Apple weighs expanding ads beyond the App Store

Apple Ads said on June 8, 2026 that “Greater creative freedom is coming to ads on the App Store,” with advertisers later this year able to design and upload their own creative assets for Today tab and search results ads. The change lands as Apple weighs whether to keep its ad business inside the App Store or push it further across the company’s ecosystem.

The business case is large. Apple said its App Store ecosystem facilitated $1.3 trillion in billings and sales worldwide in 2024, then later said the total rose to over $1.4 trillion in 2025. Apple’s App Store Ads page says more than 850 million people visit the store every week, top-of-search ads convert at more than 60%, and 95% of downloads after an ad tap happen within a minute. That mix of reach and high-intent traffic gives Apple a premium inventory base that most ad platforms cannot match.

Apple has been building toward that position for years. It renamed Apple Search Ads to Apple Ads in April 2025, signaling a broader ambition than search placements alone, and Apple updated its advertising policies page on Feb. 26, 2025. Omdia estimated Apple’s advertising business was worth more than $3.7 billion a year in February 2022, after growing 238% in 2021 from 2020. Apple’s March 2026 introduction of Apple Business added another commercial layer to the company’s services push.

That expansion also sharpens the tension around Apple’s privacy pitch. Apple has built its brand around a promise that its devices and services rely on first-party signals rather than the cross-site tracking that powers much of the digital ad market. If Apple moves ads beyond the App Store and into more of its owned surfaces, the company would be monetizing more of the interfaces it controls while exposing itself to fresh antitrust and consumer-protection scrutiny over how those placements are chosen and sold.

For marketers, the upside is straightforward: Apple could turn its tightly managed ecosystem into a larger media platform with affluent users, measurable conversion and more ad inventory. For Apple, the challenge is more delicate. The company is trying to deepen a business that already sits inside one of the world’s most valuable commerce ecosystems without making its privacy promise look like a limit on everyone else’s data use, but not its own. That makes the expansion a national test of Apple’s privacy promise.