That's funny. Why would Apple be "different"?

With any luck this backlash against Apple is so significant that a red flag is waved so ferociously that Google will never blast an advertisement out to their Google Wallet users.

As the article outlines, I am sure that due to the sheer number of people who use Apple Wallet there was someone out there who had just bought an advance ticket to Superman and the moment they received a 'Transaction Successful' message this F1 advertisement notification popped up and had them wondering if Apple preserving their privacy really is a competitive advantage.

I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.

More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste

The thing I used to like about Apple, even if you disagree with some of its decision. It is very coherent. It act as if Apple is a single entity even when it was a hundred billion market cap company. Compared to companies like Google and Microsoft, every product and services are like their own subsidiaries. Now Apple has become just another cooperate entity but with design team holding sufficient political power.

It's not so bad. I would rather have an appliance than a computer as my primary phone, of course. But if Apple is leaving the appliance market, then thank goodness at least I have the skills to use a pocket computer safely.

Most don't have such skills. None should be required to. That's why it's good there should be a company like Apple around, at least as Apple has been. If I need to advise my older relatives never to upgrade, and help them source and maintain older iPhones, I guess I can do that.

  >  4.5.4  Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

Today we have an Apple that keeps pushing new poorly thought out features. More and more they don't respect the user. Constant interruptions that don't serve the user, a ridiculous onboarding process with far too many screens, forcing their own products like Apple Music on people, not making design choices and making the user pick an option. We are so far from less but better and it's only getting worse. I wish there was a way forward for Apple, but I think it's just going to slowly die.

If the person who came up with this reads this site, I hope they see this comment and think about how screwed the industry would be if everyone acted the way they did.

I'm sad they make the only decent laptop out there, for everything else I'm glad to be out their crap wallet garden.

This is coming from a guy who generally fawned over every new iterative release as if it was revelatory for 20 years.

The updates Microsoft has been making to add stuff the Windows lockscreen and start menu also seem like they should be at the least legally questionable.

And of course Google practically invented these things.

They burned a lot of goodwill over a low conversion campaign. It reminds me of the U2 album that they snuck onto everyone’s phones, but even tackier .

I am not in anyway agreeing with the tracking of people's activities and purchases, but if you use either of the main payment processor networks (VISA or MasterCard) then your purchase history is being tracked and sold to third parties.

Any choice of wallet app, or ecosystem (ie iOS or Android) will not make any difference.

I really hate Apple - but what's stopping me from moving out of the ecosystem is that nobody else builds shit that works and is on same level. The M Pro series processor is only touchable by that one AMD chip you can't get anywhere. Windows is garbage and Linux is a part time job. Android is even worse in terms of spam and jank, and the only ecosystem that works is Google - where if you get locked out - you're just praying to HN/Google contacts that you didn't lose your access.

What you say seems likely, but then what. Should I throw my phone in the bin because it might be bad in the future, as opposed to being actually bad now?

And because it has positioned itself as the single most prominent privacy-conscious champion in big tech through repeated actions over the course of many years.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Apple depending on where your priorities are (lack of openness and cultivating an ecosystem based on locking you into it by not interoperating with anyone else are great places to start); but it's hard to make an argument that anyone else in big tech even comes close to the amount of trustworthiness Apple has demonstrated for their users.

The fact that Apple actually pushing an ad to its users is headline news speaks volumes to the trust they've earned (and damaged by doing so). Do you think it'd make headlines if Google showed its users an ad? Or Microsoft? Or Meta?

"Privacy. That’s Apple.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. It’s also one of our core values. Which is why we design our products and services to protect it. That’s the kind of innovation we believe in."

So, Apple explicitly advertises with privacy, which makes it very different from other big tech companies, and it seems justified to expect it to uphold its promise. "Privacy. That's Apple.", according to Apple.

The U2 album wasn’t spammy it didn’t interrupt people, it was in an appropriate place, and it was easily removed. Even if you didn’t want it, it’s reasonable to not consider it a problem.

This was outright spammy. It was trying to sell people something. It was in a sensitive place. And it was an attention-seeking, interrupting notification.

This shouldn’t have even made it onto the drawing board, and for this to make it into production at Apple is a sign something is seriously wrong there.

Every now and then, there is a full-screen popup on my phone that wants to onboard me into the wallet app. The only options I have are "yes" or "later".

Clearly a company that operates on the principle of "If the user doesn't want to, let's just nag them to death until they give up" is not to be trusted.

That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.

Do you have links? Because every single time someone claims “everyone” on HN shared an opinion and I go check, the threads are split. What that tells me is that the people who accuse HN of being a biased hive mind are themselves biased to the point of being blind to other arguments.

> now they're boiling the frog.

That’s a myth.

> according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

Yes it is

> Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out from receiving such messages.

You’d be surprised to hear how much the political power of the design team within Apple has eroded over the last decade.

Here’s a little game of insider Apple baseball:

1) why do you think the chief of design isn’t on this page? https://www.apple.com/leadership/

2) from the SVPs on that same page, who do you think the chief of design reports to?

The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.

So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.

The reason that they so often seem so is because of the massive surveillance enabling targeted ads. Ads served based on the context they appear in (eg, ads for financial services on the WSJ, or ads for diapers on a baby monitor app) do not require any surveillance or knowledge of the person they're going to be seen by in order to function.

From what I can tell, this ad was not targeted in the least: it just went out to everyone with an iPhone.

(That doesn't make it good, it just means that it doesn't specifically violate Apple's commitment to privacy.)

> I try very seldom to call for anyone to be fired, but I think whoever authorized this movie ad through Wallet push notifications ought to be canned.

There's some intersection point between who "owns" the wallet and who is coming up with ways to generate marketing revenue.

Whoever lives at that intersection point is the real shot caller here aren't they?

Imo you don't fire people for generating bad ideas, that just creates a culture of not thinking outside the box. But the person who is filtering those ideas is the critical lynch pin.

My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.

When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.

Tim Cook did this, and anyone that can't put the blame on him is lying to themselves.