John Gruber over at Daring Fireball summarizes the recent controversy over Apple’s vomitous use of an Apple Wallet Push Notification to promote F1 The Movie, adding:

iOS 26 adds new settings inside the Wallet app to allow fine-grained control over notifications, including the ability to turn off notifications for “Offers & Promotions”. That’s good. But (a) iOS 26 is months away from being release to the general public; and (b) at least for me, I was by default opted in to this setting on my iOS 26 devices.

I was also opted in by default on iOS 26 (beta 2)—I’ve since turned it off.

The Wallet app wasn’t the only transgressor; I received a notification from the new-to-iOS 26 Apple Vision Pro app.

The Apple Vision Pro app has a “New Content Available” Push Notification setting (defaulting to opt in, natch). It would reasonably cover the first half of this notification—I want to know when new Apple Vision Pro content is released—but tacking on the F1® ad puts me in the wholly unacceptable position of either allowing tacky ads, or not learning about new immersive content. (I have, of course, chosen the latter.)

Unsurprisingly, Apple has App Review Guidelines covering this exact scenario. Also unsurprisingly, Apple is violating its own guidelines:

4.5.4 Push Notifications must not be required for the app to function, and should not be used to send sensitive personal or confidential information. Push Notifications should not be used for promotions or direct marketing purposes unless customers have explicitly opted in to receive them via consent language displayed in your app’s UI, and you provide a method in your app for a user to opt out of receiving such messages. Abuse of these services may result in revocation of your privileges.

That’s pretty clear-cut, and Apple violates all three parts:

1. It sent a Push Notification for a promotion without customers “explicitly” opting in to receive them.
2. The publicly available version of iOS offers no way to opt out of those notifications.
3. iOS 26 beta adds the required option to opt out from promotional pushes, but defaults customers to opt in.

Marco Arment:

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?

Oh wait, that’s already what happens.

Apple’s as bad as everyone else. They don’t respect their customers — we’re fodder.

They truly have no standards anymore.

I’d say “Apple has lost their way” but they’ve been abusing Push Notifications—and customer trust—for so long they’ve clearly chosen this path. They haven’t strayed—it’s their strategy.