The App Store ads are a disgrace. 100% of my older relatives get fooled and install the first app that comes up in App Store when searching for something.
The only thing that gives Apple an edge over Google/Amazon is that they are not an ads company or retail shop.
Such a pity seeing them to want to move into that space.
Those ads are probably to pay the news companies, not Apple. They probably don’t get any money from Apple so they need some revenue to justify licensing their content for Apple news.
I think app store is fair game, if the adds are well done they can actually be useful. Overcast adverts prove this.
I think they need to invest heavily in making it very very difficult (impossible?) for copy cat type apps to appear in search and making sure that adverts are clearly marked as adverts... It will just turn into a shit show otherwise...
I've never seen the office nagging. I've never seen a single ad. Not from first boot that I can recall. There are no ads on my lock screen, there are no ads on my start menu.
The only things I can think of, is that I immediately turned off as many bs anti-privacy type settings as possible when I initially set up the system. I also use glasswire and restrict most things that try to go out without my permission (or anything I don't want to allow in general).
When I fire up my start-menu, I've got it defaulted to pinned tiles, there doesn't even appear to be space for an ad that might be getting blocked on there. There are no ads in the all apps section either.
If you had Windows Spotlight on (like the changing background image for lockscreen), they used to show occasional ads there. It could be they removed that.
I also haven't seem them, but I think they were removed by this tool: https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/ (PLEASE, please check before downloading, I installed it a year ago or more, back then it was ok, I can't guarantee how it's now).
This disables a lot of tracking, but I assume, also disables ads. (I've seen only 1 ad, and that was for the OneDrive in explorer).
Are those dependent on the OEM? My start menu never had any of that from the first setup. Neither of those are on my system anywhere. The only really super annoying thing on my system has been cortana, being unable to fully remove it.
You are being disingenuous because you are a power user who has admitted to carefully reviewing your settings and running a third party cleaner, but you are acting like you are the kind of standard user we are talking about.
App Store search is a disgrace. At least the apps in ads are still being developed. Google search has ads taking up the whole page preventing you from seeing actually good results
The only thing that gives Apple an edge over Google/Amazon is that they are not an ads company or retail shop.
Such a pity seeing them to want to move into that space.