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Comment by ViViDboarder | Hacker News Reader

I’ve become increasingly annoyed with this trend. Apple is doing it too on iOS, though the ads are all for first party products. If you use Apple News you can’t turn off all the teaser headlines for News+. If you use 4Gb of your free iCloud storage you’ll be pestered with “Upgrade” notifications.

Similarly, it’s a little more expected on the web, but I used to have YouTube Premium and now that I’ve canceled, every new YouTube session has a pitch for premium.

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Oh don't worry, even if you never showed one iota of interest in Youtube Premium and skip every single annoying popup related to it - you'll still get asked every single time you open the app.

I pulled up YouTube on my Model 3 the other day and it gave me a 1/3 screen ad for Premium.

I can’t use Spotify(premium!) without having a freaking in-app pop up on iOS too.

I’m actually thinking about going back to pirating music and just building my own player that load things off of S3.

I don't really get these complaints - the entire point of freemium services is to upsell users to a pay-for tier.

There is a difference between up-selling and being an annoying pest to the extent that people stop (or at least reduce) using your product

Whats not to get? He doesnt want ads and doesnt want premium so he leaves. Seems like the freemium product is working in separating the paying customers and the never-will-buys via annoyance.

I have premium!!

That’s the kicker…

I have had premium since 2011 and aside from the occasional oddball popup for a concert near me (which is always based on what I listen to), I never get ads. What exactly are you seeing?

That's the thing. Paying for premium means you have discretionary income.

As such, you're far more valuable to Spotify than its free users.

You can show the value of your premium offering without shoving ads for it in people’s faces.

To be fair they are demonstrating pretty well that premium users don't see ads.

I'm a Spotify Premium user and it still annoys me with a modal popup pitching something stupid every now and again. Not very often at all, maybe once every few months, but still.

Deezloader is quite a miracle in that regard btw. after so many years there still are the ways to illegally download music from the legal service and that is just... something.

D-Sub (for Android) and AirSonic are actually perfect for this - without having to build/debug anything.

Seconding Airsonic! https://github.com/airsonic/airsonic

Big fan of play:Sub as a client for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/play-sub-music-streamer/id9553...

Install Telegram. Open up a chat with you favorite music downloaded bot and listen whatever you want for free on the go. It steams but also caches what you already listened so it's pretty much better than anything you could easily fire up without spending a weekend.

Apple TV+ as well. I once got a notification that my complimentary free subscription offer included with the device purchase was expiring.

This happened out of nowhere on an iPhone I use for development, where I've never even launched the app in question.

I've never gotten an ad for anything in iOS, but I also do not use iCloud or Apple Music or Apple TV. At least the ads seem to be contained within their own apps, then.

I think for established public orgs this really is the nature of public pressure for constant growth.

People have to show numbers and eventually a couple ads here or there is just a little white lie for a solid couple of percent. And it's totally cool because everyone else is doing it wink. And then it becomes normalized and suddenly Hulu premium is showing ads on every show.

I think Hulu was the last subscription service I ever paid for, years ago.

And nagging for Apple Pay, Apple Music. Like I don't think any version of Windows ever had as many annoying modal dialogs than modern iOS.

Personally, I was really annoyed by the pre-roll ads on Apple TV+. I thought Apple was better than that :/.

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