Advertisements requiring the granularity provided by Core Location are a tiny sliver of an already small mobile advertising market. The vast majority of mobile

Advertisements requiring the granularity provided by Core Location are a tiny sliver of an already small mobile advertising market. The vast majority of mobile advertising campaigns are targeted at the country level, and the user's IP address is all that's needed. A small number are targeted to the state or designated marketing area (essentially a metropolitan region). Mobile IP isn't perfect for those, but it's better than nothing. In other words, this barely impacts the mobile advertising industry at all. I suspect Apple will release an Advertising SDK that relies on Quattro, take 30% of the profits - less than most advertising networks take - and cut developers a single check, which will be mighty convenient. However, Apple's not likely to enforce that developers use only their advertising SDK. Many iPhone application developers that use advertising know that using multiple ad sources and doing some simple yield optimization performs better than a single ad source - even the most privileged ad network doesn't perform as well as multiple ad networks used in conjunction. Banning an AdMob or a Millenial or a Google AdSense would result in significant backlash. I believe zefhous is completely right - this is about protecting the user experience, nothing more.