Apple, which is a major global phone company, has already started down this path, which will likely open doors for others to follow suit. Nothing, which touts its phones for their simplistic UI, has also just introduced something similar.
What am I talking about? Ads, of course.
Good old ads, we all hate them
I know, I know, ads pay the bills for many companies, but we all know just how far they’re being taken nowadays. Take YouTube, for example, it’s borderline unusable unless you’re a Premium member, or you’re using…frowned upon methods to dodge ads on videos. But that’s just an app, surely products you pay for are exempt? No, no they’re not.
Take the currently under development monetization in Apple Maps, for instance. Though relatively inoffensive in concept, there is no doubt in my mind that it will keep getting worse after it begins rolling out. 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 the ones we find on budget Chinese phones.
Nothing’s Lock Glimpse, a new “feature” that has received harsh backlash online, is bordering on introducing advertisements to the lock screen. The company has clarified that these are not ads, but then also went on to say that they had to experiment with different forms of monetization because they’re a relatively smaller company.
So…ads. Right?
Samsung already does this on budget phones
But surely this won’t make its way to established manufacturers like Samsung and Google, right? Surely, Apple will also only advertise its own services. Right? Well…
If you’re not seeing ads on your Galaxy phone at the moment, it’s because you live in a region where Samsung can’t pull such a stunt. Go over to a lower-income country and get a budget Samsung phone, and you won’t just get bombarded with ads nonstop, the phone will automatically download apps you don’t want the moment you go online.
The Samsung Galaxy M34, for example, has a widget on the home screen that is just rotating ads endlessly. Every time you lock and then unlock your screen, there’s a new link to some article with an ad on it. It’s something you should never have to experience on a Galaxy phone.
I never expected Apple to advertise its own F1 movie on its phones, but it did, and it rubbed me the wrong way. Nothing introducing something very similar to ads? Also not on my bingo card, but here we are. What’s to say that Google won’t pull a similar move a couple of years down the line?
We might even reach a point where iPhone and Galaxy models ask you to sit through an ad to continue using them. Seems pretty farfetched now, but give it 10 years…
Everything will get worse, and so will your phones
It’s a tried and tested formula. A service comes out offering cool features or good entertainment. It has a free tier and a paid tier. Eventually, the company introduces multiple paid tiers, and the lower tiers begin losing perks that they previously had, like ads for example.
This keeps going until one day you’re paying $45 a month instead of the $5 you started with, all for the same perks. If this sounds familiar, this is pretty much what happened with Netflix. It’s what will happen with almost every subscription service on the market. How long do you think it’ll be before OpenAI includes promoted responses in ChatGPT? I think we’ll see that happen as early as next year.
This sucks, it really does. I thought only budget Chinese smartphones in low-income regions would annoy their users with ads to make back the cost of manufacturing, but we might just see this infect every modern smartphone in the world, no matter its price tag.
And we’ll all just accept it as the new normal and continue going on with our lives.
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