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Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

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Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#21

Post by pianoben »

tabs_masterrace wrote: post #15

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 serv…

Analytics tools like Amplitude give you vastly more and more-useful information than just sessions and events. Sure, it's one thing to capture events, but fast and easy search and segmentation of those events? Building ad-hoc funnels and visualizing behavior of cohorts over those funnels? This is real and significant value.

There's a reason that there are profitable companies dedicated to building stuff like this. It's really hard to get right in a scalable way.

Unless you're already a multi-billion dollar corp (and how did you get that big without analytics), it's a no-brainer - this is something to buy, not to build.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#22

Post by laurent92 »

Pet_Ant wrote: post #18
akmarinov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

> 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…

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.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#23

Post by kall »

ppetty wrote: post #17

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.

Posthog (https://posthog.com) looks pretty cool in this space

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#24

Post by alexdean »

pianoben wrote: post #21
tabs_masterrace wrote: post #15

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 serv…

Analytics tools like Amplitude give you vastly more and more-useful information than just sessions and events. Sure, it's one thing to capture events, but fast and easy search and segmentation of those events? Building ad-hoc funnels and visualizing behavior of cohorts over those funnels? This is real and significant value. There's a reason that there are profitable companies dedicated to building stuff like this. It…

Agree, building this in 2021 is not a good use of data engineering time.

As well as the SaaS packages like Amplitude and Mixpanel, you also have great open-source tools and platforms for mobile and product analytics like PostHog (https://posthog.com/), Countly (https://count.ly/) and Snowplow (https://snowplowanalytics.com/).

Disclosure: Snowplow co-founder.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#25

Post by madeofpalk »

laurent92 wrote: post #22
Pet_Ant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Who is "he"? I lost who we are talking about here...

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#26

Post by nerdjon »

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.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#27

Post by johnchristopher »

alexdean wrote: post #24
pianoben wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analytics tools like Amplitude give you vastly more and more-useful information than just sessions and events. Sure, it's one thing to capture events, but fast and easy search and segmentation of those events? Building ad-hoc funnels and visualizing behavior of cohorts over those funnels? This is real and significant value. There's a reason that there are profitable companies dedicated to building stuff like this. It…

Agree, building this in 2021 is not a good use of data engineering time. As well as the SaaS packages like Amplitude and Mixpanel, you also have great open-source tools and platforms for mobile and product analytics like PostHog ( https://posthog.com/ ), Countly ( https://count.ly/ ) and Snowplow ( https://snowplowanalytics.com/ ). Disclosure: Snowplow co-founder.

I regularly see a lot of GA analytics on HN.

How does your solution compare to Matomo ? I feel the interface is extremely dated and not intuitive but that just might be me.

Why is Matomo so rarely cited ?

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#28

Post by sofixa »

simonh wrote: post #20
_qulr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#29

Post by snowwrestler »

laurent92 wrote: post #22
Pet_Ant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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.

Re: Is Apple Banning Free Analytics SDKs?

#30

Post by fmajid »

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/

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