Specifically, is tracking inside of a single app/property acceptable?
So much mobile tracking is added due to a lack of real HTTPS links (in mobile called deferred deep links). To just know whether a user from link X did or did not open the app.
Happy to chat with people opposed or pro, feel free to reach out for a longer discussion.
If you have any kind of unique identifier for the user (UUID, etc) and do not ask for consent before processing their data (tracking them), then this is a clear breach of privacy law.
If you get explicit consent (that means the user understands what they're consenting to) before you process their data (so no setting up identifiers and then showing a popup), then you're in the clear.
If you put unique identifiers in the link the user clicks so you can see if the user opened your app, then you need to ask for consent before generating the link.
And of course, apps/services should all function if the user doesn't provide consent. "Give consent to enter" is explicitly illegal.
Theoretically, you could build something like this, but it's not what advertisers want, because they want to track their users without interrupting the conversion flow with a yes/no popup "do you want company Y to know you installed app X because of them".
That was also the interpretation I got from this, but it's hard for me to understand how this is expected to work for any analytics unless the idea is just that every app has a consent popup to use in the EU?
Let's say you wanted to avoid the consent popup and stay within EU law. Wouldn't any analytics you collect from your app would be meaningless to the point of absurdity? This is an honest question, not trying to just make my own point.
1.) use custom product pages. Users need to have a device with iOS 18, but if they do you can now assign a URL to a custom product page, and the app will receive this URL on first launch. Only works for a small number of static links because you can't dynamically create custom product pages. Good for thinks like influencer campaigns if you have a small number of influencers (e.g. a YouTube channel you support), and since iOS 18 adoption is high enough now this has very recently become a viable method.
2.) use an App Clip. I do this for referral links in my app. The user launches the App Clip, and because the App Clip can receive an invocation URL, you can store that in a shared group container - that's a shared data space between your App Clip and your app. Most users don't know what an App Clip is, so to avoid confusion and make your users assume that they already downloaded the app when in fact they didn't, I recommend just making it a single page with a download button. You can try this flow here (it's a referral link for my app); make sure to open the link on an iOS device, otherwise you will see a fallback website telling you to install the app first: https://tape.it/user_referral/1
No.
Tracking is explicitly not permitted unless you receive an informed consent from the user.