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“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

developer.apple.com

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Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#241

Post by hexane360 »

Fnoord wrote: post #64
gameswithgo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that all tracking and ads should be banned? that would be fantastic!

Then we can go back to the time where we simply paid for software with money instead of with privacy (such as tracking or PII) or time/focus (advertising). If there is one company of FAANG who's up for this task -and can beat Google at their game- it is Apple.

Why do we expect one of the other 4 oligopolists to save us?

Also, I have serious doubts that Apple can beat Google - and it certainly won't be "at their own game" (which is advertising).

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#242

Post by notatoad »

dawnerd wrote: post #214
crazygringo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong about it? "Because it's wrong" isn't really a response without something backing it up. That's what I'm asking -- what's the harm, where's the wrong? The harm in advertising is obvious. A harm from third-party analytics is not.

Analytics can be harmful too. Developers use it to make the app/game stickier, more attractive to children. Children also have no way of consenting or even knowing what analytics are. Not only that but there’s no knowing what happens to the analytics at third parties - regardless of their privacy policies. Basically all third party analytics are designed to build profiles and help marketing. Plenty of safe ways to tr…

>Developers use it to make the app/game stickier, more attractive to children

another way to phrase that is "developers use it to make the game more fun"

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#244

Post by paulcole »

move-on-by wrote: post #34

So far the only kids apps I've used with my little one is 'Sesame Street' and 'PBS Kids Video'. He loves Elmo, and its very handy in the pediatrician's waiting room to have a distraction. I also run a PiHole, and to my displeasure, I've found both these apps use Google Analytics. PBS Kids Video goes a few steps further and uses Google AdWords as well as ScorecardResearch analytics. These publicly funded apps are siph…

> These publicly funded apps are siphoning data about me and my little one off to 3rd parties.

If you need some pearls to clutch, there’s an app for that. Unfortunately it contains Google Analytics and ScorecardResearch analytics.

I mean how much can there be to know about a kid? Loves Elmo? Oh better show it ads for Elmo lmao.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#246

Post by S_A_P »

Here me out here- I equate apps with ads as predatory. The gut feeling from many apps/games is that the goal is to annoy you into paying. Many “free” games let you have one ‘turn’ and then force a 30-60 second ad on you that usually redirects you to the App Store to download some other affiliate app. Maybe I am the old man screaming get off my lawn, but when pc shareware was the rage you usually attempted to delight the user into parting with their money. Then I remember a shift in the late 90s where ad/malware started showing up in shareware. That effectively killed the shareware market for me. Rubberduck h30 was the app I remember as the culprit.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#247

Post by scarface74 »

crazygringo wrote: post #175

> Apps in the Kids Category may not include third-party advertising or analytics. Totally agreed for advertising... but analytics are essential to improving the quality and usability of apps including for kids, and they're a real cost to roll your own. Using third-party analytics is like using a third-party JPEG or MP3 decoder: it almost never makes sense spending 100's or 1,000's of hours writing your own. So I don'…

How hard is it really to add your own analytics? Isn’t it just logging what your users are doing and sync it to your server when you get a signal? I was writing stuff like this for enterprise field service Windows CE devices over a decade ago.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#248

Post by scarface74 »

jsnell wrote: post #172

Here's how I expect this to go: 1. Six months from now, Apple will announce a new ad network, which will be whitelisted for Kids apps. 2. Twelve months from now, they'll ban all non-Apple ad networks in kids apps. If they want to be subtle about it, I'm sure they'll find some inappropriate ad to use as a pretext. 3. 18 months from now, they'll open their ad network to all apps. 4. 24 months from now, they'll ban non-…

Apple failed at in app advertising so badly years ago, I doubt they will go down that road again.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#249

Post by xemdetia »

yawz wrote: post #97

This should be the standard across the board, but unfortunately we're too far from that. As a parent, it pisses me off to see not-age-appropriate advertisement shown to kids.

Yeah, part of me wonders if this is just more a reaction to the apps market hitting the next plateau and one of the last impulse growth markets being kids apps. Once there is a special category it should create a new breed of app that would inherently get less complaints/refunds/etc.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#250

Post by crazygringo »

scarface74 wrote: post #247
crazygringo wrote: post #175

> Apps in the Kids Category may not include third-party advertising or analytics. Totally agreed for advertising... but analytics are essential to improving the quality and usability of apps including for kids, and they're a real cost to roll your own. Using third-party analytics is like using a third-party JPEG or MP3 decoder: it almost never makes sense spending 100's or 1,000's of hours writing your own. So I don'…

How hard is it really to add your own analytics? Isn’t it just logging what your users are doing and sync it to your server when you get a signal? I was writing stuff like this for enterprise field service Windows CE devices over a decade ago.

Logging is easy.

Waiting for a connection and syncing reliably and testing that it works is a little harder -- annoying but not too bad.

Provisioning a database to store the data, maintain backups, index properly for queries etc., and maintain so it doesn't run out of space or degrade in performance as datasets grow by many orders of magnitude is an entirely separate skillset and harder still.

Visualizing it -- coming up with complex SQL queries and then dumping them into a graphing tool and overlapping different data series on the same graph -- will take forever. A big part of analytics is exploring and looking for patterns. The person with the business background doing the exploring probably isn't a programmer or a SQL expert. So a pre-built GUI for this is huge, and will be the hardest thing of all to program.

So, pretty hard.

Or... you can throw in a third-party tool with all of that, and have it all work in an hour or two.

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