It’s an unfortunate fact of modern consumerism that everything eventually gets ruined for more profit. Sure, I get it: Apple, Samsung and Google aren’t charities, they’re companies. But the type of ruin I’m talking about completely affects the user experience.
Apple, which is a major global phone company, has already started down this path, which will likely open the doors for others to follow suit. Nothing, which promotes its phones for their simplistic user interface, also just introduced something similar.
What am I talking about? Advertisements, of course.
Good old ads, we all hate them.
Apple Maps will soon receive in-app advertising. | Image credit: Apple
I know, I know, ads pay the bills for many companies, but we all know how far they are being pushed these days. Take YouTube for example, it’s almost unusable unless you’re a Premium member or using… frowned upon methods to avoid ads on videos. But that’s just an app, surely the products you pay for are exempt? No, they are not.
Take the one currently in development. monetization in Apple Maps, for example. Although it is relatively harmless in concept, I have no doubt that it will continue to get worse once it begins to be implemented. The iPhone has already picked up subtle ads for the company’s services, and it’s a slippery slope before we end up with pop-up ads like those we find on budget Chinese phones.
Nothing’s Lock Glimpse, a new “feature” that has received harsh reactions online, is on the verge of introducing ads to the lock screen. The company clarified that these are not ads, but then added that they had to experiment with different forms of monetization because they are a relatively smaller company.
So…ads. Good?
Samsung already does this on budget phones
The Galaxy M34 shows rotating ads on the home screen in India. | Image credit: Mrwhosetheboss
But surely this won’t reach established manufacturers like Samsung and Google, right? Surely Apple will also only announce its own services. Good? Good…
If you don’t see ads on your galaxy phone At the moment, it’s because you live in a region where Samsung can’t pull such a trick. Go to a low-income country and get a quote Samsung phone, and not only will you be bombarded with non-stop ads, the phone will automatically download apps you don’t want the moment you connect.
The Samsung Galaxy M34, for example, has a home screen widget that simply rotates ads endlessly. Every time you lock and then unlock the screen, there is a new link to some article with an ad. It’s something you should never have to experience in a galaxy phone.
I never expected Apple to announce its own F1 movie on its phones, but it did and it bothered me. Nothing that introduces something very similar to ads? Not on my bingo card either, but here we are. What do you mean Google won’t take a similar measure in a couple of years?
We could even reach a point where iPhone and Galaxy models ask you to sit through an ad to continue using them. It seems pretty crazy now, but give it 10 years…
Everything will get worse and so will your phones
It is a tried and tested formula. A service appears that offers interesting features or good entertainment. It has a free tier and a paid tier. Over time, the company introduces several paid tiers and the lower tiers begin to lose benefits they previously had, such as ads, for example.
This continues until one day you pay $45 a month instead of the $5 you started with, all for the same benefits. If this sounds familiar, this is pretty much what happened with Netflix. This is what will happen with almost all subscription services on the market. How long do you think it will be before OpenAI includes promoted answers in ChatGPT? I think we’ll see that happen next year.
This sucks, it really does. I thought that only cheap Chinese smartphones in low-income regions would annoy their users with ads to recover the manufacturing cost, but we could see this infecting all modern smartphones in the world, regardless of their price.
And we will all accept it as the new normal and continue with our lives.
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