New iPhone Dev Agreement Bans the Use of Third-Party Analytics and Services | Hacker News Reader

New iPhone Dev Agreement Bans the Use of Third-Party Analytics and Services

erickerr.com

133 pointserickerr54 comments

This is just not fair to developers.

Apple is changing the rules half way through the game, to the benefit of nobody.

I can't think of a developer OR end user who will be better off as a result of this decision. It's an innovation stifler and I can't understand why they are doing it.

This kills location aware 3rd party advertising.

As the article also says, looks like this will wipe out SimpleGeo. A sad day.

They are changing the rules, yes, but they are changing it along with a new set of circumstances. With multitasking support coming, the consequences for user tracking is growing. Considering Apple's zealous focus on user experience, I can see how they would want to manage the exposure of third party marketers to their users.

Nope, sorry. This has very little if anything to do with the user.

Apple wanted to buy Admob, but Google got them instead. This change will prevent Admob ads from being well targeted on iPhone, and will prop up their (assumed to be upcoming) rebranded Quattro mobile ads.

This smacks of anti-competitive practices. (That is, assuming Quattro ads are allowed to use location aware targeting.)

Anti-competitive tactics are entirely legal unless they have a good chance of resulting into, or furthering a monopoly.

I have never seen "anti-competitive" being used in a positive light. A quick search shows it has mainly been used by prosecutors and plaintiffs to describe their adversary.

You don't need to believe me though, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices (We can /all/ trust wikipedia, right?) "Barriers to entry" is relevant.

Read the Sherman's Act instead of Wikipedia, it's quite unambiguous about this subject.

Thanks for the tip. European law is relevant in this case as well, and I'm not sure it requires a strict monopoly over the market. That said, clearly if iPhones were a small part of the mobile ad platforms, nobody would care if Apple limited the ads that could be shown on them. I don't think that's the case though.

The point I was trying to make was: If we switched this around, and Microsoft had the number one smartphone, and they did something like this, regulators (though you're right, probably not American ones) would have them bent over a table.

Yet this is completely fair to consumers who buy the application. Some welcome protection for them against unscrupulous developers or ad agencies.

This change of the rules makes a ton of sense; with location-aware backgrounding (applications waking up and getting a notice when you change locations), it would be very easy for an agency to track where you're going and in turn sell it to someone else to make a quick buck.

But, somehow, as a consumer, I don't get any protection against Apple.

Hmm.

With something like $30 billion in cash in the bank, Apple's one of the companies that I'm not worried about selling information in order to make a quick buck. After all, aren't people always saying that Microsoft should use the privacy angle against Google? Why not Apple as well?

Generally companies don't get $30 billion in cash by turning down opportunities to make money.

Umm, did you bother reading Apple's financials before tossing out that piece of FUD? The vast bulk of Apple's financials, and that $30 billion in cash, comes from hardware sales. Call me crazy, but i think it makes sense to protect a profit source from unsavory types building who-knows-what from data collected in the background.

Hardware with their software on top of it, and their experience all around. Remove the software on top of it, and you have hardware that is priced much higher than it should be.

Naturally. If you remove half of a product while keeping the same price, it's bound to be overpriced. Software isn't free (unless it is free...).

Keep in mind what I'm replying to. The argument is that 'bulk' of the money Apple makes is from hardware sales. Remove the hardware sales, and Apple doesn't make much money. My argument is that if you removed the software, they wouldn't be making the hardware sales. People aren't buying Apple for the hardware. They are buying it for the complete package.

Even you admit as much by suggesting they are removing half the product.

If you have $30 billion in cash, chances are that you have somewhat of a reputation. Apple definitely does. That repuation is worth far more to the company than a couple hundred thousand or a few million that an agency could offer.

However, if you're a small firm that might be struggling to survive and is somewhat lacking in the morals department ("Is it illegal? No? Then why not? We need the money."), that same money looks far more attractive.

Ummm... who exactly are these "unsavory developers"? This is starting to feel like a bad political ad.

I never mentioned developers. I mentioned agencies. As in, advertising agencies. They already (or used to) sell email addresses to spammers. It isn't far fetched to imagine selling location-based data as well. That sort of information is far more valuable than an email.

someone has never heard of crush offers...

It would also be very easy for you to uninstall the app. This is possible on my droid but I haven't really run in to it. If I were worried, I probably wouldn't install the app.

"to the benefit of nobody"

Apple is benefitting. Apple is right to look out for their own interests - they should behave in ways that are good for them, long-term. If you think Apple's actions aren't good for it, fine, but remember that you don't have all the information they do.

If customers don't like Apple's policies, they are free to competitor's product. If developers don't like Apple's policies, they are free to develop for another platform.

I love Apple's products, and I'm going to continue using and buying them.

Good for the first one: I don't want joe's random app sending tracking data on me to ned's random service provider to sell to anyone with 50 cents.

The second one doesn't prevent analytics. Device Data is a keyword in the contract…

"Device Data" means data or information regarding the characteristics or usage of a particular device, including but not limited to UDID, crash logs, OS version, carrier name, hardware model, installed applications and application usage data.

… so you can't provide a vector for a third party, not bound by your agreement to respect the user's privacy, to loot the device of useful information. Good! You are allowed to collect and use this data, you just have to respect applicable privacy laws and handle notice and consent according to the contract.

The key is, you can't bind some random analytics firm. If you include code that dumps that out to a third party firm they are free to do whatever they want.

So create a UUID the first time you run, send only that to the analytics firm. Leave the Device Data alone. I suspect this would pass, though it is possible it would fail under the "application usage data" section.

One could imagine some extreme interpretation where Apple is trying to prevent any information about which apps are installed being divulged to anyone, but there are so many unaddressed vectors (e.g. loading an ad from an ad server) that it seems unlikely.

I was (if not sympathetic, at least) understanding until this.

At what point do all these restrictions start becoming truly anti-competitive? Locking out 3rd party tools and services in favor of in-house products, and this one now including the actual revenue-generating ones.

If you start to view the App Store as a collection of markets (e.g. for development tools, application niches, ancillary services like ads, analytics, web services, etc), rather than just a vendor-specific platform, where Apple's own products compete with other vendors', the analogies to Microsoft are becoming clearer:

- iPhone OS/App Store => Windows

Markets analogous to Internet Explorer vs. Opera/Firefox:

- iAd vs AdMob

- iBooks vs Kindle (an example where they're actually allowing competition!)

- Phone.app vs Google Voice

- MobileSafari vs Opera/FF

- ObjC runtime vs Flash runtime (this one stretches it a bit, but not that far)

Whereas MS's anti-competitive actions involved threatening OEMs, Apple is exercising actual contractual control over what Apps/services can participate in the market, Period. That should certainly qualify as anti-competitive behavior.

I understand the angst that this is causing, considering the news from yesterday, but really, who wants their location data sold to some 3rd party for the purpose of ad targeting? Not me! I think this is a good move for consumers, despite the negative impact it may have on some application developers (ad networks).

The location data is a little iffy, but defensible. The real problem is the third-party analytics clause.

Ad companies are, at their core, analytics companies. By understanding your audience, you serve higher-potency ads, which means you can charge more for their placement, and developers have a higher incentive to use them. Companies like Google and AdMob are analytics companies. By understanding an audience, they can serve relevant content (ads). If they can't understand the audience because collection of metrics is prohibited, then their ability to act as an effective ad provider is massively diminished. Ad revenues dive through the floor and advertisers stop using the platform.

Enter iAd. We can provide you with detailed user analytics and possibly even that coveted location data. Thanks to the new iPhone user agreement, we can even tell you what size underwear a user wears, and how many eggs they had for breakfast. We will give you returns on your ads that you have never before dreamed of. Stop using those wimpy ad companies that can't give you an ROI on their blind-targeted ads to save their life. Use iAd and make more money for us.

It's very difficult to interpret this as anything but a move aimed to invalidate other advertising platforms on the iPhone, in order to make room for iAd as the only viable choice.

That's pretty unambiguous. The subtext there is "Thou shalt not use anything except iAd" (since companies like AdMob are as much analytics as they are ads). Gonna be really interesting to see how this shakes out.

What's funny here is that in many respects, Apple is treating App Developers as if they are full on Apple employees, and yet without any of the actual benefits of employment.

Who writes the checks makes the rules, and ultimately, for apps, it's consumers that write the checks and consumers that benefit from this change.

Consumers don't write Facebook's checks, companies like Offerpal do: http://www.businessinsider.com/offerpal-coincidentally-repla...

So the differences between Apple's users' data policies and Facebook's become clearer.

Meanwhile, to receive the money, obey the rules. It's simple.

Good. The alternative is a managerie of different ad networks all collecting sensitive data about me. I'm unambiguously in favor of Apple not allowing new location-aware ad tracking networks.

Except, of course, their own ad network.

Better one than ten.

Uh, why? Competition generally works out well for the consumer.

You are not a consumer in this case. The buyer of your mined personality profile is.

I meant in the sense that I have to look at the ads, and if one ad network is particularly obnoxious, I'd like developers to have alternatives to put in their apps.

But in the sense you're talking about - if you care about someone buying your "mined personality profile", wouldn't you rather have 10 incomplete profiles out there than 1 really accurate one?

No, I would not rather have information about where I was every hour of the day scattered around ten different places. I would much rather it be at only one place, especially if that place already has my credit card info.

I've heard this criticism a lot and it always perplexes me, because it's completely divorced from the reality of how mobile ads are bought and sold.

Right now the mobile ad market can work with your approximate age, your gender, your location down to the city level at most, and very high-level interests derived from the site or app you happen to be using at the time. Anything else is too finely grained to sell meaningful volumes of advertising against and therefore not wanted.

I'm guessing people take the reality of the online ad market and falsely assume the mobile market is there as well.

I don't care what they're doing with the data today. I'd rather they didn't have it at all. I directly benefit from this decision.

Except for the whole classification of apps (Free) that are going to be squeezed by this. By eliminating competition, Apple gets to decide just how profitable (if at all) app companies are going to be.

This isn't good for anyone but Apple.

It would be interesting to know how coarse the data exposed to mobile ad providers is -- does anyone have any experience here?

Were I implementing mobile ads, the precise location would stay on the device, and the information sent to the ad server would be city or at least zip level.

I agree. I find these clauses to be the exact opposite of 3.3.1, they are ethical and they show a laudable concern for a user's data and privacy. A welcome stance in this day and age.

That's not true, as a developer I'm well within my right to collect every piece of data I can get my hands on. That being said, I personally never would.

Apple is just banning the competition for analysis of said data so they can be the only game in town and "control the user experience" as they like to call it. I wouldn't be surprised if iAd included an analytics dashboard when it's released to the public.

As a developer, you are well within your right to understand the rules. I think Apple is doing a good job of protecting its users from money-hungry developers -- Facebook is a good example of what can go wrong.

So, does this mean that I can't use something like MixPanel to track activities users make in my apps? I'm not so fluent in legalese... What if I don't track any "user-specific" data... just tracking aggregate events like "how many people clicked this button in this part of the app today"?

This just keeps getting better. Although it's worth noting that none of these policy changes actually make a practical difference; Apple has always reserved the right to reject your app for any or no reason. They're now just making it obvious that they intend to do so for blatantly anticompetitive purposes, as opposed to purposes that could plausibly be defended as benefitting users.

Is Apple just trying to regain control over every possible facet of the app store? Banning all third-party analytics from apps sounds huge, so if I am missing something then please enlighten me. I thought the location-based data verbiage was just one example of something not allowed.

This would affect far more than just ad companies, right? I understand that's probably a motivating factor, but wouldn't this incorporate an even larger subset of third party analytics companies (like Flurry / Pinch Media for example)? The purpose of those companies is not the same purpose as the app itself which rules them out. It could depend on the definition of "User Data" and "Device Data" in the agreement, I suppose.

Third party gaming tools would seem to be safe at least.

"User Data" means personal information, user location data, user content (e.g., address book contacts, SMS messages, photos and calendar events) and/or Device Data obtained by You or Your Application from a user of Your Application or from such user's iPhone OS Product.

---

Many third-party gaming tools do collect UDID (or a hash derived from the UDID) since this is the only common identifier available across applications, due to sandboxing.

Interpreted liberally, this affects anything that makes an HTTP request to a third-party, since the application name ('application usage data') and the IP address ('user location data') is in the headers.

the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited

I guess this is the Admob killer clause? Goes along nicely with the Adobe Flash killer clause...

"You think you're going to buy AdMob, eh? Well, I've got good news and bad news."

It sounds like someone should create a self-hosted iPhone analytics software package. Perhaps one of the existing companies will release their software as open source.

I think Jobs is one paranoid mofo. If analytics is stored on 3rd party servers then Google might decide to buy that company and their data and gain some insight into the Apple app ecosystem. Launching Apple's own ad network and I hope their own analytics system keeps all the data in their walled gardens. I don't really care as long as I have some kind of app analytics.

Wouldn't this also ban OpenFeint as the leading competitor to apple's new Game Center?

Oh, Apple, your transformation is complete.

How long until Apple disbands the senate and declares martial law?

Watch out for Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.

hm, so this might be why apple hasn't approved my flurry analytics app yet...

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