They just recently (like in the past few weeks) added an ad slot in the ios app store that I actively hate, but it’s the first one that’s just there (and not in search). Just wait though. Soon the app store will look exactly like this shot of the play store.

Google is an advertising company.

I’d take the in-store ads if they enforced consistent behavior for in-app ads. It’s infuriating to have an ad that plays for 30sec or whatever, only to then force you to wait ANOTHER 5-15sec on the title card for the close button to appear. Or, worse yet, have an ad that automatically opens the Play Store unless you can hit the 2px close button.

Unfortunately that seems to be the case with Google products (see YouTube on mobile). Most users might not even care about the excessive ads and Google knows that.

Luckily, there seem to be many alternatives on Android. If Apple was to ad-ify the App Store, you wouldn’t have that many options (outside of jailbreaking and maybe the Altstore).