Mobile Dev Memo

It pops up a big scary per-app dialog (https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/image-12.png) that the app wants to “track you across apps and websites owned by other companies”.

I just wish people understood how much they’re being manipulated by Apple’s marketing here. Credit to them: they’re the best in the world —- if Tim Cook decided to sell cigarettes, he’d have most of us on two packs a day and believing it’s good for us by Christmas.

Apple is a giant corporation, they’re not your friend. They can be total jerks when it suits them. They happen to have failed at their own advertising network and had the brilliant idea to spin this as if they “care” about your “privacy”. It is a convenience of the moment to sell more devices like the iPad Pro I’m typing this on.

The level of rhetoric has reached foaming-at-the-mouth proportions, and we can no longer have a rational discussion that acknowledges the nuances. Even the word “tracking” is so loaded with evil connotations and indistinguishable in most people’s minds from the ever-cited, rarely existent “selling my personal information” that few can see beyond the word to make a conscious choice about what level of tracking is acceptable. (NONE! I can already hear the shouting.)

IDFA is a random identifier that’s been used for attribution and audience targeting (for which Apple provided it). Digital advertising has a fairly unique property, which is that it’s possible (at least sometimes) to connect the dots…

>One big privacy issue is that there is no sane way to protect your contact details from being sold, regardless of what you do.

>As soon as your cousin clicks "Yes, I would like to share the entire contents of my contacts with you" when they launch TikTok your name, phone number, email etc are all in the crowd.

Fortunately this is changing with iOS 18 with "limited contacts" sharing.

https://mobiledevmemo.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/image.png

The interface also seems specifically designed to push people to allow only a subset of contacts, rather than blindly clicking "allow all".

The far bigger issue is the contact info you share with online retailers. Scraping contact info through apps is very visible, drawing flak from the media and consumers. Most of the time all you get is a name (could be a nickname), and maybe some combination of phone/email/address, depending on how diligent the person in filling out all the fields. On the other hand placing any sort of order online requires you to provide your full name, address, phone number, and email address. You can also be reasonably certain that they're all accurate, because they're plausibly required for delivery/billing purposes. Such data can also be surreptitiously fed to data brokers behind the scenes, without an obvious "tiktok would like access to your contacts" modal.

Sources? Otherwise it’s just speculation, which I’ve heard isn't generally worth considering.

FWIW, I work on a national news media app and advertising CPMs are down considerably year over year thanks to Apple's ATT update, so advertising is not the driver for these business as much as it once was. Many are looking to subscription revenue to fill the void, but even that's not enough to cover the loss.

I know less about the linear (TV) and print distribution side of the business, but my guess is they're also struggling given that their target demo is getting older and older while younger cohorts aren't adopting these legacy distribution channels. https://mobiledevmemo.com/att-is-killing-advertising-performance-six-tactics-for-adapting-to-the-new-advertising-landscape/

You're correct in that "if it bleeds it leads"; people are fixated by bad news.

I can say anecdotally after living in both NYC and right-leaning rural NY and PA areas where the crime and poverty rates are statistically higher that it's cleaner and these issues aren't as apparent, so something isn't adding up.

Here's a link from Sept 2020 about how this was expected long in advance: https://mobiledevmemo.com/what-will-googles-deprecation-of-gaid-look-like/ The key word here is "consensus". He's reporting that others held this expectation, not just himself. This step by Google does not yet go as far as predicted; there is a big difference between a modal opt-in/opt-out and an opt-out in settings.

Here's a link speculating on the impact of Apple's IDFA deprecation on Facebook, from January: https://mobiledevmemo.com/facebook-may-take-revenue-hit-from-apple-privacy-changes/ It carries strong parallels to what is in-process at Google.

A few ad experts I follow say that Facebook and Google will claim increasing dominance in the ad space. Their logic is that as each ad vendor loses third party information, comparative advantage will favor companies with strong first party information. This will drive more ads toward Facebook as a relative share, even if they are still losing overall. I have no information to judge to what extent this claim holds.

> The fact that ByteDance spent aggressively on user acquisition to grow TikTok has been common knowledge for years: at one point, the company spent an estimated $3MM per day on acquisition marketing in the United States alone, and the company is purported to have spent roughly $1BN on advertising over the course of 2018

https://mobiledevmemo.com/tiktoks-billion-dollar-secret-that-wasnt/

Stratospheric rise, yes. But I question how market driven this actual rise was, who exactly provided the funds to spend $2bn over a few years to make TikTok a large brand.

Is it a "cultural phenomenon" and "geopolitical flashpoint" when an app with that much firepower takes off?

I consider these cop-out answers, but Stratechery [0] and Money Stuff [1] are excellent. I'm bewildered daily by Matt Levines ability to write. Mobile Dev Memo is pretty good and follows mainly the mobile ad industry [2].

Apologies for the self-promotion, but in case any tech minded finns are reading this, I write a daily news letter about tech in finnish called Transistori [3].

[0]: https://stratechery.com/

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine

[2]: https://mobiledevmemo.com/

[3]: https://www.transistori.com/