Apple News ads are drawing another round of criticism from longtime Apple watchers who say the service keeps showing low-quality, repetitive promotions, including ads that look scammy even to users who have Apple’s ad personalization enabled.
Daring Fireball’s John Gruber said the ads he sees in Apple News remain repetitive and poor, often appearing three or four times while scrolling through a single article. He said the problem has not improved since Apple’s ad sales partnership with Taboola, which he wrote about in 2024.
Kirk McElhearn made a related complaint in February on Kirkville, writing that he uses Apple News for coverage outside his paid subscriptions to The Guardian and The New York Times, but does not want to pay £13 for Apple News+ because the paid product still includes ads. McElhearn said many Apple News ads he saw looked like scams. In one example he examined, an ad presented itself as a small business closing after 26 years because its owner was retiring. McElhearn checked the domain and found it had been created the previous year and registered through a company in China.
Why are Apple News ads being criticized?
The complaint is less about privacy and more about quality control. Gruber said the ads he sees are not useful or well matched to him, despite his having “Personalized Ads” switched on in Apple’s Privacy and Security settings. He also said App Store ads do not seem contextually relevant to him, which makes him skeptical that ads reportedly coming to Apple Maps will be better.
Taboola is known for web recommendation ads, the kind often found under articles with lurid thumbnails and celebrity-adjacent bait. Eric Seufert of Mobile Dev Memo argued on Threads in 2024 that Taboola’s Apple partnership should not be treated as a privacy scandal because those ads are targeted by context rather than by invasive user profiling. Gruber’s response now is that contextual targeting may avoid some privacy problems, but it has not fixed what Apple users actually see.
Contextual advertising means an ad is selected based on the content around it, rather than a detailed profile of the person reading. That can be better for privacy, but it can still produce ugly or irrelevant ads if the marketplace and review process are bad.
What does this mean for Apple Maps and the App Store?
Gruber tied the Apple News complaints to a broader objection: Apple keeps adding ads to services without giving paying customers a way to remove them. He pointed to Apple Maps and the App Store as services Apple controls directly, unlike Apple News, where publishers decide whether ads appear in their channels.
In Apple News, Gruber said, Apple cannot flip one switch and sell a universal ad-free tier unless participating publishers agree. He noted that Daring Fireball’s own Apple News channel does not show Apple’s ad units because he does not participate in that system. The App Store and Apple Maps are different, in his view, because Apple decides whether those apps show ads at all.
Gruber argued that Apple could make the App Store and Apple Maps ad-free for iCloud+ or Apple One subscribers if it wanted to. His criticism is that Apple offers no such option, even while companies like Netflix and YouTube sell ad-free tiers. The unresolved question for Apple is whether services built into premium hardware should also carry ads that users cannot pay to avoid.
This story draws on original reporting from Daring Fireball.
