He/She meant _searching_ for apps for a functionality in App Store is a sure way to get gobbledygooky apps. He/She probably searches them on $SEARCH_ENGINE and uses the AppStore just for the download.
Ah, so using a different advertisement platform instead of this one.
Let me put this another way: if you want to manually kick off app updates, you literally have to see ads. App Store > Today tab (the default view) has ads. Then you hit your profile button to escape the ad center and there is your app update interface.
This has been normalized by basically all commercial OS platforms, but imagine how insanely negatively received it would be if apt upgrade or brew upgrade displayed ads before your packages downloaded.
Apple even shows ads for stuff like Apple Music/TV+/Fitness/News+ free trials in the settings pane.
And people give Microsoft shit for having ads in their platform...at least they don't show you ads in Windows Update!
Now, you might say this is because of the influence of SteamOS, but I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that Ubuntu has been getting more popular overall.
Linux users have a choice while iOS and Android users essentially don’t.
Web search engines' advertising can be hidden with an ad blockier. The App Store? Not so much. Its search is completely unusable anyway, even when you give it the exact app name you want.
Apple's enshittification is real, and accelerating.
