Apple sparks a backlash from iPhone owners after the Apple Wallet app pushed a notification that promoted a $10 discount at Fandango for Apple's F1 movie
Casey Liss: … In case you forgot after F1 got multiple sections … Kelsey Fogarty / Pocket-lint : This F1 stunt in your Apple Wallet deserves a penalty flag David Uzondu / Neowin : Apple faces backlash for promoting F1 movie via Wallet app notification Bluesky: Wesley Hilliard / @hilli.tech : Yep, I make the argument that some ads are good, actually. Fight me. — Apple is one of the few, if only, companies that do advertisements of its own products and services right. It eschews the modern state of surveillance capitalism and relies on good, old-fashioned billboards we can easily dismiss. … Romit Mehta / @romitmehta.com : Old enough to remember Candy Crush tile in Windows Start menu and I still see a prompt to change my default browser to Chrome when I go to Google Docs. — Platform providers need to be good app developers on their own platform! [embedded post] M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler.com : You either die ranting against inserting ads or live long enough to start inserting ads. [embedded post] Patrick Socha / @psocha.co.uk : Maybe some U2 might help calm them down? Alex Hern / @hern : Literally the only reason why I'm still on iOS is the fact that in the duopoly it's the one that is slightly more bashful about treating its users as gaping money funnels for ads to be shoved down techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/i... Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken.com : They shoulda had U2 compose the score for this movie. techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/i... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : This is such a stupid abuse of the platform by Apple. Especially since you can't even turn these notifications off [embedded post] Mastodon: Casey Liss / @caseyliss@mastodon.social : 🤮 — [image] Don Burnside / @donburnside@mastodon.social : Another app looses notification privileges. Gross that it's the wallet app. https://mastodon.social/... Marco Arment / @marcoarment@mastodon.social : This is a core system app interrupting you, promoting a sale by a movie-ticketing company, to push you to go see the platform vendor's new movie. — Why not just pop up random ads all the time, always creating new channels that everyone's opted-into by default so you can never keep up with opting out of them all? … Jonas Wisser / @jwisser@wandering.shop : @agiletortoise @caseyliss @twostraws No, I got this as an ad in the Wallet app itself and it has an Apple Pay header. F1 is an Apple Studios movie; this is Apple taking advantage of one business to drive money to another. — [image] @simonbs@mastodon.social : To: Apple — Your app, Wallet, has been rejected. — Your app displays advertising in notifications, which is not compliant with the App Review Guidelines and violates guideline 2.5.18. Ads must be confined to the main app binary. — Please remove the ads from the extension and resubmit. … John Gruber / @gruber@mastodon.social : @caseyliss The worst part is the “®”. Marco Arment / @marcoarment@mastodon.social : I recently read this: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ ... It's long. Very long. And not every example is perfect. — And it's also, broadly, very right about what tech has become. X: Parker Ortolani / @parkerortolani : oh no no no Apple, that being said F1 is insanely good Sebastiaan de With / @sdw : who approved this? ads from my wallet app? Oh hell no. [image] Tom Warren / @tomwarren : Apple abusing its Apple Pay notifications to promote its F1 movie is gross 🤮 https://www.theverge.com/... [image] Sebastiaan de With / @sdw : lmao [image] Mark Gurman / @markgurman : Not great, but Apple has been doing this for years. Settings has basically become a digital billboard for Apple services. And once ads hit more Apple apps, one notification (out of the hundreds we get a day) is going to be a dream. I put this in the whatever category. @dhh : How the mighty has fallen. Patrick Moorhead / @patrickmoorhead : Seriously, Apple, what are you doing?!?! [image] Antonio García Martínez / @antoniogm : (Some) people might complain about this, but if the $10 off were for a movie they were hoping to see, the conversion rate would be 20%+. Revealed preferences (i.e. the clickthrough rate) always tells the real story. (I just used the $10 discount to book tix. Thanks Apple.) John Vezmar / @johnvezmar : All these F1 movie notifications from Apple is the equivalent of when they put that U2 album on everyone's iTunes back in the day no one asked for. [image] Kif / @kifleswing : apple sending ads in push notifications [image] Forums: Hacker News : iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing F1 movie r/gadgets : iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing ‘F1’ movie r/technology : iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing ‘F1’ movie r/ios : Disable fandango ad from Apple Pay? r/apple : iPhone customers upset by Apple Wallet ad pushing F1 movie | TechCrunch Msmash / Slashdot : iPhone Customers Upset By Apple Wallet Ad Pushing F1 Movie See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple has steadily expanded the surfaces through which it can promote offerings, including additional App Store advertising placements. The Wallet notification extends that distribution logic into a utility app used for payments and passes.
The promotion was also part of a broader Apple-services campaign for the film; subsequent coverage tied Wallet to a cross-service push that preceded Apple's first reported box-office hit. The backlash matters because a transactional app carries a different expectation of relevance than a media storefront.
First-order effects
- iPhone owners who received the alert are confronted with Apple using Wallet to market its own film and a Fandango discount, prompting complaints about the app's notification role.
- Apple and Fandango gain a direct promotional route to Wallet users, while Apple risks weakening the app's perceived utility if users regard such alerts as advertising.
Second-order effects
- The response raises the cost of using Wallet notifications for future Apple promotions: Apple must weigh campaign reach against opt-outs, muted notifications, and user distrust.
- Outside merchants and app developers may scrutinize whether Apple reserves privileged access to a device-level channel, reinforcing concerns around Apple's control of its distribution surface.
Third-order effects
- If utility-app notifications become a recurring owned-media channel, platform operators will face a durable trade-off between monetizing attention and preserving the trust that makes system apps valuable.
- The episode points to a broader gatekeeper question: whether first-party services can market through privileged interfaces without creating a different standard of access than partners receive.
The trend: Device platforms are increasingly turning built-in utility surfaces into owned distribution channels, testing the boundary between service notifications and self-promotion.