I hate to break it to you, but it's been like this for YEARS now. The frog has been boiled. Line must go up and the market is saturated.

I watched an "Android user switched to iOS" YouTube video recently and it's interesting how much you don't see when you haven't been removed from an environment. This Android user was shocked at how much iOS advertises to you, which is not intuitively what any of us would think an Android user would be shocked by switching platforms. A lot of us iPhone users think that Android phones are like a used car sales lot with bloat apps and you can't delete Facebook and all that.

You know how when you haven't seen a friend for a long time and they've changed appearance? But if you see them every day you don't really notice the gradual changes as much. I think that's what's happening here: long time iOS users just don't see that Apple is using all the same tactics as Microsoft and Google in their OSes, but Windows especially is seen as hyper-commercial and ad-riddled.

iOS has what are effectively ads in the Settings page in exactly in the same way that you get critical updates which is crazy.

Every major OS update advertises some new feature that siphons up your personal data like Apple Intelligence. Heck, they suggest you turn analytics back on years after turning it off - every single major update! I know this is common practice but we have to pause and recognize that these things are advertisements.

You think Windows is bad with OneDrive and Copilot? At least you can uninstall those! Try removing Apple News on your Mac! You can't delete the app, not allowed!

Congratulations, you bought a piece of hardware from Apple, now you get a 3-month trial to [random service they run] and you will be notified about this in the settings page...again, right next to your critical security updates.

App Store? It's an ad platform, not a package manager. Sure, another industry standard, but it's not like Apple is some kind of unique premium company in this regard.

Apple TV is touted as having no ads, but it really does if you don't move Apples apps off the top row of the screen. For now, it's far less egregious than any other streaming box I can think of, but I imagine it's this way because the product is a bit of an afterthought that predates Apple's orange squeezing (we are the oranges).

2026 Apple introducing more ads to increase opportunity in search results