1/ With rumors flying that Apple is delaying the iOS 14 privacy changes, I thought I’d share some nuance on why that would be a good thing.
2/ Apps being able to do cost-effective marketing ultimately benefits everyone involved: consumers, Apple, developers, ad networks, and even the thousands of growth/ad tech/infrastructure companies (including @RevenueCat) that help facilitate that marketing.
3/ Most apps need to make money to be worth building and updating. And being able to measure marketing spend is an important part of the complex App Store economy that powers so many of the great apps we depend on every day.
4/ Apple’s intent with the IDFA was to help facilitate that marketing measurement, but it quickly devolved into a tool for privacy invasion. There’s been story after story the past few years about shady data brokers using the IDFA and other means to build invasive user profiles.
5/ Killing the IDFA (by making it opt-in instead of opt-out) is absolutely the right thing for Apple to do. Apple is hitting the reset button on the tradeoff between privacy invasion and the beneficial aspects of being able to granularly measure marketing spend.
6/ SKAdNetwork is the new IDFA — it’s Apple’s attempt to facilitate cost-effective marketing on their platform. And I’m personally quite excited about SKAdNetwork. I’ve been hesitant to advertise my apps because I didn’t want to participate in the “data industrial complex”.
7/ But SKAdNetwork is just not ready for prime time. And the current mobile ad ecosystem just isn’t able to absorb this big of a change this quickly, as was evidenced by Facebook’s hint that it would have to completely abandon the Facebook Audience Network on iOS.
8/ Apple delaying the privacy rules (if they do it) isn’t an admission that App Store profit is more important than user privacy, it’s an admission that ushering in a new privacy-friendly mobile marketing paradigm is too important to rush out half-baked.
9/ And I hope it’s framed that way so that we can have nuanced conversations about important tradeoffs. But it’s 2020, so we’ll mostly get disingenuous, click-bait headlines about Apple caving to Facebook. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
