Although Android is great, one thing that has always been criticized is that there are too many system ads.

Whether it is the system’s own app store, photo album, or calendar, there are always unexpected advertisements.

Some systems are quite conscientious, like MIUI, which provides a switch to turn off system advertisements. Some systems hide the system advertising switch tightly, like a treasure hunt game...

The iOS system next door is not only smooth, lag-free, and clean, but also has the big selling point of fewer system ads.

However, the advantage that fruit fans have always been proud of seems to be almost gone.

There are also ads on iOS

When the iPhone XS/XR was released, the Apple Store would push trade-in promotion ads.

Later, Apple discovered that it was not very profitable to sell iPhones alone. To make money from selling accessories (not), it needed to develop more channels to make money.

So Apple is now focusing more on subscription services such as Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple News.

Since the subscription service is to be expanded, advertising is of course indispensable.

Many people have recently received Apple Music advertisements pushed by Apple, suggesting that they can get a three-month free membership to Apple Music.

After Apple’s wave of push system advertisements, it will definitely attract many new users to subscribe.

This is not Apple’s “first time”.

I have also pushed an advertisement for Apple Music before to promote that my Apple Music now supports Amazon Echo speakers.

After such an advertisement, you can imagine that many Amazon Echo speaker users have fallen into the trap.

The most crooked thing about Apple is that these ads take advantage of the system’s priority to push them.

So when we encounter it, we can only clear it silently, but we cannot directly turn off push in the settings like other apps.

These are all advertisements

In addition to these pop-up advertisements, Apple also has some operations, which Xiao Lei thinks are "advertising in another sense."

In "Wallet", Apple will clearly display its "Apple Card" (Apple's own credit card service) on the homepage.

Now that there is such a big advertisement for me on the homepage, it will make you feel like you have walked into the wrong set, and you have completely forgotten what you came here to do.

Hey, didn’t I originally come to see the bank card transaction records? /Hey, don’t I want a movie ticket?

Now you may not feel anything when watching a single advertisement, but when you put all the large advertisements in the native app together, it will be a completely different feeling.

Thankfully, these ads are currently only available on iOS in other regions.

It may be that there are no such subscription services in China yet. Xiaolei has not found these large advertisements on iOS in China for the time being.

But don’t be too happy too early. What I’m going to talk about below is relevant to most of my friends.

One is an advertisement on the App Store.

Speaking of the App Store, you may not have much idea about it. It looks quite clean and there are not many advertisements.

In fact, Apple launched the App Store search service in 2016. Advertisers can bid to get the top C position on the App Store search page.

In other words, the first App we see on the search results page may not be the one with the most downloads or the highest ratings, but the one that gained popularity through crazy spending.

Another thing that also bothers us is the iCloud pop-up window:

It will appear once a day or two to remind you that iCloud space is insufficient, so hurry up and spend money to expand the cloud disk space. .

Friends who can't stand pop-ups can either go into settings and delete unnecessary backups to free up some space, or just like Xiao Lei, obediently spend money to recharge every month to keep clean.

A slap in the face from Apple?

How come iOS, which has always used a clean system as its selling point, and Apple, which attaches great importance to user experience and reputation, starts to have more and more advertisements, and even has the momentum to "pay tribute" to Android?

Xiao Lei boldly guessed that this is related to Apple’s recently promoted subscription service.

Since iPhone XS sales plummeted the year before last, Apple’s desire to survive has become stronger and stronger, and it is constantly looking for new ways out.

Apple has been making efforts in subscription services since last year, launching the credit card service Apple Card, streaming media services Apple TV+ and Apple News, and gaming service Apple Crade.

If you want to attract iPhone users to subscribe to these services, you can’t expect users to activate them on their own, but you also need to use these explicit and implicit built-in ads to remind users that “the iPhone is still so useful.” Serve".

However, Apple is paying more and more attention to subscription services. New subscription services are added every year, especially iOS 13, which has several new ones at once.

Xiao Lei estimates that this type of built-in service advertisements will only increase in the future, so everyone should take precautions.

At least give me a switch

Today Xiaolei complained about Apple’s built-in advertising, but it was not aimed at mobile phone manufacturers’ behavior of advertising in the system.

We all know that advertising is a large part of the revenue of mobile phone manufacturers.

For example, Xiaomi’s advertising revenue reached 10 billion in 2018 (advertising revenue decreased in 2019, only 4.8 billion).

So the traffic brought by these advertisements within the mobile phone system is very high in revenue.

Leave the initiative and choice to us. If you don’t want to watch it, you can turn it off with a switch.

MIUI has been criticized by us for having too many advertisements, and you can see all kinds of fancy advertisements in various places in the system.

But Xiaomi later learned the lesson and added a one-click switch to turn off ads in the system settings.

Give users a space to choose. Users can choose to watch or not watch, instead of forcing every user to watch.

Another point is that the pricing of the iPhone is already very high. The iPhone 11 Pro is priced at 10,000 yuan less, which is more than twice or even three times more expensive than the Android flagships of the same period.