51–60 of 80 posts
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.
Always the same apple bashing for doing what their users would or will probably like
As a user, I want to have the option to globally disable all tracking. Random advertiser IDs every time one is requested, no sharing of vendor IDs, just quit it. Gather your statistics from people who don't care about privacy or people too tech-illiterate to disable the checkbox, but don't force your terrible tracking down the customer's throat. Or rather, disable the tracking by default, make it opt-in per app. If your app is crap but useful enough, people will want to improve it.
Now, if Apple did that, all the Silicon Valley startups around app optimisation would cry foul, Facebook and Google would sue Apple and there'd be a massive PR campaign against Apple, so they can't do ever what I'd like them to do.
Lots of developers seem to act as if they have a god-given right to track people to gather analytics rather than doing some costly end-user research. These were probably the same developers who proclaimed that the GDPR would end all computing as we know it because now they have the legal obligation to care about their customers' privacy.
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…
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…
But funnels are nothing more then how many people did Y after X.
If you record everything (say every single web request) you could easily do a query to find out that type of data and shove it in a table.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 welcome the competition.
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…
And that shouldn’t be an issue for analytics anyway because using the IDFA for anything other than advertising has always been prohibited. IIRC Apple checks if your app accesses this value and your app will be rejected if your app does and not contain any ads.
> 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?
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"