Apple’s obsession with ads is killing the iPhone

Disappointing news for iPhone and iPad owners last week, when it emerged that from the start of March, Apple will run more ads in App Store search queries. You may feel that searching for “into the breach” should surface the game “Into the Breach” rather than “Hero Wars: Alliance RPG”, but Apple does not appear to agree.

Now, you might argue that I’m stretching the term “news” a little, since we’ve had ads in App Store search since 2016, and even this latest expansion of the program, creating multiple paid slots per query, was first floated last month. But you would be wrong, because we just learned two new nuggets of knowledge: the timeframe, and the markets which will get the extra ads first (the U.K., followed by Japan, followed by everyone else). So there.

In any case, the topic is one that lends itself to small updates rather than blockbuster announcements, because Apple’s love affair with in-software advertising is one long process of gradual expansion. The thin end of the wedge is slowly replaced by the thick end of the degraded user experience.

At first, it was a single ad at the top of each search query. Then those ads spread to other parts of the App Store. And Apple News. And Stocks. And iMovie. And, in another 2026 development, Apple Maps. The company is constantly pushing for more intrusive advertising. When users push back hard enough (such as ads for gambling apps appearing in the “You Might Also Like” section), Apple generally takes a step back; when they don’t, Apple takes another step forward. And this is the latest.

It’s easy to see why Apple would want to add ever more ad slots to its software platforms: money. You don’t get to a market cap of $4 trillion without having an eye for revenue opportunities. But it’s not free money. It comes at the cost of user trust.

Apple’s whole thing is that it’s different from other tech companies. It makes the hardware and the software. The hardware is there to bring in the revenue, and the software is there to make the hardware as appealing as possible. This is supposed to be the company you go to if you’re sick of having your data harvested, of being a product rather than a customer. Apple fans pay a premium upfront, and in return, they get to inhabit a safe space: the famous walled garden. And they’re entitled to expect Apple to remove weeds and throw out any traveling salesmen.

Why, a customer might reasonably ask, am I seeing ads? Was the $999 I spent on my iPhone not enough for you? And if you’re going to start doing the same things as Google, what’s stopping me from saving money and buying an Android phone?

This might sound like a small annoyance: the equivalent of someone complaining about ads on the cheaper tiers of their streaming service of choice. (There are promotional slots, inevitably, before shows on Apple TV, as well as widespread product placement.) But this runs a lot deeper.

Search ads specifically are poison to a healthy ecosystem, because they exist entirely to direct consumers away from the product they asked for and towards the product the platform owner was paid to recommend. Ads are labeled, of course, but if nobody clicked them, nobody would pay for them. They’re directing traffic. They’re shaping the market. They’re making it more likely that an Apple Maps user will walk past the hidden gem gastropub that desperately needs the business and into the subpar chain restaurant that paid for an ad.

So Apple needs to think about the app ecosystem it wants to run. Does it want to reward innovation, encourage small developers to thrive, help customers to navigate millions of apps and find the one that’s best for them? Or does it want to favor bigger developers and help copycats to mislead consumers into downloading the wrong app? I’d like to think it’s the former. But every expansion to its in-software advertising business makes me doubt it more.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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