14 DAY TRIAL // Nobody likes ads, and every time they’re implemented in a product that has until that point been offered free of charge, clean, and with zero restrictions, the decision is rather controversial and always received with mixed reactions by the community.
This was Apple’s main concern when the company started looking into bringing ads to the App Store, with emails exchanged by several executives confirming the big honchos feared this approach would damage Apple’s image.
Disclosed as part of the legal war between Apple and Epic, the emails reveal that company executives wanted the App Store to highlight high-quality apps, not necessarily random items based on ads.
App Store ads went live a year later
“The devs would love it. The problem is that Tim is telling the world that we make great products without monetizing users. Ads would be weirdly at odds with that. I do think that search and explore are much better discovery tools. Also popularity alone is a stupid ranking function for the App Store. It’s fine for music (though fuse is about to unleash a torrent of fakery there, too),” Eric Friedman, head of Apple’s Fraud Engineering Algorithms and Risk unit, reportedly said in a message.
“But in the App Store I don’t only want to know what is popular. I want apps that are high quality, well looked after by engaged developers, and retained (because useful) by other users. Being popular within a category is a nice to have and should mostly correlate with the other values I described.”
App Store Search Ads eventually made their debut in 2016, a year after these emails were sent, and according to some conversations, the Cupertino-based tech giant came down to one simple conclusion.
“If people are willing to pay ‘marketing companies’ (bot nets) to gain position, why don’t we just let them pay us to gain position?” Friedman said in a different email.