User Interface Murks - Spam in Music
Designing and building user interfaces for software is hard. Really hard. And yes, even very large companies with lots of resources can get this very wrong.
Time to learn a new German word: Murks. The closest english term is "botched". In this blog, we will show you such cases, and what can be done to fix them, both from the developers point of view, as well as from the user perspective.
Episode 3 - Apple Spam in macOS "Music.app"
While macOS 12.2 doesn't really fix any of the bugs we have reported to Apple in the last 10 years, reports came in that the really buggy "Apple Music.app" was supposed to be rewritten in a way, hopefully with less bugs this time.
But when we launched version "1.2.2.40", we were very dismayed to see that Apple Spam has crept into that app as well.
In the left sidebar, there is a new section named "Apple Music," with two advertising entries, which you cannot remove.
Most of all, as we are not using the paid "Apple Music" stuff, and have blocked all network access to it, these two entries in the sidebar take up a lot of prominent space, and want to coerce you into paying for a subscription you probably don't want.
That is yet another despicable Dark Interface pattern that Apple is using to trick you.
Asking Apple Support about this, they said clearly:
Well, actually, Apple is lying in both counts.
1. Our Apple bug reports of the past 10 years have been widely ignored, so no, "All feedback is carefully reviewed." is not the case.
2. There actually IS A WAY to remove that Spam!
Being very unsatisfied with Apples answer, we have hacked "Apple Music.app" with certain tools, and found a safe way to disable this spam!
Fire up Terminal.app, and paste this entire line there, and hit Return:
defaults write com.apple.Music haveRadioState 0
This will change a secret and undocumented hidden preference for the app, and next time you launch that Apple app, the new SPAM is gone!
It is quite likely that a future version of "Apple Music.app" will remove or rename that option, so we will keep looking at it.
Shame on you, Apple! Remove that new spam immediately!
What can we do?
As users, please login to Apples bug reporter, https://feedbackassistant.apple.com/
Tell Apple in clear words what you think of this spam, and the fact that there is no way of removing this unwanted advertising, and that this is a "dark pattern". Maybe they will understand and remove this soon.
Further reading
A great book about "dark interface patterns" is "Hooked" by Nir Eyal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern
A dark pattern is "a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills"