Comment by lbacaj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbacaj | Hacker News Reader

To clarify, outside of the CDN providers or AWS calls and the big 3 (Facebook, Google, Apple), the vast majority of the calls seem to be to marketing providers or developer tools

Branch - these guys provide deep links into phones and tools to analyze who clicked on the links and if they worked.

mParticle, Appsflyer, Braze formerly Appboy, Appboy all provide internal app marketing teams tools like mobile push or analytics from the app on the phone.

While NewRelic, letsencrypt (free SSL certificates), crashalytics etc are all developer tools to monitor usage and issues with your app.

In summary majority are 3 classes of traffic: CDNs which cache data, Marketing tools such as deep linking analytics etc, and finally developer tools.

Seems like a missed opportunity for Apple and Google to allow users to opt in or out but send data back to one place and then push that out to all these guys so the phone isn’t sending the same data over and over to so many partners and wasting battery.

With regard to your last paragraph: that would probably be an excellent application of Ben Thompson's aggregation theory. It would increase Apple and Google's moat by making them the hardware gatekeeper for all mobile app analytics. And battery life is also a strong cover for the business reasons for doing it.

But the public claim, "it saves battery life!" would not make it defensible for most analytics companies, in my opinion. That would mean Google and Apple get duplicated access to just about all mobile analytics data in the world overnight. They already get vast data from the mobile phones through telemetry and their own apps; I think the largest third party analytics providers would revolt. They would all be at the mercy of Apple and Google's benevolence, which is basically backing their business into a corner. You don't want to be reliant on the whims of a giant tech company.

There are probably also some (maybe weak) anti-trust arguments against it, because all analytics other than e.g. Google Analytics become literal second class citizens on the phone. That would basically be telling app developers they're not allowed to send requests to specific hosts within their apps, only Apple and Google can do that (on their respective phones).

So I don't know if this is a missed opportunity, so much as Apple and Google realizing it would burn their walled gardens to the ground.

How would it burn anything to the ground? What would a revolt of 3rd party analytics providers even look like, and why would Google or Apple care?

I think it would at least create a lot of hostility between Google/Apple, the developer ecosystem and the analytics industry. Third party analytics companies could have their lunch eaten entirely because Google/Apple have greater resources than them and would know how to obviate them using their own infrastructure. I could see very expensive lawsuits being brought against Google/Apple for doing this, or increased pressure for third party app stores or nontraditional app distribution channels.

In the short term you're probably right, nothing would "burn" except a lot of developer good will. But in the long term it'd be a great way to get many different parties thinking hard about how to get off your platform or replace you.

I think it would at least create a lot of hostility between Google/Apple, the developer ecosystem and the analytics industry.

Twitter wiped out dev support even more completely than is suggested here, and it hasn't really hurt them aside from some persistent grumbles.

Those are all great points.

I was not thinking about the anti-trust implications by not allowing folks to send data back but perhaps there is a middle ground.

It could also increase transparency for consumers by allowing the opt in opt out on the device for each app and letting customers know “this app is tracking your clicks on it”.

The one point about them essentially getting all data, don’t you think they are already doing this? Look at the amount of calls the iPhone is doing back to Apple or the amount of data Android is shipping to Google. I believe they literally are already doing all of it, this would just be a way to give developers access to what they want transparently and reduce the number of unnecessary calls, all the calls would still happen but server side.

>think the largest third party analytics providers would revolt

Would anyone care? I don't think a game company is going to refuse to publish on iTunes or Google Play because some tool they use for analytics stops working.

Nothing against analytics companies, but they just aren't a relevant party in Apple's (or Google's) ecosystem.

> Would anyone care? I don't think a game company is going to refuse to publish on iTunes or Google Play because some tool they use for analytics stops working.

I don't see why these companies can't simply push all analytics to their own servers then out to the analytics company, bypassing apple/google.

Most of the biggest mobile games companies have custom analytics engines and likely do this anyway.

That doesn't really solve the battery life / analytics duplication problem.

Furthermore, from experience, duplication within a single app often happens all on its own because, say, different departments use different toolchains with different integrations, thus want different analytics providers and it's easier to just have the app send to both. It's inefficiencies all the way down because the only one to really pay for this is the user, and the user doesn't know they're paying for this (be it in battery life, PII leakage, etc).

As a developer knowing the ability of some of these developer tools they have the same ability to log sensitive privacy data as marketing tools. All tools that log to a central server have a high potential of abuse and should have similar oversite to prevent abuse.

>letsencrypt (free SSL certificates)

Wait, what? How would a client app get SSL certs from letsencrypt?

And what does a client need with a CA-signed cert?

Likely that OP used the browser on their mobile phone alongside other apps

CDN providers cross over into analytics and tracking.

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