Steve Streza

The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware

Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue.

All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become.

If you don’t subscribe to these services, you’ll be forced to look at these ads constantly, either in the apps you use or the push notifications they have turned on by default. The pervasiveness of ads in iOS is a topic largely unexplored, perhaps due to these services having a lot of adoption among the early adopter crowd that tends to discuss Apple and their design. This isn’t a value call on the services themselves, but a look at how aggressively Apple pushes you to pay for them, and how that growth-hack-style design comes at the expense of the user experience. In this post, I’ll break down all of the places in iOS that I’ve found that have Apple-manufactured ads. You can replicate these results yourself by doing a factory reset of an iPhone (backup first!), installing iOS 13, and signing up for a new iCloud account.

Apple Music

ios adware apple music 1

When you open the Music app for the first time, it shows you an empty library and a bit saying that you can get music from the iTunes Store. So you head over to the search tab (ignoring the “Search By Lyrics” ad for Apple Music), and search for an artist, and find that your library is empty, but that Apple Music search tab sure is full of lots of exciting stuff. You navigate down to the song you want to listen to, and you get greeted with a fullscreen popup ad for Apple Music, one which went out of its way to disable support for iOS 13’s new swipe-to-dismiss gesture.

ios adware apple music 2

Leaving search, there are three other tabs at the bottom: For You, Browse, and Radio. The “For You” tab is a sneaky ad, offering to help you find new music based on your tastes. Tapping the big red button takes you to a signup screen for Apple Music. Nowhere on this screen was it stated to be a subscription feature.

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Under Browse, you find a whole selection of songs, artists, playlists, and other general curated music selections. Tapping into basically anything will take you to a fullscreen Apple Music ad.

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In Radio, we finally have something we can tap that doesn’t trigger an Apple Music ad! Beats 1 can be played seemingly without subscribing to Apple Music, and some of the older interviews are playable. I say “some”, because while tapping on that interview of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie will play, tapping on the entry for A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie under the “In Case You Missed It” section will bring up another fullscreen ad.

As a bonus, it stops whatever you’re playing, as the audio player switches to the track you selected before the server tells it that it can’t be played without a subscription. I think this is a bug more than malice, but it highlights how the app is designed for the subscriber, not the person who doesn’t want Apple Music.

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So Browse and For Now are entirely Apple Music ads. Radio has some free content but that largely exists to pull people into Apple Music, and Search will happily pull you in to Apple Music if you tap the button. Almost this entire app serves to be an ad for Apple Music. There is a setting in the Settings app to hide Apple Music (next to an ad for Apple Music, of course), but that only does so much.

The Browse and For Now tabs are hidden, and some of the Apple Music-exclusive stuff in Radio is hidden. But every radio station except for Beats 1 is still present, all which trigger an Apple Music ad. After you quit and restart the Music app, the search bar changes the “Apple Music” search results to “Radio”, but the autocomplete largely populates from Apple Music, and some of the search results can return playlists that take you to Apple Music. It helps, but ads are still there to be stumbled into.

ios adware apple music notifications

If you subscribe and then cancel, Apple sends invasive push notifications asking you to re-susbscribe. These are on by default without a permission request. This is, of course, against the rules they lay out for other developers.

Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used for advertising, promotions, or direct marketing purposes or to send sensitive personal or confidential information.

Apple TV+

ios adware apple tv

The TV app opens with Apple’s standard summary screen, leading with an ad talking about Apple TV+. The home screen is chock full of TV+ ads and ads for shows on TV+. If you have existing iTunes Store shows, or streaming apps like Netflix or Crunchyroll setup, you might see shows you’re watching under the “Up Next” section. But no matter what you have, the Apple TV+ ads are huge and inescapable. Again, the TV app’s notifications is enabled by default with no permission request.

Apple News+

ios adware apple news

Another app that has its notifications turned on by default, this is how many people will interact with this service. Tapping notifications doesn’t take you to a web browser, but directly into the News app. If you open a story on one of Apple’s partners like the Wall Street Journal, the screen it takes you often has a large banner ad at the top of the screen for the Apple News+ service. This seems to be intermittent, but it cannot be dismissed, hidden, or disabled.

If you look through the News app itself, you will see a plethora of stories in the Today feed. Some of these will trigger the same ad shown above; there is no indication on the feed itself. Some will actually have a full paywall in front of them preventing access without signing up; these do have a tiny Apple News+ logo beneath them, but it’s far enough below that it almost looks like it belongs to the next section.

And of course, in the dead center of the tab bar, is the News+ tab. Leading off with a large ad at the top of the feed, it lists stories and publications similar to the Today feed. Most of these stories are paywalled, but not all, so people may end up going there and hunting for stories they can read. This tab cannot be hidden, ever.

Apple Card

ios adware apple card

After you set up your iPhone, you get a home screen with at least one badged icon, on Wallet. Opening this takes you to a giant ad that’s nearly half the screen for Apple Card. Fortunately it is dismissable. But every time you try to add a credit/debit card to Apple Pay, you are asked if you want to sign up for Apple Card instead.

Apple Arcade

ios adware apple arcade

The first three tabs of the App Store app are Apps, Games, and Today. These tabs don’t have much in the way of ads, aside from some Apple Arcade games that might appear in Games and Today. However, Apple Arcade gets an entire tab all to itself, which has a huge in-feed ad for the service, and of course a whole pile of games advertising it. Compared to other games and apps, Apple Arcade games get more prominent visual treatment, larger videos, and bigger download buttons. This tab, like News+, cannot be turned off.

App Store Search

ios adware app store search

And of course, almost anything you search for in the App Store has a large ad at the top of your search results. This isn’t an ad for an Apple-run service, but it is a way they make money by extorting developers and showing you the wrong thing. If you search for a specific app, you will often not see that app in the first slot, unless the developer has paid for the privilege.

Conclusion

Apple wants to grow their services business with drastic increases year-over-year. This means they are going to aggressively push more services into more places (including deeper into macOS and tvOS, which are also slowly having adware trickled into them). Apple TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card are all new this year, and are already strongly advertised in iOS. Apple Music has existed for a few years, and its level of advertising in the app is pervasive. As time goes on, these ads are going to get worse, not better.

Of course, Apple has a right to tell users about their services, and try to convince you to subscribe to them. And you might disagree with my assessment that some of these are ads at all. Individually, most of these instances aren’t insidious by themselves. But when you look at them together, they paint a picture of how Apple is making the user experience provably worse to boost growth at all costs.

This issue is not going to get better. Apple is going to expand its services, both breadth and depth, and the adware problem is only going to get worse, unless people call out Apple for what they’re doing. And yet, this issue is rarely talked about, likely because many of the people who cover Apple inevitably subscribe to some or all of these services. Gadgets like smart TVs and ebook readers are frequently criticized for their annoying, invasive advertisements despite their (often large) upfront price. It’s time for the tech community to recognize that Apple is no longer designing their products for a great experience, but as upsells to get you into the paywalled garden.

My First FPGA Experiments

One of my earliest memories of awe when learning how to program computers as a kid was wondering how the computer takes bits in the CPU and turns them into an image on a screen. When you don’t know how most of the system works, it’s easy to conclude that it is basically magic, and that the knowledge was arcane to the point of being inaccessible without tons of background in engineering and science.

As I grew up, this question never really left my mind, and really grew into the more abstract question of how a computer works at every level. Once you get into the high level of software and languages like C and Swift, you can abstract away a lot of the questions into programming language theory and ignore things like transistors and voltage. But peeling back the curtain to reveal what is going on in the circuitry lies a world that is both simple in its principles and ever complex in the myriad of tricks used to keep this wrangled chaos ticking in utter precision.

I started watching Ben Eater’s incredible YouTube series on building a computer on breadboards a couple years ago. I’ve watched the whole thing end-to-end multiple times, and have built (or tried) a couple of the modules, including the clock and the ALU. I went from knowing very little about electronics to having a fairly broad understanding of how circuits work, at least in theory.

On the other side, I’ve tried writing video game console emulators, notably a Game Boy emulator in Swift which works well enough to understand how a higher level system works with all its pieces put together. The emulator is largely unusable (hence why it doesn’t exist in an open source form) but it can run the start of a couple games, generate some graphics and sound, and process user input. Over the years I’d heard about things like Verilog and VHDL being used to define hardware in code. And in the last year or two I’ve gained an understanding of what FPGAs are (especially thanks to the MiSTer project and its focus on cycle-accurate emulation).

So in my ever expanding pursuit to learn how each piece of the computer works, I’ve picked up an FPGA development board, the DE10-Nano, and have begun using the Intel Quartus software to learn how to program it using Verilog. So far, I’ve gotten a couple small and ultra-basic projects working, namely getting an LED to blink based on an internal 50MHz clock and a clock divider, and a basic unclocked two-bit adder. As I continue going down this route, I have a number of project ideas I want to try, including:

  • emulating Ben Eater’s breadboard computer
  • a video generator that outputs something to HDMI
  • an analog to HDMI video converter and scaler, akin to the OSSC
  • an HDMI to analog video converter, so I can play PC games like Undertale on my old CRT TV
  • a Dreamcast VMU clone
  • a basic graphics card
  • a RISC-V CPU
  • some kind of module for my modular synthesizer

Will I be successful at actually building any of these? Who knows! But in the end, I’ll get a few steps closer to understanding how computers truly work at the silicon and chip level. And the journey is definitely more valuable than the destination.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 In-Depth Preview

I’ve never been able to get into a flight simulator before, but I really want to check this one out. This is a fantastic in-depth look at it. Make sure to crank the resolution all the way up.

Campaign Diary: Setting Off

The party set off from Neverwinter with the supplies en route to Phandalin. They came across two dead horses in a choke point on the road. Hagnar went to briefly investigate, then returned to the cart, only to be ambushed by two goblins with one more sniping with arrows from the trees. Tarot charmed one, while Thunder cleaved the arm off another, leaving the third to run away as Hagnar sniped it in the back.

Thunder discovered that the horses belonged to Gundren and Sildar, and convinced the goblin Grok to bring them to where they were taken. While distractedly talking to Tarot, Grok failed to point out one of the traps, nearly causing Hagnar to fall into a pit. They arrived at the mouth of a cave, where Grok turned tail and fled.

Peering into the cave, the party noticed it was dark, so Azunyan lit Thunder’s axe bright pink with sparkles. This caught the attention of two goblin guards, who shot arrows at the party from a bunch of nearby thickets, hitting Hagnar. The party took shots at the two goblins, with Tarot slicing one’s throat and the other getting hit with a firebolt from Azunyan and a cleave from Thunder.

Heading into the cave, the group sees three wolves, and tries to tame them. Azunyan puts one briefly to sleep, and goes to calm the others, but one is only made angrier, which leads Thunder to quickly kill it. This drives the other into a rage, and the party decides this is more trouble than it’s worth, and heads deeper into the cave.

After a little while, they see a goblin keeping watch who notices the party and begins running off to alert the rest of the goblins. Thunder whips an axe at him and kills him instantly, knocking him into the river below. They decide to try to climb up a rocky embankment but it collapses, knocking Thunder unconscious as he falls into the river. Tarot tries to pull him out but gets dragged in as well. Hagnar and Azunyan pull him out with rope and they spend a couple hours helping him recover.

They head back into the cave, seeing the wolves, and the now conscious Thunder antagonizes the wolves with a face, which stirs the wolves into a frenzy, causing one to yank loose its chain. The party coerces it out of sight and kills it with a fire bolt from Azunyan and a scimitar shot from Hagnar. Azunyan then calms the other wolf, now all alone, and forms a solid bond with it.

The Icon Garden Episode 19 SwiftUI and Native Apps

I was a guest on The Icon Garden podcast today, talking about the newly announced SwiftUI, how it co-exists with other tools like React Native, and what it means for the future of native apps and cross-platform hybrid apps.

Remote Camera Access Exploit in Zoom for Mac

So Zoom runs a web server on your Mac (even after you uninstall the app), and that web server can launch Zoom calls via URLs, and those Zoom calls can default to having your camera open. Which apparently makes it very easy to embed something into a web page (or an ad) in an attempt to trick people into unwittingly opening a video chat.

Remote video exploits are one of the worst case scenarios of security vulnerability, and this is it. It looks like Zoom took over two months to start responding to it from the timeline, and if that’s true, it’s irresponsible security practice.

If you have Zoom installed on your Mac, check the “Patch Yourself” section of the article to block the functionality that allows this.

WebSub and Microformats

As of now my personal website should support WebSub on all pages, posts, and the RSS feed (basically everything linked in the sitemap). If you have the capability to subscribe to pages via WebSub, you should be able to point it at any page on this site and get notified when that page updates. That’s maybe not the most useful on individual pages, but it is useful for the home page, or if you want to be able to subscribe to individual tags or projects.

This should work well with social readers that let you subscribe to websites, at least in concept. To go with that, I’ve updated the microformats across much of the site to make them accessible to those readers. Things appear alright in web-based validators but I’ve been having trouble getting those changes to appear in the readers themselves. Hopefully that will fix itself as caches expire. But it’s one step further down the road of being a good IndieWeb citizen.

Behind the scenes, WebSub support is handled by Webmaster, my custom-built server that integrates with my Gatsby build system. When GitLab finishes building, it sends a webhook to Webmaster that signals that the site has changed, causing Webmaster to fetch the sitemap and scan the ETag of each file in it for changes. If any of those ETags are different from what’s already known, then that page has changed. The WebSub subscribers for that URL are fetched and notified with the changes. No WebSub hub necessary, but down the road I could switch to one pretty easily.

Checking out the IndieWeb Summit remotely and working on my personal website today.

Noclip Documentary on the Fall and Rise of Final Fantasy XIV

With the impending release of the third expansion Shadowbringers, I’ve been rewatching this amazing documentary on Final Fantasy XIV, its very poor launch, and its reconstruction. It’s a fascinating tale, one that has probably never been attempted (and likely never will again).

The Verge's PC Build Copyright Strike Fiasco

In September 2018, the Verge posted a video that was designed to show people how to build a PC, which was full of errors and mistakes. Some were inconsequential or considered bad practice, like having bad cable management which might impede airflow but wouldn’t necessarily impact performance. Some would cause performance problems but not damage, like putting the GPU in the wrong PCI-e slot. And some issues could cause irreversible damage, like using the wrong screws on the radiator, which could potentially penetrate the radiator tubing and cause coolant leaks. The internet quickly began criticizing this video for its flaws, making parodies and reaction videos, and the Verge disabled the comments on the video before ultimately taking it down, amending the accompanying article noting that the video wasn’t up to their standards. Paul’s Hardware did a very good summary of the video and the reaction to it. The internet made fun of it for awhile, and everyone largely moved on. Until this week.

On Tuesday evening, Kyle from the YouTube channel Bitwit tweeted that the Verge had used YouTube’s copyright strike system to take down his reaction video. The Verge did not issue a statement or public comment to this, but about a day later, the claim was reversed after being disputed. According to Bitwit, YouTube disputed that the video fell under fair use for transformative purposes (which will go on to be disputed by the Verge later). They also took down a video from channel ReviewTechUSA which broke the original video down and added a lot of commentary to it. Before the videos were reversed, several large tech YouTube channels posted videos about the Verge’s actions, which appeared to outsiders like the Verge was trying to censor criticism, as the videos were both transformative, critical, and highly viewed.

This morning, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel finally issued a statement on behalf of the Verge. In it he says that the legal team at Vox Media (the parent company of the Verge) found these videos and decided that they were not fair use, and issued copyright strikes to YouTube under their own purview. Later, when he was notified of these strikes, he had them rescinded despite believing that the legal team was correct in thinking that they did not fall under fair use. He then spent the morning responding to tweets about the issue, including my own, which were almost entirely negative.

Now, I’ve generally liked the Verge and Nilay Patel’s work, and have defended him and his position strongly when I agree with him. And after thinking about it, in some ways I can understand where they’re coming from. If we assume they’re being truthful in their public statement, they saw some videos, they felt they were not fair use, they tried to take them down. But their process failed in a few fundamental ways.

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