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Apple will soon roll out ads in your search results, plus game subscriptions are coming

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Apple will soon roll out ads in your search results, plus game subscriptions are coming
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iOS

It's rare for Apple to announce anything before its big event for developers, WWDC, but in an interview with The Verge and then on Apple's developers' website, Apple has detailed some upcoming changes that are coming to the App Store.

First up, the apps that you have bought won't be appearing in the "featured" section of the App Store. This is a welcome change that was already in place on tvOS and that should expand soon to iOS.

Apple is also adding a new way for developers to charge for content: subscription in apps. While you could already do this for some categories of apps, developers will now be able to turn them on in any categories. This mean that we could see MMO-style subscriptions on iOS sooner rather than later.

This is especially important for developers since, if a subscriber continues to pay for more than a year, it'll split the revenue 85/15 for the developer against the normal 70/30 that's currently applied everywhere.

Between now and this fall, Apple will also start rolling out ads in your search results. We don't know how they'll appear or how obnoxious they'll be but I'm not too fond of that change even if it's not going to be that much of an issue.

These are rather big changes in Apple's App Store and I'm sure we'll hear about that and more next week at WWDC. Stay tuned.