Advertising accompanies you all day: on the go on buses and trains, in the city, on the radio and television or on the Internet. Soon also specifically on your smartphone? The everyday companions offer comparatively free space to place advertisements. Apple has now discovered this for itself.
For several years now, the same message has been coming up: WhatsApp should get advertising . The difference to smartphones: It is an app and therefore nothing unusual. So far, however, there has been no advertising in mobile phone menus or on the home screen – or at least rarely.
Apple has now discovered this fact for itself and unceremoniously places advertisements in the menu of its iPhones. These are not colorful pop-ups that slide across the menu, but rather subtle hints in the same design as the setting options. Tom Warren from the US technology magazine The Verge distributed a corresponding screenshot on Twitter . The advertisement also appears on the iPhone 12 Pro of our editor Hayo Lücke.
Instead of advertising third-party products, Apple has so far only shown its own services, such as its in-house gaming service Apple Arcade, AppleCare + and services from Apple TV + . In addition, the advertising should only be seen on iPhone 12 devices . The magazine GizChina also reports on advertisements on iPads.
APPLE IS NOT REINVENTING THE WHEEL
The Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi has been using this “gap in the market” for a long time. Xiaomi plays a relatively large number of commercials on cheaper smartphones in particular and has received sharp criticism for them. The advertising has already disappeared on the manufacturer’s high-end devices.
In addition, Samsung should also play with the idea of showing ads on its Galaxy smartphones . This was reported by Let’s Go Digital in early October, citing a patent. This talked about “Samsung Mobile Ads”, which could advertise own (paid) services on smartphones and tablets . There are no further references from Samsung to “Samsung Mobile Ads”; nor has the idea been implemented to date.