Apple Put Ads Inside iOS. Local-First Notes Don't Have to Care

Apple has started showing ads for its own services inside the iOS Settings app. Banners for iCloud+ storage, Apple Music trials, and AppleCare+ sit near the top of the screen. Many of them have no dismiss button, and the ones that do sometimes fail to dismiss. TechRadar documented the pattern this week, and the Hacker News thread about it blew past 700 points and 500 comments within a day.

The short version: the only reliable way to make one of these promos go away is to wait for it to expire, which can take weeks, or to pay for the service it is selling. While you wait, the Settings app carries a notification badge that looks like an alert but works like a marketing message.

What is actually happening

The banners promote Apple's own services: iCloud+ storage, free trials of Apple Music and Apple TV, and the AppleCare+ extended warranty. Some appear right after you activate a new iPhone, which is a strange kind of welcome: buy a phone at a record price, then watch it advertise at you. One Reddit user compared the experience to Microsoft's Start menu ads. Another wrote, "I wish Apple would just stop that crap."

There may be a bug involved. Users who already pay for iCloud+ report still seeing the iCloud+ promo, which suggests the system is not checking subscription status. Apple has not said whether that is a defect or intended behavior. What is not in doubt is the direction: MacRumors reported this month that Apple is considering ads inside Visual Intelligence too.

Why the anger goes deeper than banners

Apple sells a premium device on the promise of a premium experience, then uses system-level surfaces to sell subscriptions. The banner itself is almost harmless. What it implies is not: the operating system is becoming ad inventory, and the platform owner decides what counts as a default surface.

That reaches further than Settings. If your notes, files, and photos live in a vendor's cloud, the surface you read them on is one product decision away from carrying an upsell. The iCloud+ promo proves the concept already works in one direction: your data lives in Apple's cloud, so the storage upsell can follow you around the OS.

What local-first changes

Uteke is a notes app built on a different constraint: everything runs on your phone. Capture a thought, tag it or skip the tag, and search it back later by meaning instead of exact wording. The embedding model that powers that search downloads once, and after that the app makes zero network calls. Airplane mode is the default state, not an emergency.

There is no account, no cloud, and no tracking. That constraint is structural, not a policy promise that could be walked back someday. With no server in the loop, there is no inventory to sell and no telemetry to profile. Your context stays on your device because there is nowhere else for it to go.

The honest trade-offs

Local-first gives up some conveniences, and it is worth being plain about them. There is no automatic multi-device sync today. Scheduled auto backup and full export are Pro features ($4.99 a month or $49.99 a year), and what you export is yours to store wherever you want, which is the point. The free tier covers the habit: 250 notes, five collections, full offline semantic search, five voice dictations a day, and no account required. Uteke is on Android in beta now, and the iOS version is on the way.

If you want server-side sync and a vendor managing your data, the big notes apps do that well. The trade is that you accept their surface and their roadmap, which now, on at least one major platform, includes ads on system screens.

The question worth asking

Most of the people angry this week will keep paying for iCloud+, and that is fine. The subscription is not the problem. The problem is a default surface repurposed after purchase. Before you pick where your notes live, the useful question is simple: who else can monetize the screen they appear on? A local-first app has the shortest possible answer. The screen is yours, the data is on it, and there is nothing to sell against it.

Try Uteke at uteke.app, or grab the Android beta on Google Play.