Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads | Hacker News Reader

Apple Maps Might Start Showing Ads

macrumors.com

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I get Apple are looking at doing this tastefully but this is a slippery slope where bean-counters realise they can get extra revenue for little effort. Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles — except Apple upselling their own services and I’m honest not ok with that either.

If I wanted my hardware to be subsidised by advertisers then I’d have stuck with Android.

They already started this slippery slope with the stocks application.

I paid a premium for Apple hardware in part to not have this nonsense, yet they did it anyway after the fact. :/

The News app is less of a slippery slope and more like a vertical waterslide.

Unlike every other company that does this you're paying the premium and they aren't even subsidizing the hardware costs.

> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles

The App Store is already filled with paid search results.

I don’t really use the App Store at all, so that bothers me less. I use maps almost every day.

"First they came for..."

I know. Hence this being a slippery slope.

I could probably have made my point clearer though.

And it's a terrible low quality experience. I feel dirty after having typed in the literal name of an app and being subjected to a FULL PAGE AD for another, scummy one.

Tim Cook is a bean counter.

His one significant win as a CEO was making the profit margins on apple processors higher.

AirPods are the biggest surprise runaway success under Tim Cook

Really? That was his one significant win? It wasn't taking Apple from a $350B market cap (the peak of Apple's market cap under the previous CEO) to a $3.5T market cap?

Right, so you're grading it on bean counting.

Importantly, the NASDAQ also had a 9-10x increase in this period, so while Apple did grow, it's not exploding benchmarks under his tenure as far as I see it.

This used to be true, but they have been focusing very heavily on services, and on ads to a lesser degree for quite a few years to pursue greater profits. & It's clear that this trend will not stop.

What part of a Pixel is subsidized by advertisers? Are you one of those people that ridiculously believe flagship and midrange Android phones are plastered with ads? Have you even used an Android phone recently?

Ironically, I use an Android device because I resent looking at ads.

I never get YouTube ads (plus I have SponsorBlock among other features), I get no ads or paywalls on my browser (which support Ublock Origin and BypassPaywallsClean), none of my social media apps have ads and most are open source clients, etc.

I haven't seen a single ad on my phone in ages, and that's why I can't part with Android (for now).

> Whereas the entire point of paying a premium for Apple products is that you don’t get subjected to any side hustles

I pay for Apple One and I am furious about their ham fisted inclusion of easily the lowest quality ads in Apple News Premium, and to have included them to such a degree that they are a major distraction.

It already inadvertently does! The controls Apple has on "who can upload data to Maps" has been gamed for years.

Type something like "Double Bedroom" in London - You get Booking.com SEO (MEO?) spam! I had to do some qualitative analysis of map results (don't ask) and we decided to drop it as a data partner - there are 10's of example of search terms like this for Apple Maps that I found without much effort!

Apple seems to build things that are very fundamentally unsound - but pass surface inspection. The article at the top of HN right now (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953) is another great showcase of this flaw in Apples processes, the really don't go super deep on good software.

Three other places this shows up - Gaming, Swift and Machine Learning.

- Gaming: I have heard 3 times in the past 15 years that Apple have made some fundamental change to their OS to support Desktop class gaming like Windows has - and every time those efforts fall flat. Every time it happens they get huge amount of kudos and press, the effort fizzles out, then they do it again after a few years.

- Swift: I have heard of two separate efforts to make Swift code bases work on Linux, both of which failed. Server support has died. They throw "support" libs over the wall, and don't fix them when they don't work. Swift UI is a canonical study in not spending enough time planning.

- ML: People are getting excited about MLX at the moment, and I see it as a great mirror of what they do with Gaming - some shallowly supported, not fundamentally sound, passion project gets some steam, they make big announcement, effort dies in a year and shuffled under the carpet.

And fans of Apple keep falling for it!

Gross. The slow intrusion of ads into more and more places might raise revenue a little bit, but tarnishes Apple's brand image. Apple News is already a revolting app, only somewhat saved by the fact that Google News is even worse.

I've already decided that my personal line in the sand is when they replace the scenic screensavers on Apple TV with ads, something they're already toeing the line with in the newly added Peanuts screensavers. At that point Apple has lost the plot and I want nothing to do with their products anymore.

I'm in line with most of what you said, but I gotta disagree about the peanuts collab. I grew up with peanuts and I just love having it there on the tv.

The peanuts collab is not an advertisement nor is it a collab. Apple purchased the rights to the Peanuts franchise years ago and they are using the characters as part of their product design. If they are advertising (which they are not), they are not receiving any money for it, and Apple themselves have nothing to capitalize on these "ads" considering there is no product being sold. The Peanuts movie had a weak response and nearly everybody has already watched the Peanuts animated shorts. So no, it is not advertising.

I love Apple Maps for navigation. Blows google maps out of the water. Clearer instructions. More awareness of lanes. Generally much better UX.

However their business search is barely worth using. Frequently out of date. Missing hours. Reviews from yelp which are inferior to googles, and need to leave to app to browse.

If they want to make ad revenue it will be on the search side and they have a long way to go.

> More awareness of lanes

It really makes you wonder if anyone who works on the driving directions of Google Maps has ever used the product. The two most maddening dysfunctions of their driving directions are 1) displaying and holding a waypoint that is unavoidable, such as "merge onto Highway Whatever" when there are no other options, and 2) holding a direction such as "take exit 42" until the very last moment, even when there is a choice to be made immediately afterward, where you really want guidance about whether to bear left or right at a divergence. Combine them both and you get Google Maps repeatedly telling you to do something you can't avoid at the time when it should have been telling you the next turn.

Interesting you say that because I’ve found their directions to be generally ok on UK roads. Not perfect but not terrible either.

The best satnav I’ve ever had was whatever was built into my VW CC. I think it might have been TomTom-based. I loved pretty much every aspect of that satnav. In fact I loved pretty much every aspect of that car too.

I remember well the satnav in my last VW. On the center panel of the instrument cluster it displayed accurate and useful diagrams of the next turn including the streets that you were supposed to pass, with less emphasis. I also recall that its voice prompts were very polite, such as "If possible and safe, make a U turn".

i'm not sure how far you've tried to drive with apple maps. but from what i can tell, apple maps is better for navigation around NYC and SF. not so much when you get out of the few cities where it's better.

even around vancouver, which i would have thought might be a big enough place to get some love from apple, i still get frustrated with apple maps directions. google maps might not have all the shiny bits that apple maps has, but the directions are always right, or at least close enough to right that i'm not mad about it.

I’ve used it mostly in Toronto and the Bay. I could see smaller cities being worse, but I’m surprised Vancouver isn’t top tier.

In my experience in every city (literally) in Ontario and lots of south western Quebec, Apple Maps is the clear winner. There are some areas where google is better, but overall Apple wins on navigation. I generally use google for business search, and either Apple or Waze for directions (depending on my familiarity with the area).

When Apple built their Maps it was presumably easy to justify the cost because it was dangerous to stay reliant on Google for something so essential to mobile. But maintaining a useful map system has got to be fantastically expensive as well and it's hard to imagine that anyone is really buying an Apple device because of Maps. Therefore, ads of some variety are pretty much guaranteed.

This argument would have worked except that Apple collects its map data largely from you, the iPhone user, without your knowledge or consent. For example, the live traffic data in Apple and Google maps is incredibly useful, except that they gather this data from aggregated motion and GPS data from users themselves. If you are driving and see through your app that there is traffic ahead, it is because Apple is tapping the phones of the drivers directly in front of you and uploading that data to a central server. So Apple is running their service off of the device you paid for and extracting without your knowledge or informed consent. Now, they plan to place ads into this service as well so that you can pay for the service with your data in two ways.

Beyond this, Apple uses the location data of its hundreds of millions of users to identify paths like sidewalks, parking lots, etc. Essentially, as you walk/drive, you are drawing Apple's maps for them. Apple is taking this data from you for free without any compensation and largely without informing you. So now, it's clear Apple has been building out much of its map data with free labor, and they only send out their little envoy vehicles for data gathering in areas where they do not have enough free labor to do it for them.

I guess this and other dark patterns, there’s no point to using Apple products after all. I was hoping the premium price gets you privacy - but what they’re giving is not so much privacy as much as a walled garden where THEY can violate your privacy and keep the wins for themselves.

Apple Maps always refers you to Yelp, which in the past extorted businesses for good ratings. I avoided them like the plague, so I can't say if they're any better.

Or worse.

What a bummer. It recently started being a good Map app. I guess apple is really starting to go down a bad path what with their AI stuff etc.

When Maps was updated in the last 3 or 4 iOS updates to make the nearby search result list much larger it was obvious that ads were coming. The UX of "search for x nearby" has suffered because where as before you could fit ~2x as many results.

One thing I don’t get is how to do search for X near the thing I’ve clicked. It often resets to near me.

After you enter a search term there are two search choices in the list below, either “Nearby” or “Near area on your map”

And then when I pan the map, maybe 90% of the time it doesn't load new results for the visible area. It makes Apple Maps pretty unusable for finding things in unfamiliar areas.

Why are people outraged? Apple is an advertising company and in order to sustain their growth they need to expand and proliferate their advertising to all of their products.

I’m not Apple fanboy by any stretch, and I use Google maps, but Apple/Google maps are so valuable to my life, in the purist definition of valuable.

Directions (garmin), finding businesses and places (yellow pages), pinning places (like a big map on the wall with pins), trip time estimation, etc

I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads.

Google Maps has plenty of ads. All the square pins are paid placements.

despite the fact that a lot of the actual content is provided by users for free.

You could really say the same about OpenStreetMaps being laundered for revenue.

I don't see how this statement is related to my statement.

It's about the fact whether ads are justified or not. If users provide the content for free, there are less good reasons to justify adding ads there.

If I make an edit on Google Maps and Google stores and serves my edit to the world in perpetuity, what is the relative fraction of value at any time t after my edit?

The value comes from user-generated content, just like on Instagram—individual posts may not matter, but their collective contribution is what creates value.

> I’m amazed by these extremely good products being free and mostly not covered in ads.

Probably because people don't click on ads while using Apple/Google maps to drive somewhere. The app has one job: give me directions. I'm not interested in enshitification of these products.

Plus, they already gather lots of data about you, which is more valuable than showing ads.

Although maps are very useful, for me it is the street view functionality that I find the most useful—especially if I am driving somewhere I have not been before. I can rehearse key points of the drive, see landmarks, exit numbers, and so on.

> extremely good products being free

All the Apple ecosystem is subsidized by the price of the iPhones and Macs. There is no excuse for putting ads in such expensive products. And it's one reason why I'm moving away from Apple but that's another story.

Moving to where?

Thinking of moving away from Apple as well.

I’m personally moving to the Fairphone with preinstalled e/os. A phone that I control, can repair, and has more privacy than the other OS is what I expected from Apple until the past decade where they decided that privacy was a joke.

It's simply not wise when everybody owns an iPhone and leaving iMessage will lead to social ostracization.

What are you moving to? Windows is worse. Android phones have various issues with privacy or security. Linux products aren’t anywhere near ready (compare battery life between system76 and a MacBook for example). There just isn’t enough competition.

Android phones have fewer issues with privacy and security than Apple phones. You can install a fully offline mapping application on Android and have it be your default navigation app. Unlike with iOS (which tells Apple everything you've installed and run), you don't have to tell anyone you installed it, and also unlike iOS (which sends all GPS data to Apple), you don't have to tell anyone your GPS location. Apple marketing saying they care about privacy doesn't make it true.

What are good choices on phones? Pixel seems like it would leak things to Google. And as I understand Samsung phones have lots of preinstalled garbage.

Pixel with GrapheneOS if ypu want to take this seriously.

If you're in EU: Samsung falls under the DMA ruling, so you get to disable most superflous apps with a single checkbox at setup time.

You can install whatever you want on any Android phone from a reputable vendor, including Pixel phones. If you don't want to send data to Google (aside from OS updates), just replace any Google apps with non-Google apps.

Apple's ecosystem is the worst, except for all the others.

The excuse is more free money. If millions of users rely on the Maps app for recommendations for food places and service centers, why shouldn't Apple exploit their position of power for financial gains?

good thing is that absolutely no one will see these ads :)

I just tried OpenStreetMap and was awfully disappointed. It's "just a map". I can't click on businesses, bus stops, etc. to get extra information about them. It's more like a digital version of paper maps I used to have eons ago.

People forget that what makes products "sticky" is the amount of stuff added to them by the users over the years.

How did you use OpenStreetMap? If you're just browsing it via the website, you can click the query button and then select a map item for more information.

(Just to be clear, I am not suggesting the UX or data on OSM competes with Google Maps. But I did go and click on a Chase Bank near me and got the phone number and hours, just to be sure that I wasn't making anything up. There are OSM apps that provide a nicer experience including navigation features.)

Historically, the project has not focused on making openstreetmap.org an end user mapping tool. Good or bad, that's the history, it's shown a flat slippy map without much interaction.

Features often do have additional information, but broadly speaking, it's pretty incomplete and wouldn't be comparable to Apple/Google maps. There's areas where the data is probably better than commercial maps, but that isn't the case on average.

People forget that the purpose of a map is to show you where you are and how to get where you want to go.

It used to be, it's not anymore.

You tried openstreetmap.org. That isn’t a consumer mapping site, it’s the community site for the OSM project. The idea is that the data is published as open source for other apps/sites to build on.

The plain OpenStreetMap web site isn’t very user friendly. Have you tried Organic Maps? It’s an OSM app for Android and iOS. It’s probably the most user friendly OSM app right now.

The entire paradigm difference or "features" which you are lacking is exactly the way the providers want you to funnel you - compare Organic maps (using osm), which only allow you to browse and navigate, to gm or am, which will always prefer you to be served with opening hours and ads of their partners, then only show GO LEFT, WARM, WARMER, you're almost there, now CONSUME&BUY!

And come back to our app again if you need to get a taxi or buy a fare... cmon, sweet convenience!

Then to wake up in a reality where you forgot why north was showing on top of the screen, you prefer it to turn map orientation with your body movements and ofc whisper more dopamine inducing advices.

The maintainers of openstreetmap.org should really add a warning : "this is for advised contributors!".

OSM is a database, and osm.org is the database browser.

End-User apps are Organic Maps, osmapp.Org, and the one that I'm building cartes.app. I hope to internationalise soon.

Enshittification strikes again.

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