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Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

104 points by ch_sm 6y ago

maccard 6y ago
This is a bit of a stretch - the gist is that Apple is requiring opt-in consent to 3rd party tracking, and will start failing review for people apps that don't provide an opt in. This isn't a ban on Free analyics SDKs at all.
- akmarinov 6y ago
  It's not a ban, but since all these 3rd party tracking platforms use the user's data to power ads, you have to show the opt in, which of course people will say no to, leading to the SDKs being mostly useless in your binary. Compare that to Mixpanel for example, where they don't power ads, you can skip showing the opt in and have a useful analytics SDK. Effectively the free SDKs need the data to make money for their owners, the opt in kills that and it might as well be a ban.
  - cassianoleal 6y ago
    > Compare that to Mixpanel for example, where they don't power ads, you can skip showing the opt in Is this really the only criterion for requiring an opt-in? Tracking is bad for many other reasons other than selling targeted ads.
  - simonh 6y ago
    It really isn’t a ban though, not in any sense. It’s simply a requirement to ask for opt-in. Apple is making no decision about the use of IDFA, they are simply allowing users to make that decision. The truth is users are against this behaviour, but Facebook, Google, and the author of that blog don’t like to face up to that fact, so they will assiduously blame Apple for this not the people actually making the decision to cut them out - users.
    - _qulr 6y ago
      > the author of that blog don’t like to face up to that fact, so they will assiduously blame Apple for this Could you please quote the relevant section of the article you're referring to? If it's just "the article title", that seems to be quite a stretch to me.
      - simonh 6y ago
        Sure, fourth paragraph: "Apple is also enacting a de-facto ban on these free analytics SDKs. The setup looks like this:"
        _qulr 6y ago
        Is it accurate to say that your only evidence that this article constitutes "Apple bashing" is the word "ban"? If so, that seems hypersensitive and defensive IMO. A "de facto ban" is not a "de jure ban", so it's already a pretty weak statement.
        threeseed 6y ago
        It's not a de-facto ban either. In fact it's not a ban. Period. Advertisers could invest time and money in explaining to users what their data is being used for and the benefits it brings. Making it seem like Apple is preventing analytics by simply asking users what they want is disingenuous at best.
        _qulr 6y ago
        Eddie Izzard: "I'm simply asking people, cake or death? It's disingenuous to suggest that this is a loaded question. After all, people could choose death. I'm only presenting the options."
        Spivak 6y ago
        I like how strongly people seem to be reacting to having to ask permission to digitally follow someone around, write down everything they do, and then use it to send them ads. Guess that means the new rule isn't toothless after all.
  - Pet_Ant 6y ago
    > Effectively the free SDKs need the data to make money for their owners, the opt in kills that and it might as well be a ban. It's not a ban on the usage of SDKs, what it is, is a "ban" on their business model, and if you don't provide enough value to users for them to pay for then it's a "ban" on your business model. Basically, it just means that your service is asking too high a price (the user's privacy) for the market bear. This is only giving user's agency and insight and after that the market functioning as intended.
    - laurent92 6y ago
      But he’s not allowed to withdraw the service if customers don’t agree. Therefore his business model, which was an exchange (not even taking users’ data, only displaying relevant ads), is required to become a donation from him to a good share of his customers, if he wants to keep the other ones who agree to advertising tracking.
      - madeofpalk 6y ago
        Who is "he"? I lost who we are talking about here...
      - snowwrestler 6y ago
        The goal is to shift the ad industry away from intrusive tracking, not to ban ads as a business model. The answer will be to show ads that are made relevant using signals other than collecting personal data. I get that the digital ad industry is not set up well to do that now, but the idea is to force them to adapt. They will have to eventually if major applications of personal data are closed to them by changes like Apple’s.
        threeseed 6y ago
        And also moving to everything being explicit. Many of us are actually okay with first-party data collection. But it is ridiculous how user data is being packaged and sold to so many faceless third parties whose you don't know and whose policies are not clear.
  - tinus_hn 6y ago
    Why do these SDKs ‘need the data to make money for their owners’?
    - simonh 6y ago
      The owners provide the SDKs for free, the only value they get from them is the analytics data.
      - tinus_hn 6y ago
        That depends on how creative you are. They could sell support for their SDK, exploit network effects, gain exposure and developer mindshare, or, you know, just provide something to the community for free with no strings attached.
        simonh 6y ago
        None of that changes the fact of how they use these SDKs are intended to get value at the moment.
        tinus_hn 6y ago
        Let me predict Apples answer to that for you. They don’t care. They don’t have to care. They don’t care. If you are hurt by this decision, you can either change or give up. You can complain on web forums and try to convince other developers but the fact is that you are a force against one of Apples core values, user privacy. They have barely anything to gain from you and one of their core values to lose. You’d need some serious leverage to make them care and you don’t have it. And even if you had, Apple would simply build their own framework and use their control over the platform, the tools, the stores and the rules to completely crush you. And if you imagine you have an antitrust case, it will take years and you will probably lose.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    > you have to show the opt in, which of course people will say no to Oh no, people are allowed to decide what their computers do, instead of being spied on without knowing. The horror! What's next, people being allowed to uninstall the app? Seriously, if your business model depends on doing things the user is not aware of and wouldn't agree with, you deserve to fail.
stationfrocks 6y ago
The question is: will it be possible to use facebook and firebase sdk's without the opt-in consent, provided that no use of the idfa is made? My understanding is that as long as the opt-in popup isn't shown, the device won't allow access to the idfa, and as such the sdk you're using does not matter. Both facebook and firebase's sdks seem to have fallbacks in place for when the idfa is not available. This is to be taken with a grain of salt, and I'd love to see somebody more savvy on the matter confirm this...
- swiley 6y ago
  I would have been happy if facebook's stuff weren't usable by iOS developers without at least something user visible. I already gave up on the platform and switched to something sane though.
- m_eiman 6y ago
  I suppose it's not just the idfa, it's any personal information you share with third parties.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Something as simple as an IP address is considered personal data in Europe, and something that can uniquely identify a user with a reasonable degree of accuracy (device fingerprint, which Facebook does collect) would also be included.
- graftak 6y ago
  Yes it will technically be possible but at the same be a violation of the App Store guidelines, meaning it will likely lead to a ban.
- djrogers 6y ago
  From Apple: "you’ll need to receive the user’s permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier". OR access IDFA being the key there. If you can't honestly and easily answer the question "does this 3rd party SDK track my users?" then you probably should not be using it.
random5634 6y ago
Always the same apple bashing for doing what their users would or will probably like
- _qulr 6y ago
  Where do you see Apple bashing in the article? It was an article targeted at app developers, offering them advice on how to adapt to the new rules.
  - simonh 6y ago
    The Apple bashing is in the title and in the text, calling this a "def-facto ban" by Apple. No it's not, it's giving the option to the users. The fact that users generally abhor and detest this sort of tracking and want nothing to do with it is hardly Apple's fault.
    - sofixa 6y ago
      In the same way that people bash the EU for cookie banners, people will bash Apple for extra work on both sides ( developer and user) to comply with new, better rules around privacy.
      - random5634 6y ago
        I bash the EU constantly for cookie banners because they are an example of something that is SO ANNOYING that USERS absolutely hate them. Apple and the EU's approaches to privacy and security are diametrically opposed. Apple has reasonable technical defaults, and is not to intrusive. EU is massive annoyance and intrustion, and limited technical competence. My guess - if you let users flip a bit in their browser to never have to see a cookie popup again with an auto agree to all forms of tracking, a huge number would do it. The EU has done more to damage the attention people pay to privacy and security than almost anyone out there. They seem to not realize that: 1) Users have control over cookies, persistence etc via their browser directly, which would be a great place to start making changes. 2) Popping up a notice for every damn innocuous and obvious use of a cookie is totally annoying to just about everyone. 3) THe amount of time wasted on cookie policies alone is just nuts. The mismash is ridiculous. ICO, CNIL, German and Spanish DPA, UK and EU laws on cookies.
ohreallysteve 6y ago
From my understanding, the iOS permission to track prompt is only if your app uses user device data for the purpose of targeted advertising by accessing the IDFA. There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA and you can configure exactly that via Firebase Google Analytics [1]. I don't see a whole sale banning of free analytics SDKs but I do see a positive shift in forcing developers to have more awareness about what data is collected and what it is used for. Edit: Per Apple's definitions of tracking, it also includes sharing user or device data with data brokers.[2] [1]https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-collection?platform=ios#disable_idfa_collection https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-co... [2]https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...
- Reason077 6y ago
  > "There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA" Exactly. I hope this is true as this is exactly what I'm planning to do.
  - kruuuder 6y ago
    Apple says "you’ll need to receive the user’s permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier". So if the SDK uses any information at all (e.g. the IP address) to track the user, you need the user's permission. Do you think Google will do some kind of tracking with the user's IP address? I'd bet on "Yes".
    - nulbyte 6y ago
      Apple defines tracking to mean something specific: > Tracking refers to the act of linking user or device data collected from your app with user or device data collected from other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes. How will Apple enforce this? You can, for example, turn off data sharing in Google Analytics to disallow Google to use the data you collect for their own advertising purposes.
tabs_masterrace 6y ago
For those who have the freedom to decide what to use, I recommend looking into rolling your own. Especially if you're writing back-end services for your app anyway. After Google shutdown Fabric.io, we asked ourselves why even rely on 3rd parties for analytics. All we really wanted to know is basic usage statistics, like uniques, sessions, events. Turns out to be just a few days of work for what amounts to a CRUD service with a worker. Small bootstrapped HTML page to view the stats, no pretty graphs or anything, just numbers. The client code is around 300 lines, basically a simple network request queue. For comparison the latest libGoogleAnalyticsServices.a comes in at ~35mb (wtf?).
- e2021 6y ago
  collecting the data isn't the problem, its the analysis thats annoying. ie. this only gets you so far: > Small bootstrapped HTML page to view the stats, no pretty graphs or anything, just numbers. Maybe I want to see the number of some custom event per week, ok, now show me number per session, then break it down by country etc etc. I guess you could export the data to some BI tool and create a bunch of reports, but that is a bit of a hassle, especially since in anything but a very small company the people who most want to do this analysis are going to be non-technical. Are you going to assign engineering resources to sit around making reports full time? Much easier to just use google which 1) has all this built in 2) people already know how to use
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    > Maybe I want to see the number of some custom event per week, ok, now show me number per session, then break it down by country etc etc. There's this thing called SQL that the oldies used to generate such reports ... Jokes apart, I agree with the suggestion to build your own analytics, or host one using some popular open source analytic software. There is more privacy awareness among users now, and sharing your data with Google or Microsoft or Facebook is the easiest way to hurt your reputation with these individuals. Has everyone forgot that webservers still generate their own visitors logs? Moreover, if you think the data is important enough to collect and analyse, it seems quite foolish to trust a third-party with it, especially a free one.
ppetty 6y ago
This really seems like an OSS opportunity for someone or some organization to create an ad-free analytics SDK for “in app” usage & engagement. But I agree with other posts that Apple doesn’t seem to imply they’ll forbid any SDKs … they’re going to have an impact, though, on any information gathering & sharing that involves PII.
- kall 6y ago
  Posthog (https://posthog.com https://posthog.com) looks pretty cool in this space
nerdjon 6y ago
I would not be mad if the Facebook SDK was outright banned, it collects way too much data. But I will take being able to stop them from tracking every time I open third party apps even if I don't log in with Facebook. Even if I have to be prompted every time I install an app. But maybe similar too what happened with iOS 14 and the clipboard alerts, this will force a change on the App Store and finally remove Facebook and Google's stronghold on the web and apps.
fmajid 6y ago
It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 of your apps installed, all three will share the same IDFV, so you can even do cross-app or cross-selling analytics. What you cannot do by design is use IDFV to build a cross-publisher dossier on users, or target users based on that ID other than on your own apps. Apple hasn't put any restrictions on IDFV, only on IDFA, which was designed, well, for advertising and needs to be reined-in due to abuses in the Wild West everything goes world of the AdTech surveillance-industrial complex. In fact the existing opt-out "Limit Ad Tracking" setting that already implements what will become opt-in with iOS 14.5 does not apply to IDFVs. Back in 2010 Steve Jobs himself had banned analytics altogether when Flurry's VP of Marketing blabbed and disclosed the existence of the then secret iPad: https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/ https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/
- apike 6y ago
  Yes, but – Apple's documentation says that the upcoming opt-in requirement is for more than for IDFA-based tracking. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-... According to Apple, the opt-in API is also required for other activities, including: > Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps. So as a developer, you need to ask: even though we don't use IDFA, is this analytics SDK repurposing our data to fingerprint and target our users? Certainly for the default setups of these adtech-backed free analytics SDKs the answer is "presumably yes?". But we don't yet have a clear answer from Apple or the vendors as to what exactly will trigger an App Review rejection here, and what exactly the SDKs do with the data they receive in different circumstances. Hence the uncertainty.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    The world where people are just dropping huge opaque blobs of code into their own apps that betray your users privacy, probably, we didn't actually check, is awful. How is the person releasing the app not ultimately responsible for every line of code in it?
jrochkind1 6y ago
> iOS apps currently using the Google Analytics, Flurry, and Firebase SDKs may need to migrate off of them promptly I don't develop in this space, but... Firebase is considered an analytics/tracking API? What happened?
- apike 6y ago
  Firebase includes a wide umbrella of services, which include what used to be Fabric Analytics and Crashlytics. From Apple's perspective, sharing data with these services may count as "sharing data with entities who display third-party ads" since Google owns the service, and Google displays ads. Or maybe not.
- Kimmo_Hintikka 6y ago
  Well google bought them years back and while I think main use of firebase is still realtime data and authentication there are more and more people loading firebase analytics as well. Still I dont understand discussion that these would be banned they are still different binaries for different service allthough for super lazy people there is this one mega binary loading the "whole firebase"
theshrike79 6y ago
Betteridge's Law at work again [1] But, putting "Apple Banning XXX" in a headline is a sure-fire way to get clicks, so... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
> Apple announced last summer that they will soon require users to opt in before apps can get the infamous “IDFA” tracking identifier for that user. I absolutely LOVE that apple is slowly turning the screws on advertisers with these pro-privacy moves. It's been slow and incremental, but also increasingly hostile towards people and services that attempt to identify and market to end-users.
waynesonfire 6y ago
This is great news for users and platforms that don't abuse user data.
gowld 6y ago
Where's the "ban"? OP us quoting Apple policy as requiring user opt-in to tracking analytics.

104 points by ch_sm 6y ago

This is a bit of a stretch - the gist is that Apple is requiring opt-in consent to 3rd party tracking, and will start failing review for people apps that don't provide an opt in. This isn't a ban on Free analyics SDKs at all.

akmarinov 6y ago
It's not a ban, but since all these 3rd party tracking platforms use the user's data to power ads, you have to show the opt in, which of course people will say no to, leading to the SDKs being mostly useless in your binary. Compare that to Mixpanel for example, where they don't power ads, you can skip showing the opt in and have a useful analytics SDK. Effectively the free SDKs need the data to make money for their owners, the opt in kills that and it might as well be a ban.
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  > Compare that to Mixpanel for example, where they don't power ads, you can skip showing the opt in Is this really the only criterion for requiring an opt-in? Tracking is bad for many other reasons other than selling targeted ads.
- simonh 6y ago
  It really isn’t a ban though, not in any sense. It’s simply a requirement to ask for opt-in. Apple is making no decision about the use of IDFA, they are simply allowing users to make that decision. The truth is users are against this behaviour, but Facebook, Google, and the author of that blog don’t like to face up to that fact, so they will assiduously blame Apple for this not the people actually making the decision to cut them out - users.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > the author of that blog don’t like to face up to that fact, so they will assiduously blame Apple for this Could you please quote the relevant section of the article you're referring to? If it's just "the article title", that seems to be quite a stretch to me.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Sure, fourth paragraph: "Apple is also enacting a de-facto ban on these free analytics SDKs. The setup looks like this:"
      - _qulr 6y ago
        Is it accurate to say that your only evidence that this article constitutes "Apple bashing" is the word "ban"? If so, that seems hypersensitive and defensive IMO. A "de facto ban" is not a "de jure ban", so it's already a pretty weak statement.
        threeseed 6y ago
        It's not a de-facto ban either. In fact it's not a ban. Period. Advertisers could invest time and money in explaining to users what their data is being used for and the benefits it brings. Making it seem like Apple is preventing analytics by simply asking users what they want is disingenuous at best.
        _qulr 6y ago
        Eddie Izzard: "I'm simply asking people, cake or death? It's disingenuous to suggest that this is a loaded question. After all, people could choose death. I'm only presenting the options."
        Spivak 6y ago
        I like how strongly people seem to be reacting to having to ask permission to digitally follow someone around, write down everything they do, and then use it to send them ads. Guess that means the new rule isn't toothless after all.
- Pet_Ant 6y ago
  > Effectively the free SDKs need the data to make money for their owners, the opt in kills that and it might as well be a ban. It's not a ban on the usage of SDKs, what it is, is a "ban" on their business model, and if you don't provide enough value to users for them to pay for then it's a "ban" on your business model. Basically, it just means that your service is asking too high a price (the user's privacy) for the market bear. This is only giving user's agency and insight and after that the market functioning as intended.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    But he’s not allowed to withdraw the service if customers don’t agree. Therefore his business model, which was an exchange (not even taking users’ data, only displaying relevant ads), is required to become a donation from him to a good share of his customers, if he wants to keep the other ones who agree to advertising tracking.
    - madeofpalk 6y ago
      Who is "he"? I lost who we are talking about here...
    - snowwrestler 6y ago
      The goal is to shift the ad industry away from intrusive tracking, not to ban ads as a business model. The answer will be to show ads that are made relevant using signals other than collecting personal data. I get that the digital ad industry is not set up well to do that now, but the idea is to force them to adapt. They will have to eventually if major applications of personal data are closed to them by changes like Apple’s.
      - threeseed 6y ago
        And also moving to everything being explicit. Many of us are actually okay with first-party data collection. But it is ridiculous how user data is being packaged and sold to so many faceless third parties whose you don't know and whose policies are not clear.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Why do these SDKs ‘need the data to make money for their owners’?
  - simonh 6y ago
    The owners provide the SDKs for free, the only value they get from them is the analytics data.
    - tinus_hn 6y ago
      That depends on how creative you are. They could sell support for their SDK, exploit network effects, gain exposure and developer mindshare, or, you know, just provide something to the community for free with no strings attached.
      - simonh 6y ago
        None of that changes the fact of how they use these SDKs are intended to get value at the moment.
        tinus_hn 6y ago
        Let me predict Apples answer to that for you. They don’t care. They don’t have to care. They don’t care. If you are hurt by this decision, you can either change or give up. You can complain on web forums and try to convince other developers but the fact is that you are a force against one of Apples core values, user privacy. They have barely anything to gain from you and one of their core values to lose. You’d need some serious leverage to make them care and you don’t have it. And even if you had, Apple would simply build their own framework and use their control over the platform, the tools, the stores and the rules to completely crush you. And if you imagine you have an antitrust case, it will take years and you will probably lose.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  > you have to show the opt in, which of course people will say no to Oh no, people are allowed to decide what their computers do, instead of being spied on without knowing. The horror! What's next, people being allowed to uninstall the app? Seriously, if your business model depends on doing things the user is not aware of and wouldn't agree with, you deserve to fail.

stationfrocks 6y ago

The question is: will it be possible to use facebook and firebase sdk's without the opt-in consent, provided that no use of the idfa is made? My understanding is that as long as the opt-in popup isn't shown, the device won't allow access to the idfa, and as such the sdk you're using does not matter. Both facebook and firebase's sdks seem to have fallbacks in place for when the idfa is not available. This is to be taken with a grain of salt, and I'd love to see somebody more savvy on the matter confirm this...

swiley 6y ago
I would have been happy if facebook's stuff weren't usable by iOS developers without at least something user visible. I already gave up on the platform and switched to something sane though.
m_eiman 6y ago
I suppose it's not just the idfa, it's any personal information you share with third parties.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Something as simple as an IP address is considered personal data in Europe, and something that can uniquely identify a user with a reasonable degree of accuracy (device fingerprint, which Facebook does collect) would also be included.
graftak 6y ago
Yes it will technically be possible but at the same be a violation of the App Store guidelines, meaning it will likely lead to a ban.
djrogers 6y ago
From Apple: "you’ll need to receive the user’s permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier". OR access IDFA being the key there. If you can't honestly and easily answer the question "does this 3rd party SDK track my users?" then you probably should not be using it.

random5634 6y ago

Always the same apple bashing for doing what their users would or will probably like

_qulr 6y ago
Where do you see Apple bashing in the article? It was an article targeted at app developers, offering them advice on how to adapt to the new rules.
- simonh 6y ago
  The Apple bashing is in the title and in the text, calling this a "def-facto ban" by Apple. No it's not, it's giving the option to the users. The fact that users generally abhor and detest this sort of tracking and want nothing to do with it is hardly Apple's fault.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    In the same way that people bash the EU for cookie banners, people will bash Apple for extra work on both sides ( developer and user) to comply with new, better rules around privacy.
    - random5634 6y ago
      I bash the EU constantly for cookie banners because they are an example of something that is SO ANNOYING that USERS absolutely hate them. Apple and the EU's approaches to privacy and security are diametrically opposed. Apple has reasonable technical defaults, and is not to intrusive. EU is massive annoyance and intrustion, and limited technical competence. My guess - if you let users flip a bit in their browser to never have to see a cookie popup again with an auto agree to all forms of tracking, a huge number would do it. The EU has done more to damage the attention people pay to privacy and security than almost anyone out there. They seem to not realize that: 1) Users have control over cookies, persistence etc via their browser directly, which would be a great place to start making changes. 2) Popping up a notice for every damn innocuous and obvious use of a cookie is totally annoying to just about everyone. 3) THe amount of time wasted on cookie policies alone is just nuts. The mismash is ridiculous. ICO, CNIL, German and Spanish DPA, UK and EU laws on cookies.

ohreallysteve 6y ago

From my understanding, the iOS permission to track prompt is only if your app uses user device data for the purpose of targeted advertising by accessing the IDFA. There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA and you can configure exactly that via Firebase Google Analytics [1]. I don't see a whole sale banning of free analytics SDKs but I do see a positive shift in forcing developers to have more awareness about what data is collected and what it is used for. Edit: Per Apple's definitions of tracking, it also includes sharing user or device data with data brokers.[2] [1]https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-collection?platform=ios#disable_idfa_collection https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-co... [2]https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...

Reason077 6y ago
> "There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA" Exactly. I hope this is true as this is exactly what I'm planning to do.
- kruuuder 6y ago
  Apple says "you’ll need to receive the user’s permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier". So if the SDK uses any information at all (e.g. the IP address) to track the user, you need the user's permission. Do you think Google will do some kind of tracking with the user's IP address? I'd bet on "Yes".
  - nulbyte 6y ago
    Apple defines tracking to mean something specific: > Tracking refers to the act of linking user or device data collected from your app with user or device data collected from other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes. How will Apple enforce this? You can, for example, turn off data sharing in Google Analytics to disallow Google to use the data you collect for their own advertising purposes.

tabs_masterrace 6y ago

For those who have the freedom to decide what to use, I recommend looking into rolling your own. Especially if you're writing back-end services for your app anyway. After Google shutdown Fabric.io, we asked ourselves why even rely on 3rd parties for analytics. All we really wanted to know is basic usage statistics, like uniques, sessions, events. Turns out to be just a few days of work for what amounts to a CRUD service with a worker. Small bootstrapped HTML page to view the stats, no pretty graphs or anything, just numbers. The client code is around 300 lines, basically a simple network request queue. For comparison the latest libGoogleAnalyticsServices.a comes in at ~35mb (wtf?).

e2021 6y ago
collecting the data isn't the problem, its the analysis thats annoying. ie. this only gets you so far: > Small bootstrapped HTML page to view the stats, no pretty graphs or anything, just numbers. Maybe I want to see the number of some custom event per week, ok, now show me number per session, then break it down by country etc etc. I guess you could export the data to some BI tool and create a bunch of reports, but that is a bit of a hassle, especially since in anything but a very small company the people who most want to do this analysis are going to be non-technical. Are you going to assign engineering resources to sit around making reports full time? Much easier to just use google which 1) has all this built in 2) people already know how to use
- webmobdev 6y ago
  > Maybe I want to see the number of some custom event per week, ok, now show me number per session, then break it down by country etc etc. There's this thing called SQL that the oldies used to generate such reports ... Jokes apart, I agree with the suggestion to build your own analytics, or host one using some popular open source analytic software. There is more privacy awareness among users now, and sharing your data with Google or Microsoft or Facebook is the easiest way to hurt your reputation with these individuals. Has everyone forgot that webservers still generate their own visitors logs? Moreover, if you think the data is important enough to collect and analyse, it seems quite foolish to trust a third-party with it, especially a free one.

ppetty 6y ago

This really seems like an OSS opportunity for someone or some organization to create an ad-free analytics SDK for “in app” usage & engagement. But I agree with other posts that Apple doesn’t seem to imply they’ll forbid any SDKs … they’re going to have an impact, though, on any information gathering & sharing that involves PII.

kall 6y ago
Posthog (https://posthog.com https://posthog.com) looks pretty cool in this space

nerdjon 6y ago

I would not be mad if the Facebook SDK was outright banned, it collects way too much data. But I will take being able to stop them from tracking every time I open third party apps even if I don't log in with Facebook. Even if I have to be prompted every time I install an app. But maybe similar too what happened with iOS 14 and the clipboard alerts, this will force a change on the App Store and finally remove Facebook and Google's stronghold on the web and apps.

fmajid 6y ago

It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 of your apps installed, all three will share the same IDFV, so you can even do cross-app or cross-selling analytics. What you cannot do by design is use IDFV to build a cross-publisher dossier on users, or target users based on that ID other than on your own apps. Apple hasn't put any restrictions on IDFV, only on IDFA, which was designed, well, for advertising and needs to be reined-in due to abuses in the Wild West everything goes world of the AdTech surveillance-industrial complex. In fact the existing opt-out "Limit Ad Tracking" setting that already implements what will become opt-in with iOS 14.5 does not apply to IDFVs. Back in 2010 Steve Jobs himself had banned analytics altogether when Flurry's VP of Marketing blabbed and disclosed the existence of the then secret iPad: https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/ https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/

apike 6y ago
Yes, but – Apple's documentation says that the upcoming opt-in requirement is for more than for IDFA-based tracking. https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/ https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-... According to Apple, the opt-in API is also required for other activities, including: > Placing a third-party SDK in your app that combines user data from your app with user data from other developers’ apps to target advertising or measure advertising efficiency, even if you don’t use the SDK for these purposes. For example, using an analytics SDK that repurposes the data it collects from your app to enable targeted advertising in other developers’ apps. So as a developer, you need to ask: even though we don't use IDFA, is this analytics SDK repurposing our data to fingerprint and target our users? Certainly for the default setups of these adtech-backed free analytics SDKs the answer is "presumably yes?". But we don't yet have a clear answer from Apple or the vendors as to what exactly will trigger an App Review rejection here, and what exactly the SDKs do with the data they receive in different circumstances. Hence the uncertainty.
- Spivak 6y ago
  The world where people are just dropping huge opaque blobs of code into their own apps that betray your users privacy, probably, we didn't actually check, is awful. How is the person releasing the app not ultimately responsible for every line of code in it?

jrochkind1 6y ago

> iOS apps currently using the Google Analytics, Flurry, and Firebase SDKs may need to migrate off of them promptly I don't develop in this space, but... Firebase is considered an analytics/tracking API? What happened?

apike 6y ago
Firebase includes a wide umbrella of services, which include what used to be Fabric Analytics and Crashlytics. From Apple's perspective, sharing data with these services may count as "sharing data with entities who display third-party ads" since Google owns the service, and Google displays ads. Or maybe not.
Kimmo_Hintikka 6y ago
Well google bought them years back and while I think main use of firebase is still realtime data and authentication there are more and more people loading firebase analytics as well. Still I dont understand discussion that these would be banned they are still different binaries for different service allthough for super lazy people there is this one mega binary loading the "whole firebase"

theshrike79 6y ago

Betteridge's Law at work again [1] But, putting "Apple Banning XXX" in a headline is a sure-fire way to get clicks, so... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

> Apple announced last summer that they will soon require users to opt in before apps can get the infamous “IDFA” tracking identifier for that user. I absolutely LOVE that apple is slowly turning the screws on advertisers with these pro-privacy moves. It's been slow and incremental, but also increasingly hostile towards people and services that attempt to identify and market to end-users.

waynesonfire 6y ago

This is great news for users and platforms that don't abuse user data.

gowld 6y ago

Where's the "ban"? OP us quoting Apple policy as requiring user opt-in to tracking analytics.