Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads

#21

Post by interg12 » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 10:22 PM UTC

hahainternet wrote: post #16

slaven wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you see what happened with UDID and how much kerfuffle there was to get from there to IDFA it's pretty obvious Apple wants to protect the user. For a contrast to Android you just need to read this article: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140130170002-11...

> Well, if you see what happened with UDID and how much kerfuffle there was to get from there to IDFA it's pretty obvious Apple wants to protect the user. From my perspective it seems that Apple wants to have access to this data for iAds, but doesn't want any competition. It's been their normal behaviour recently, trying to eliminate any possibility of anyone competing with them in their markets. From wide device ban…

Apple wants to create a monopoly for advertising across the entire Apple product ecosystem. If they're the only company with install attribution across apps and devices, they can serve (re)targeted advertising to you on the Apple TV, your iPad, your iPhone, and Safari, all through the cross-platform iAD.

Re: Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads

#22

Post by flipped_bit » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 1:03 AM UTC

interg12 wrote: post #19

sneak wrote: post #4

No, Apple is rejecting apps for pulling the advertising unique identifier and not using it for ads, but instead to spy. Stop it.

Whats wrong with using the highly reliable IDFA for install attribution? 1) Allows the advertiser to know exactly which publisher provided the install, thus allowing for fair billing. 2) Allows advertisers to study users on a app-level to see which sources provide the high quality users. 3) Ultimately helps ad networks target more relevant ads to users, providing a better user experience and higher eCPMs for publishe…

> This is only going to push the industry away from the heavily favored CPI pricing to CPC pricing.

Which is really not ideal:

1) Why pay for clicks to direct users to the appstore? At the very least, it should be only those users who download the app where the campaign effectiveness can be truly counted as a success.

2) What about post-install? Some advetisers rely on this to truly measure their return on ad spend. It helps them focus on the users that really matter.

Re: Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads

#23

Post by VintageCool » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 1:35 AM UTC

JangoSteve wrote: post #10

FireBeyond wrote: post #2

I’m not sure my understanding of this is correct. It seems to be crying about the problems this will cause. Ostensibly, it’s saying that there’s a problem with the identifier for ads being requested in apps that don’t have ads (i.e. being used as a surrogate identifier). But, more nefariously (again, if my understanding is correct) it’s saying that many ad networks rely on this info being passed to advertisers (despi…

I think what they're saying is that for something as simple as analytics (just an example), apps need some sort of unique identifier for the user, but that the only unique identifier iOS provides is the advertising ID of the user. Of course the correct answer is to stop doing any sort of analytics, or anything else that requires a unique identifier. But the point I think the author is making is that that is a bad sol…

If you are doing analytics of your users (instead of measuring your advertising), then you can use IDFV and should not be using the IDFA. The IDFV should always be the same whenever your app looks at it, whereas the IDFA is subject to change depending on the user's privacy configuration.

Re: Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads

#24

Post by egb » Tue, Feb 04, 2014, 1:46 AM UTC

egb wrote: post #18

I got rejected, but I _do_ show ads. My guess is Apple is targeting particular SDKs/libraries, and so that even apps that are showing ads are getting flagged. Not sure what the resolution is going to be - still waiting on an Apple response. I've got a whole bunch of libs included, several of which use AdSupport. Arg.

After emailing in, my app got approved, but no information as to why the rejected me in the first place...

Re: Apple Rejecting Apps For Not Showing Ads

#25

Post by shacked » Thu, Feb 06, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

VintageCool wrote: post #23

JangoSteve wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what they're saying is that for something as simple as analytics (just an example), apps need some sort of unique identifier for the user, but that the only unique identifier iOS provides is the advertising ID of the user. Of course the correct answer is to stop doing any sort of analytics, or anything else that requires a unique identifier. But the point I think the author is making is that that is a bad sol…

If you are doing analytics of your users (instead of measuring your advertising), then you can use IDFV and should not be using the IDFA. The IDFV should always be the same whenever your app looks at it, whereas the IDFA is subject to change depending on the user's privacy configuration.

IDFV would be perfect. Just need to be aware of one caveat, if the user deletes all apps from a developer (or is on another device) and reinstalls an app, the IDFV will be different. Seems like they could come up with a solution that hashes some company and user attributes to provide a consistent ID across all of a single developers apps.