While Apple is not considered an advertising company today, they have been growing services revenue for the past several years. Part of that is growth in ads (3rd party ads in app store, 1st party ads in the OS, iAd [discontinued], etc).
Even if rank and file Apple employees do not want to grow ads in iOS/App Store, clearly Apple leadership wants to sell more ads (and increase their services revenue). At App Store scale, their volume of ads is not trivial.
Even if rank and file Apple employees do not want to grow ads in iOS/App Store, clearly Apple leadership wants to sell more ads (and increase their services revenue). At App Store scale, their volume of ads is not trivial.