026. While these amounts are an order of magnitude smaller than the $210 billion Google made from its ad services, they represent a change in philosophy for Apple, which only earned around $300 million for ads in 2017.
This new emphasis on advertising also undermines Apple’s claims about privacy with its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature and its “Privacy. That’s iPhone” ad campaign. In fact, it appears ATT may have been more about blocking competitors than protecting user privacy. Since Apple introduced ATT, its ad revenue has skyrocketed, leading German regulators to investigate Apple to see if it’s abusing its power.
Apple has one of the most valuable repositories of credit card information and user behaviour data in the world, and after years of sanctimonious lying about how much they care about privacy, all bets are off now. iOs is already infested with ads, and it’s only going to get worse.
It’s not like you’re going to switch platforms anyway at this point.
Honestly I’m seriously considering it. Not back to Android, it’s still far worse on the privacy and ad-serving front, but perhaps to a dumbphone again (yes, they are still available if one looks hard enough), or a Pro1X running Ubuntu Touch if I absolutely have to have “smart” features for work. I’d also have to be willing to give up my Mac, but given I’m typing this from OpenBSD rather than macOS, I’m really already halfway there. I don’t have any other Apple kit; my wireless earbuds and fitness watch are cheap but highly recommended Chinese products that work just fine.
Honestly as I approach the second half of my 40s I’m finding myself exhausted with “new tech”; while I’m still a hardware/gadget geek I’m getting to the point where simpler is better and I want to de-clutter as much as possible. There’s absolutely no reason for me to own three laptops, two desktop workstations, four RPi boards, a tablet, and a phone, when I can accomplish 90% of my daily life with just a workstation and a phone.
Besides, I feel like Apple is losing their drive for innovation in the mobile department, given how the iPhone 14 was barely a bump over the 13 in features and performance. Likewise, as much as I am constantly floored by the advances they have made with Apple Silicon Macs, they are also pushing macOS and iPadOS towards a convergence that doesn’t bode well for desktop computing on Apple devices. The day is coming where the MacBook Air is phased out and replaced by the iPad Pro with a more solid keyboard “cover” that has its own battery and USB-C/TB4 ports. That’s great for whoever might benefit from it, but that kind of convergence never suited me.
Or you could try GrapheneOS. All the niceness of Android w/o all the extra stuff Google & others put on top of the core OS.
What are you talking about? There are no ads on my android device, and I can deny Google their default snooping rights. It will whine about and say it might break the phone, but at least I can do it, unlike with Apple on iPhone… (and nothing broke)
Sorry to tell you but Android is much better than Apple on privacy and ads, you have been lied to, and believed the lies.
Did you consider SailFishOS? I know it’s closed source but at the moment I have no reason not to trust that company. I have no personal experience though.
I’m in exactly the same boat as you but gave up on Apple and Google a long time ago as I think they are evil.I have been fine without their services (Google) or (overpriced) hardware (Apple). My problem now is that it is extremely difficult to get rid of especially Google but I try hard and will keep trying.
The influx of new GNU/Linux users will be immense. Oh, wait. OK then. People will just vote with their wallets (Apple Pay). Oh, wait. Argh. I give up. Just do it Apple. Nobody will do anything.
….but John Grubber will say that those iOS ads are the best designed ads of the world.
Switching platforms involves losing all your App Store purchases, all your in-app purchases, and all your saved game progress. Even if you are a baller and have no problem with re-bying everything, you also need to not have a problem with losing your save games. And then there is iMessage.
The good news is that Apple made their intentions clear from day 1 when it comes to iOS, for example by keeping sideloading locked and keeping iMessage un-interoperable, so anyone who got in there was asking for it. And for MacOS you can use it as a Unix system.
>It’s not like you’re going to switch platforms anyway at this point.
We did, last year, after half a decade in the walled garden. I went back to ThinkPads. My wife just replaced her MacBook with a 4k ThinkPad. My son just got a Nokia tablet instead of an iPad mini.
If I’m going to be spied on, inevitable at this point, I’d like it to be a company that’s actually competent in its management of big data. Plus I can access my Google stuff from anywhere, on any platform. My Youtube Music subscription works on my OpenBSD desktop.
I also get to have a choice in hardware (Samsung/Pixel; ThinkPad/whatever) and don’t have to pretend like the butterfly keyboards aren’t breaking left and right. It’s nice.
Migrating takes time. I still have to migrate the 80+ Apple Movies that we purchased, but we’re getting there. Google just does a lot of the web app/ecosystem stuff better. Yeah I’m part of their big data, but at least it works when I need it to.
Also, the voice recognition on Siri is just awful these days. It’s like they developed it for that one episode of Big Bang Theory 13 years ago, and then never gave it a single fucking update.
I’d be fascinated to read a more detailed write-up of your experiences, in case you ever have the inclination to write a more about it.
It kind of took a year or so, but I wasn’t deeply committed to any process that would fit in a flowchart. Basically, once I bumped into use cases where something didn’t work (i.e. our six Homepods only worked with Airplay), I took a few weeks to research a replacement and then went through the process of procuring something that was more standardized and platform-agnostic. Fortunately for us, in the USA, there are at least half a dozen reputable companies that will purchase old Apple stuff and resell them, so I don’t have to deal with the nightmare that is eBay/Swappa/Offerup. (yes, I carried six homepods in my luggage when I came back to the States last time). I imagine going the other way, INTO the Apple ecosystem, would be more frustrating.
I think the thing that kickstarted it all was me getting a Fairphone 4, and it kind of spiraled from there. I also kind of always ran OpenBSD+cwm as my desktop, even when I had maxed out iPads Pro and iPhones. And we have always used WhatsApp for communication instead of iMessage since WhatsApp is kind of the international standard (my immediate family/in-laws live across four countries on 3 continents).
So the only thing left is our Apple TV purchases. There is software to strip the DRM, that runs in a VM, but it converts at slightly slower than the rate of watching each film/episode all the way through. I wish I had gone through Amazon Prime for purchasing in hindsight, since that doesn’t care about the platform.
You are running OpenBSD? What is your wife running?
Chances are good that it’s windows with some occasional slackware 🙂
She is not technical, so Ubuntu LTS. It’s kind of well-supported by everything; Zoom for work, Netflix and Signal and Amazon Prime videos, and streaming music. Both printers were just plug and play. The external monitor is not HiDPI so it works at 100% while the laptop itself is 4k and has perfect 200% scaling and it’s neat.
The only hackish thing I had to do was install pipewire to replace PulseAudio so that her Beats wireless earbuds work. I think this is the case with all modern wireless earbuds.
I’m not an Apple user, but I’m grateful to Apple for promoting end-user privacy in the past. The mood has changed so that now many more people are concerned about control of their own data. Some of Apple’s publicity helped increase awareness, and now we’re talking about Apple’s advertising plans from a privacy perspective. I’m not saying this is all Apple’s doing, but I’m sure it helped.
I just hope end users now hold Apple to its own standards. End users who trusted Apple’s privacy claims deserve that trust to be respected.
flypig,
It may be easy for apple to be pro-privacy when it was deciding the policies that affect others, but money and shareholder pressure have a way of persuading executive to become cozy with advertisers, Nobody’s going to get fired for opening the advertiser money tap by another billion+. I think advertising on products that consumers are paying for is tasteless, but probably inevitable.
I agree there’s an element of inevitability about it (“massively profitable company chooses most profitable route”). And maybe many end users don’t really care too much about privacy anyway (I find it hard to tell). But I feel for users who do care about it and (understandably) bought Apple products thinking they were buying privacy.
Your comment also highlights another point: that Apple being disingenuous about privacy will make people nihilistic and cynical about privacy more broadly. That would be a very sad outcome.
Lying about something is not promoting it..
I take your point. Nevertheless I definitely get the impression, since the San Bernardino unlocking case through to the introduction of App Tracking Transparency (and even more so, the way other companies reacted to it) that Apple helped raise awareness of privacy.
flypig,
I agree, and I’m glad they didn’t give the police a back door. However I think there may have been a selfish motive too, the case may been as much about protecting apple’s own intellectual property as protecting user privacy.
Given the nature of the attack, police were right to demand targetted data (with a court order of course). My concern is blanket surveillance and warrantless secret surveillance that the government sometimes feels entitled to conduct without regards to their infringing constitutional rights. The snowden-era programs and secret courts had no oversight, and even members of the secret rubberstamp court created for the sole purpose of bypassing due process complained about it. IIRC the official policy now is that it is ok to monitor and wiretap everyone outside the US without a court order. They can also collect metadata without warrants. Also I believe when they have a target, they can violate the privacy of people two or three degrees separated from the target.
This to me still oversteps privacy rights that are supposed to be guarantied in the constitution. The rights were never absolute, but it’s simply inexcusable that law enforcement wouldn’t always get a warrant for every target that needs to be wiretapped. IMHO bypassing court warrants is an abuse of power every single time. And yet despite all the crimes uncovered by snowden and others, nobody in government ever goes to prison.
Bah, we’re quite off topic now.
I entirely agree. Apple is big enough and clever enough to align its public values with its self interest. That’s why I take Apple’s pronouncements on privacy as a positive sign (however disingenuous): personal privacy isn’t going to be protected unless business interests align with it.
I’m not a US citizen, so I can’t comment on the US constitution. But from an ethical perspective I agree with you. I understand the indisputable importance of protecting people from harm, but many of the government’s surveillance privileges seem to be driven by expedience rather than necessity.
Not just iOS. Nearly every computing device and nearly every website has been infected by Adtech and Social Media tracking. We live under constant surveillance and monetization.
I wonder what could have been accomplished by the computing industry with the ubiquitous network that is the Internet and the enormous amount of human and technological resources that are consumed by these parasitic industries.
I realize that this is a most unflattering, most extreme view of Adtech and Social Media, and that reality is probably not as extreme, but I am afraid I am not that far off the mark.
devloop
Yep, between the corporations and the governments, everybody’s got an incentive to use your data to their ends.
It’s a lot of money, and we all end up paying for it too; a significant percentage of our product costs goes into spamming us 🙁
It’s one of those things where if one company does it, all the competitors end up having to do it too even though it’s largely a zero sum game.
Most of these companies do provide valuable products & services, it’s just too bad about the ads & data-mining part, haha.