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Comment by marketingtech | Hacker News Reader

Not just Facebook, but the entire $80 billion mobile app advertising industry. [edit] To clarify, I'm referring to Apple crippling ads that drive net new app installs, not the ability to monetize your app via ads.

The privacy angle is completely justified, but I think Apple is underestimating the second order effects here. Significantly fewer apps will be installed, harming both the developer ecosystem and Apple's App Store profits.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/24/apple-j...

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Apps that Apple profits from, the paid apps, do not rely on ads. Apple does not profit from free apps that are monetized by ads.

I'm referring to the ability of paid apps to drive installs. These are ads that drive TO the App Store and generate paid app installs that are being crippled. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

Perhaps it’s my profile but all ads I get for apps is pay to win scam games. Surely Apple profits from these but I don’t think that’s the kind of profits Apple is after.

Those are the apps that will run more ads if targeting is crippled. They take a spray-and-pray approach by buying up all the cheap, untargeted inventory. If you see a lot of them, that means you probably aren't being tracked by the ad network.

That’s an excellent incentive to stop using the apps that are displaying the bad ads.

The apps that fail to track me?

There are plenty of non-advertising app discovery channels with substantially higher signal/noise ratio.

I am not concerned in the least, in fact, it will like drive quality up.

> Significantly fewer apps will be installed

Surely an app containing fewer ads would make people _more_ likely to install them, not less?

There will be fewer companies able to afford ads to drive installs for their apps.

IDFA trades privacy for market efficiency. It's used by ad networks to allow me to optimize for either the cheapest or most valuable installs, and validate that my marketing spend is actually driving these behaviors with an acceptable ROI.

Without it, ad networks will be much less effective and it will cost developers at least 2x to drive the same number of installs.

IDFA has obvious privacy flaws, but Apple is making a mistake by crippling it without offering a privacy-safe alternative (and several of those have been proposed by the industry).

Driving installs is a giant business that also needs to die. At a previous employer we took one small app we had maybe at #150 in travel in the App Store. We paid $10K to some app install driver company as a test. I watched as people in countries we did no business in downloaded the app in droves and pushed it to #1 in travel in 24hrs - then the money ran out and we were back at #150 in a couple of days.

The company that we were sold to by our parent company did the same thing on a regular basis and kept their main app in the top 5 for years. Not sure if they do it today (this was 6+ years ago).

I wish Apple would find a way to stop these artificial App Store hacks (maybe they have I no longer pay much attention since our app's downloads do not affect our business).

So... we get less low-quality, hardly works, just barely passes the App Store rules crapware, and less privacy worries?

Sounds like a win-win.

> without offering a privacy-safe alternative (and several of those have been proposed by the industry).

Do you have any examples/links? genuinely curious

Here are the working proposals for the privacy-safe replacements for 3rd-party cookies on web. This conversation has been happening in public for over a year. Mobile will likely follow similar solutions, but Apple accelerated the timeline of IDFA deprecation and caught the industry off guard. https://github.com/w3c/web-advertising

People complain that the App Store has too many apps already. If so, then a reduction could be a net positive.

What's a good example of a specific app that will be hurt from this?

Generally speaking, any app you haven't heard of yet is now at a disadvantage.

Specifically, this would have crushed rising giants like TikTok and Wish who each have spent over a billion on app install ads before they reached escape velocity.

There are thousands of medium sized apps that try every day to reach to new users, and now it will be more expensive (potentially prohibitively expensive) to do so.

This is simply false. Good quality apps that are worth people’s time, are also worth people’s money and word of mouth.

The reason we don’t have as many of these as we otherwise could is precisely because of the incentives of this ad-driven merry-to-round.

Would the world be worse off without TikTok?

> This is simply false. Good quality apps that are worth people’s time, are also worth people’s money and word of mouth.

Yes. Clearly you are currently aware of every good quality software product in existence, and all their creators are all comfortably rolling in money.

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