Apple Developers Complaining About Gambling Ads On Their Apps

Apparently, Apple also needs to generate some more income with dubious advertising placements. Especially among the developers of serious applications, there is dissatisfaction with dubious advertising.

Because this is now placed directly in the environment of your products – and in a way that does not exactly inspire trust in the entire platform. This is shown by a report by the US magazine The Verge “Now the product page of my app is showing gambling advertising, which I really don’t like,” explained Marco Arment, for example, who is behind the founding of Instapaper and Tumblr and currently the well-known podcast Developed Client Overcast.

The advertisement in question is marked as advertising but appears as an entry in the “You might also like this” list, in which Apple actually shows the AppStore user additional app offers that match the currently viewed application. “The App Store has corrupted such a great company so deeply. They make so much off gambling and manipulative IAPs that they don’t see the problem anymore,” Arment said.

A Multi-Billion Dollar business

As Arment noted, Apple offers advertisers the ability to display their ads in app categories other than their own app category, allowing gambling ads to appear in listings for unrelated apps like the podcast app Overcast. In addition to him, various other developers also expressed their anger, such as Simon Støvring, who is unable to see any meaningful connection between apps from betting providers and his text editor.

Apple has significantly expanded its advertising business in recent years. Even if most of the ads are only slightly disturbing, the company now generates billions in sales in this area. In August, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple plans to nearly triple its current advertising revenue to at least $10 billion a year. Gurman said keyword-based search results ads will appear in the Apple Maps app starting next year.