Apple Reportedly Moving Ahead with Ads in Maps App
74 comments
·October 26, 2025parsimo2010
crazygringo
> If I lose screen space to ads in my native Apple apps then I’m out.
The article says "The project will apparently give restaurants and other businesses the option to pay to have their details featured more prominently in search."
It doesn't sound like it will affect screen space of the map view in any way.
And software needs to make money. Their map data is hugely expensive to purchase and produce -- Maps isn't just a little app like Notes, it costs $$$$$ to develop and keep current. Apple isn't a charity. If you're out, who are you going to switch to? Are there OSM apps that are free without ads with the same level of functionality?
dontlaugh
Apple make so much money on the hardware (and subscription) I buy from them, they can easily allocate a small fraction to features that convinced me to pay for said hardware in the first place.
gruez
>Are there OSM apps that are free without ads with the same level of functionality?
The main killer would be lack of real time traffic data. I don't think there's any open source maps that provides this.
fainpul
I assume this is "crowd sourced" on Apple Maps and Google Maps, simply by gathering data from people who are currently in traffic. There's no reason this couldn't be done with free software, if people opt in. Of course it helps if there are many users, so let's start using it.
lotsofpulp
> And software needs to make money.
A business needs to make money. Apple, as a business, makes money. They might want to make more money by increasing advertising, but surely they, of all businesses, don’t need to.
tfourb
This. Apples execs have choices on how to keep making profits. Enshitification is a choice, not a requirement by some force of nature. Tim Cook could just as well sell his shareholders on the idea that really good and user friendly products can be sold for a lot of money.
robin_reala
I’m confused: are you saying that there aren’t other map apps available on iOS?
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squigz
> How is the money they are getting from hardware sales and their developer fees not enough
Because it's never enough.
Even with 180b USD in profit last year.
fsflover
> I’m out.
Where are you going? See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261
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phoronixrly
Here for example Organic Maps -- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/organic-maps-offline-map/id156...
atonse
Stuff like this (lets wring more money out of our existing stuff even if it erodes the customer experience) smacks of a culture that’s losing a spirit of innovation.
This is the kind of thing some jackass worked out in a spreadsheet and then decided the profit outweighs whatever customer backlash.
Stuff like this is a huge red flag for the future direction of Apple.
morshu9001
Watch them announce a higher dividend next, that's when it's really over.
_factor
I think it’s not lack of innovation. They’re just innovating in the wrong direction.
ajkjk
what's innovative about this? "putting ads on every conceivable surface" is far from novel.
emchammer
Has lost. Tim Cook chose the path a decade ago. He’s a guy you can call Tim Apple to his face in front of everybody and he’ll sit there and take it. He is the wrong person for the job.
nalekberov
“Future direction of Apple” is red flag for more than a decade already. Vision Pro, releasing iPhone N every year, doing incremental improvement in CPU and then selling it as “innovation”, making it impossible to repair the devices customers bought with their own money, just to name a few.
Of course Tim is only concerned whether you bought an iPhone to your mom.
hexbin010
"We make money when we sell devices. We think the user experience should be the product, not something you exploit."
RIP, Steve.
I wonder if there will be fewer ads in countries they know that Apple Maps is worse than Google Maps?
fennecbutt
Steve would've been all about this too, if he were still alive.
Simulacra
I encourage you to read Walter Isaacson's book about Steve Jobs, I think he would've absolutely hated this because it would've degraded the user experience.
owenbrown
This will destroy a lot of trust and between Apple and me.
When I buy Apple, I pay a premium price for a premium product.
I would rather you simple charge me more for my product.
The ways ads work, is that the ad revenue shows up in the company’s revenue, and very quickly the company has to increase ad load across every surface to meet earnings expectations. The user experience deteriorates, getting worse each year.
When I buy Apple, it’s based on my expectation that Apple will remain a premium, ad-free experience for the life of the device. When, after my purchase, Apple make the product worse, like with the recent iOS update that rolled back usability, it destroys a lot of trust.
I will leave the ecosystem.
This is not in Apple’s long term best interests.
kylehotchkiss
Why can’t Apple work on a nicer reviews implementation? Linking out to crap like yelp is such a B-grade experience. I wish they’d just build their own and use some LLM/sentiment analysis to help filter any spam, but even then, submissions would be tied to Apple IDs and they have a pretty good handle on the legitimacy of devices associated with an account
gdulli
Maybe it's the same sort of deal as Google where they sell the traffic to Yelp and agree not to compete? So they can sell your privacy without it looking like they're selling your privacy. If they did what you're suggesting they'd either do it in a privacy-respecting way and leave money on the table, or else directly profit from the sale of privacy and lose the ability to claim they respect your privacy. They don't like either of those options, so they go this indirect route.
Again, I have no idea if they have this relationship with Yelp, I'm just speculating if it's like the Google deal.
drewda
Apple likely pays Yelp to license the review content, not the other way around.
windexh8er
> Maybe it's the same sort of deal as Google where they sell the traffic to Yelp and agree not to compete?
I mean they already do this with preferred apps in the App Store (e.g. preferred revenue sharing for apps like Uber), so why wouldn't they do this in maps? The Apple "privacy" brand has been a sales pitch of questionable validity since it started. Apple only cares about privacy enough to keep its users from being a front page headline, nothing more.
ezfe
Apple already has an in-house rating and photo system that they are slowly replacing Yelp with...
abirch
Personally I would love to see my foody friends’ recommendations for a restaurant over some random person on the internet.
maelito
That's why I'm basing cartes.app's review system on ATProto.
morshu9001
Yelp reviews are designed for abuse. I don't even look at them.
wlkr
Perhaps a bit cynical, but it seems that as Microsoft continue to shove ads in absolutely everywhere and track everything they possibly can, Apple are content to be just marginally better rather than actually having meaningfully higher standards. Of course, it's business as usual, but we are boiling the frog for the next generation by tolerating it.
Iulioh
The problem is that these systems are so costly and hard to make that without a capital incentive no indipendent entity is going to make them and what entity do have an interest in making them as a "loss leader" if not monetized in any way (ads or paid product)?
Do we all jump on Bing maps?
Open street map is a second but still...
walterbell
> costly and hard to make
https://x.com/charliebilello/status/1953643549435527320
Apple has bought back $704 billion in stock over the past 10 years, which is greater than the market cap of 488 companies in the S&P 500.Iulioh
I don't see the correlation
naravara
Yeah Apple’s evolution over the past decade has been very frustrating and disappointing to see. It seems like whatever scraps remain of the company’s core values now exist solely with a handful of old heads at the company and will likely not survive their retirements.
A lot has changed in the tech industry, but the rapidity of hiring and expansion of headcount just seems to have engendered a broad homogenization of business strategies, design conventions, and product vision. I think they started hiring people based on narrow defined ideas about skills and resumes to fit certain roles and they all end up shuffling the same bunch of people around across the same incestuous company hiring pipelines until they’re all doing stints at every company and driving them in the same broad direction.
owenbrown
This will destroy a lot of trust and between Apple and me.
When I buy Apple, I pay a premium price for a premium product.
The ways ads work, is that the ad revenue shows up in the company’s quarterly earnings, and very quickly the company has to increase ad load across every surface to meet earnings expectations. The user experience deteriorates, getting worse each year.
When I buy Apple, it’s based on my expectation that Apple will remain a premium, mostly ad-free experience for the life of the device. When, after my purchase, they make the product worse, like with the recent iOS update that rolled back usability, it destroys a lot of trust.
I will leave the ecosystem.
This is not in Apple’s long term best interests.
bangonkeyboard
There are already ads in Apple Maps: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255060954
This would just be more ads.
dundundundun
I've always believed the deal with Apple was that I pay more, but then I am the customer and not the product.
Apple is not stupid, so I guess their research shows that this is not a common enough sentiment that adding ads will measurably hamper sales.
To someone who loathes ads (like me), this is a tragedy.
kakacik
Even brilliant companies sometimes make stupid moves and shoot off their legs with literal shotgun. Past performance is not an indication of future and all that.
I'd say this is testing waters, seeing how big backlash will be. The sad part may be they may be right and limited loss with power users will be outweighed by ads income. After all, ads are the sole revenue stream for giants like Google or Meta, too juicy to ignore where no other breakthrough is in sight.
biinjo
Meanwhile, also Apple maps since launch: “sorry I cant get directions from A to B.”
It has NEVER given me directions. I live in a non-EU country and not in the US. Small island. It shows all the roads, shops and everything but for some arbitrary reason it won’t do navigation here.
Never touched it again since Google maps is perfect. (Aside from the occasional off-road routing).
arrty88
The existing Yelp integration is so bad. Want to see a picture larger, or read more than 10 words of a review it opens Yelp app which usually doesn't work.
jostmey
The single reason I use apple maps instead of google maps is because of the lack of ads. For me, it is really the only competitive advantage offered by apple maps
Razengan
Just a minute ago I searched for the app for my bank on the iPhone App Store.
I literally wrote the name of the bank + "bank" in the search field.
I got an ad for fucking backgammon at the top.
artursapek
the App Store ads are egregiously bad
Razengan
I guess Apple deserves the Samsung ads that Google gives you when you search for "iPhone"
“Gurman warned that the move risks some amount of consumer backlash.”
The frogs don’t have to wait and see if the pot is boiling, they have a pot named Android right next to them for a direct temperature comparison and other Maps apps available. If I lose screen space to ads in my native Apple apps then I’m out. How is the money they are getting from hardware sales and their developer fees not enough? I don’t see how the execs can’t tell how damaging this is to their brand image.
Apple used to be something you accepted because you were filled with rage at Microsoft. Then Apple was something that cost extra money but it had good software and cross device integration. Then Apple’s software quality went down noticeably, but I stuck with them because at least I figured my data was slightly safer on an Apple device. But now if they’re using my data to sell ads they don’t even have a privacy angle. Apple now lags Android flagships in features, costs at least as much, and also sells my data.
I’m out.