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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Even as just an app store user I find the ads for competitors extremely obnoxious.

Search "Overcast" -> top ad is some crappy competitor (not even a good real competitor, but usually some sort of near-scam).

It makes me think less of the competitor and Apple every time I see it, it also seems completely unnecessary. I obviously want the app I searched for. It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.

The other suggestions are also really good, I'd love to be able to pay for big updates (though I personally don't really mind subscriptions for apps I regularly use).

I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.

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I'm sick of this. I'm so, so sick of this. I swear every time this happens, I think "oh, there is no app by that name" and then I have to double check make sure I really used the right search term and that the result is actually a first party app.

If I were searching for a genre such as "podcast" or "camera" app, I understand seeing paid ads. But when I search for a specific name, I see absolutely no reason whatsoever there should be an ad above my results.

There has to be a better way.

Although this gets tricky -- will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1" so that their app name is optimized to match a search term exactly? Maybe this already happens, but I can see it being hard to distinguish if the person is looking up a specific app called "podcast player" or a generic term

You're assuming that just looking for the title is everything a search engine does when it's not.

It's easy to create and train a model to distinguish between brands and generic words by counting how many times a single word appears over app descriptions, for example - there are countless ways to do this. This, in turn, can neutralize the effect of naming your app after a generic word when it comes to search ranking.

How do you know it's not competitors putting the product in their descriptions enough times that it will count as generic so they can rank above? I mean you can solve that too I'm sure, but it starts becoming more complicated than sixothree originally suggested.

> will everyone just start naming their app "Podcast player" and "Podcast 1"

This would be quite funny. I still see businesses called things like AAA automotive and similar which date back to optimising their telephone book listing order. Was this early SEO?

Yeah, there's a lot of motels from the 70s in my city that start with the letter A, but the Aalton Motel presumably won that arms race.

Apple has control over that, though! They could easily reject applications with overly generic names if that were a concern.

They already do don't they. Only Apple gets "Maps", "Mail", "Messages", etc...

Someone could manually set some keywords too.

But if there's too much uncertainty then just don't do ads at all. The fallback shouldn't be ads for all search terms.

Your post seems like a rebuttal to the idea of "just show the app they wanted", but that wasn't the request. The request was just to leave the search alone.

Especially when names are globally unique!

Among my feedback was a request to restore real search filters.

If one can click an “exact app name” box or similar, the results should always be as intended.

Of course I asked for more (like “no apps with more than $5 in-app purchases”).

That gives up control and they have no competitors in this market (iOS app stores), can’t see that happening without anti-trust.

I think they're trying to get $appname to bid high to ensure they're listed first instead of a competitor. Google Ads does this too on the search engine. I often query and see $companyname advertising for their name even when they are a large brand that is dominating the #1 spot. Problem with App Store adds is, apps don't typically have the ad budget and probably don't lose out too much if they do have name recognition. It really boils down to poor UX.

Like when you search Firefox and see an ad for Brave? (not hypothetical, seen it on the Play Store)

Apple should wind down their ads system (iAd) entirely. Advertisements are antithetical to what Apple stands for - privacy, premium experience, doing the right thing for users. They should lower their cut to 10% (not to 20, as the article states) and start offering curated experience bundles like they do with AppleTV.

iAd is dead. These are search ads.

Yeah I agree (at least on the ads piece, not sure about the rest of your comment) - I think the ads are an unnecessary dilution of their brand.

They can help developers with ad discovery in a bunch of different and better ways that are less hostile for devs and users.

*app discovery

Thank you for the funny typo "ad discovery"

"We curate the finest ads for your consumer experience.."

Ah yes - my bad, too late to edit :)

Ad discovery is more Facebook and Google’s business.

iAd was shut down years ago. Tracking ads might not align with some of the values Apple espouses but it seems a bit of a stretch to say a company famous for its ads (and often lowbrow-dismissed as 'just marketing' entirely) and advertising are 'antithetical'.

I'd say ads inside apps is antithetical to Apple's brand. Does anyone like those?

Inside apps? That's not up to them.

The app store is an app.

Apple exists to make money, first and foremost. Don't forget that.

Not like this they don’t. Traditionally they hit you pocket upfront then left you alone. Maybe it’s a minority that still want this, I definitely do.

The level of control they maintain over the devices after you have paid means I don't feel I am left alone. I feel I only have the rights of renter not an owner.

They do eventually use this power to force you to buy a new house. They use it to mark perfectly capable devices as obsolete e.g. why is a MPB i7/retina/ssd with discrete graphics now being marked as obsolete? Why is an iPad4 not allowed ad blocking with no chance to install an alternative open OS?

Lowering their cut is antithetical Apple. Apple should remain at 20% and perhaps go as high as google adsense. You agree it is a premium experience that comes at a cost.

Premium experience comes at a cost because it is expensive to produce. You need good materials, you need to hire the best people, you need to take your time, etc. And you need to be free from cheap "feature factory" thinking.

The above has nothing to do with Apple's cut on other people's work. That is just exploitation and is unrelated to increasing the quality of the experience for users. On the contrary, it makes life harder for developers wanting to bet on quality and instead encourages shovleware and deception. And this is exactly the outcome one sees.

The app store experience is what is antithetical to Apple. There is nothing premium about it.

The entire dev process with Apple is hardly ethical. No flexibility with payment options, the constant review and redevelop process even on apps that have already established a strong history. And the upfront and continuing costs... You'd have to buy every available iPhone version on market, a Mac, the programming license, the app store license, and hope Apple doesn't just rip off your idea for a future iOS feature then kick your app out of the store entirely. I may be off on some of this, but any of it is too much.

This bothers me on all search.

Search for <model> <year> of any product on google, 50/50 shot its a different company's item in the first (few) places.

Search bribes are user hostile but developer necessary it seems.

Yes, but Google is an advertising company, Apple didn’t use to be.

> It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.

It's an old-school protection racket, particularly because they own both sides of the deal.

"It'd be a shame if anything happened to your app store listing. But, you know, if you just pay us $5/mo we can make sure that doesn't happen to _you_."

App Store search results aren't very good. Instead of trying to improve the interface or results, they added app search Ads to monetize their poor search functionality. Also, the App Store has prominent ads for their in-house services (Apple Arcade apps).

The entire OS has ads for their services :/

> I'm also not sure the web apps are really competition, when something isn't native I tend to think it sucks and choose something else if possible.

Coming from the android world there is a very high bar for a native app for me. I tend to assume the app is garbage if it could have been done just as easily as a web app.

I find this surprising and it makes me wonder if native android apps are just bad?

The difference between a native iOS app and a fake app that's really just a wrapped web page is obvious. Native apps are a lot faster. It's possible there is some selection bias here and you only notice the web apps when they're bad, but I really don't think this is the case. Native apps just seem categorically better.

If Facebook pouring immense resources into it couldn't get web based mobile applications to be good, it's probably because the technology just can't compete with native.

More money doesn't mean good web app though. Most big websites ironically google's doesn't follow their own accessibility, speed, UX, UI, inclusiveness etc guidelines they recommend for getting into search results.

They are also the biggest abuser of UA agent while chromium team is trying to get rid of it. There are so many things they get wrong that they preach or push themselves.

Also, there are technical limitations especially around tracking lol. Web apps can't run processes in the background or access your files without your consent everytime.

Facebook was pouring resources into their HTML5 mobile apps ten years ago. I’m not saying web apps on mobile feel native now by any means, but I don’t think that’s a good example of a big company trying and failing anymore.

But what makes you think html+js+css performance have improved enough over native in the subsequent years where this isn’t relevant?

The Facebook html5 example predates react-native and all the other under-the-hood features and apps powered-by-JS that people don’t notice now.

Native > web in general, but most Android apps are freemium garbage designed either to get you spend money on IAP, or as a vector for getting you to run a bunch of advertising SDKs, which promptly proceed to exfiltrate everything they can about you. This shifts the balance, because finding a non-crappy app on the appstore is so difficult that it's much safer to go with the web app.

> It seems like a feature entirely designed to trick old people.

This. I've experienced this exact problem in helping elders install commonplace apps like Gmail.

Why wouldn’t they just use the native mail app?

Exact search results are getting bumped by paid ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23483101

This is also very frustrating with branded searches on Google. It's basically extortion, where you have to buy the ads on your brand or someone else will. They excuse it by pointing to how cheap it is on a PPC basis, since the clickthrough rate and resulting quality score is so high. Great, you're only extorting a nominal amount. Thank you.

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