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Comment by ugh123 | Hacker News Reader

>The new APIs are part of the StoreKit framework and include a new class called SKAdNetwork.

>With the new set of APIs, Apple will become the intermediary between the app and advertising network for conversion tracking, eliminating the need for apps to install third-party ad SDKs which potentially expose sensitive user data.

Am I missing something or is this not really any different than the 3rd party ad SDK problem the author portends? Whether the app uses a 3rd party sdk from Google/FB or built-in lib functionality via the class SKAdNetwork - it doesn't seem any different.

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You can’t track users from advertising click through opening the app after downloading the app from the App Store. So networks have to do all kinds of tricks like try to fingerprint the user to associate the advertising click and the app open.

This should make it much cleaner.

Plus after this has been around for a while Apple can add a policy banning other ad networks from using other means to track users.

Apple can just change Safari so it doesn't automatically open the App Store on redirects or from javascript. That way you'd have to direct the user to a tracking page and then he'd have to click another link to open the App Store. I doubt their tracking would be worth enough to put up hoops like that for the user to jump through.

Its proponents will tell you this doesn't have any tracking in it. Fully anonymous. Only the advert's ID gets passed along to track conversion.

Who knows who could have clicked this advert, with the ID "Advert-presented-to-ugh123"? Could have been anyone. We've successfully masked out any tracking, hooray for Apple.

Also I don't know enough about in-app and app-to-app advertising, but I'm surprised if the mechanisms described are sufficient to keep everybody honest.

My thoughts exactly! So, I programmatically name my campaigns per person, and I’ve still got perfect tracking.

The way I understand this: doing this in your application requires you to have network access, which means you have to convince your user to give it to you.

This gives you a way to count installs (and almost nothing else; you probably can assume arrival times correlate with time of installation and learn something about your global user base from that, but that’s all I can think of) without getting any permission from the user.

Applications can still use the old approach, but that’s more work and won’t produce accurate install counts. Apple thinks the end result will be that fewer apps will do it, making the dialog asking for network access rarer, and users more wary of giving the permission.

Apps on iOS don’t need to ask for network access.

the difference is: with facebook sdk, facebook has all the user data. with google sdk, google has all the user data. with apple new sdk, apple has all the data.

besides that, with the 2 previous sdk, advertisers know if the install was from a good user vs a abandoned user/bot that installed it once and vanished. the new apple sdk conveniently will not let advertisers make that distinction.

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