Recently, we covered the release of Apple’s latest privacy-centric feature – App Tracking Transparency. The new feature was released as a part of the iOS 14.5 update. While the majority of users were able to use it straight away, some users reported that the option to enable App Tracking Transparency was greyed out for them.
According to the report by analytics firm AppFigures, more than 10,000 iOS apps have already made the changes necessary to comply with the new changes. All these apps now ask users if they want to share their personal data with advertisers and let them track user behavior. The data was collected by identifying apps that have used the Identification for Developer (IDFA) tags according to the company’s latest guidelines. However, it is still just a fraction of the app available on the Apple App Store, which currently has more than 2 million apps.
If we take a closer look at the niches of the ATT following app list, almost twenty percent of the total apps are game developers or games. Other categories comprising utility, entertainment, shopping, and news app stand at brought six percent. Facebook nearly sued Apple over the App Tracking Transparency feature, saying it would hurt their revenue greatly. Social Media apps hardly count for the five percent, since most of their revenue comes from advertising itself.
Apple has introduced its own toolkit with a focus on user privacy for developers whose main source of revenue was based on advertising and user tracking. Using the SKAdNetwork and the Privacy Click Measurement, users are anonymously tagged and therefore information can be safely retrieved without revealing sensitive information.
Having said that, users who have the option greyed out are already protected from the prying eyes of advertisers thanks to Apple’s new policy. If you are wondering how the company did that, we should remind you that users have to explicitly give apps permissions to track them. In other words, no prompt equals no user information.
