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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand your point. How is Apple crushing Facebook as a competitor by allowing users to give proper consent to tracking.

I could understand if there was really an overlap somewhere, but I don't really see it. They have different business models, Apple doesn't have any social media property that compete with Facebook or Instagram and if Apple really wanted iMessage to crush WhatsApp they should at least show their interest in dominance by having an Android version of it.

Maybe they are competing on resources? but I don't see it either. They don't seem to be going after the same acquisitions.

Maybe Apple is doing this because pleasing or pissing off ad-based companies has no effect on their bottom line and they see it as a good marketing campaign to woo the privacy conscious an earn some brownie points for practically zero expense.

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First off, I agree with you that this change is a net positive for privacy.

However, let's not ignore the massive market for apps supported by ads. iOS developers had a way to be modestly compensated (without the Apple tax) in return for an app that is available to anyone for free. How much less profitable are ads going to be because people can opt-out of IDFA? I don't know. But I'm sure many developers are going to think twice about developing free apps for iOS.

Conspicuously, Apple also just reduced it's commission from 30% to 15% overnight for these developers. It seems to me like Apple really wants to nudge developers into creating paid apps. Is it because of privacy, or because it's better for Apple's bottom line? Probably both.

I'm glad Apple found a way to monetize privacy, but I didn't mind installing a free app with a few ads if I knew that I'd only use it a few times.

If Apple wanted free apps on their platform they'd make their SDK available for Linux, where thousands of developers would die for a chance to give free stuff to such a big market like Apple's even if Apple gives them nothing in return.

Your comment reads like Apple removed the ability of Facebook to monetize apps with advertising (which they didn't), and reads as if tracking users' every movement is the only way to advertise (which it isn't).

Furthermore, there are plenty of unjust/unethical systems in this world that - if dismantled - would cost the jobs of honest, hardworking people. That doesn't seem like a valid argument against the question of whether or not tracking people without their consent is itself unethical.

Edit: I want to bring up another point: You mention that using FB ads can allow developers to avoid the "Apple Tax." But not only does the Facebook Audience Network apply its own tax (via revenue share) to app developers, it also refuses to disclose that number! So if you monetize a free app with Facebook, you're paying an undisclosed Facebook tax. Given the Google tax for AdSense is 32%, it's likely that FB's secret tax is higher.

Those are all fair points. I was just speaking about incentives for a new iOS developer today. They might see the option to disable IDFA in addition to Apple's lowering of it's commission as a nudge towards creating a paid app over an ad-supported app in terms of choosing a business model.

I'm sure ad-supported apps are still going to exist, but the pros are a bit muddier now. The perceived devaluation of ads caused by removing IDFA, compounded by the lower Apple tax, are probably going to decrease the number of free apps in the App Store.

Actually a good thing for developers in my opinion.

The race-to-the-bottom with regard to price meant conditioned users to expect free - to be unwilling to pay even $0.99 for an app.

I would love to see free disappear completely from the AppStore.

I think this is common misunderstanding.

Imagine I had a free app, I was showing ads, when there was IDFA, Facebook audience network was pricing individuals, you had value $1 (for sake of argument lets say 10% chance to buy what is advertised) for some advertisement, I had maybe $0.01 (0.1% chance to buy).

Imagine I had 1000 users, 10 like you, 990 like me. Total value was $19.9 ( will net approx 2 sales )

Now we are a 1000 user pool with chance to buy (0.2%), and will be priced accordingly, will be like approx $0.02.

Actually nothing will be changed. Except, the middle man, facebook, will compete with other ad networks with commission, it means more revenue for developers. More privacy for consumers.

For advertisers, on bigger ones, there will be not much effect.

For smaller advertisers, there will be more work involved, but ad networks will manage that (from opt-in IDFA users). Ad networks eventually will discover you sources (apps you can advertise on positive ROI)

Eventually some small advertisers may have small disadvantage on this.

The real dirt behind the scenes is that Apple paid to have an evaluation of how much access was worth to Facebook, told Facebook to pay up or else. Facebook balked at the number, and now Apple is gonna cut them off. Just simple business.

Because Apple is worse, everything you do on the Apple platform has to be taxed, something like Italian mafia did in the past. Until things got heat in 2020, Apple wasn't even allowing payment competition in their iOS App Store. Think about that. Roman empire did the same with their provinces, wanna get romanised (civilised)? You got to pay the tax.

More so, Apple is #3 in the world in game revenue and guess what, Apple doesn’t even make games.

I can't buy an Apple device because of the ideology behind their products. Why expect Apple to put other storefronts on their platform? They have all the rights not to but this also implies that their ecosystem is less liberal, which is also fine. They made the OS and the device. If you hate the App Store, don’t use iOS. It's simple. They run 1984 ads but they are the core of 1984.

There is basically no reason for not providing an OS interface for others to build their own storefronts on your platform. Android showed that it's possible, there's no excuse. Period.

I'd rather pay the apple tax (money) than the google/facebook tax (my data and privacy).

I'm not using Google and Facebook either. I've restricted the traffic from my router to their domains. I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store. I use Yahoo for mails. DuckDuckGo as preferred search engine. Only WhatsApp (which is owned by Facebook unfortunately) and Discord for social stuff. My browser of choice is Edge. I don't pay oligarchs. Show me respect and openess, I will use your products. Restric my freedom, I will give you the middle finger. Also, I own Twitter and Medium fake accounts.

> I have a Samsung phone, using Samsung's store... I don't pay oligarchs.

Have you come across criticism of the chaebol system or Samsung as a company before? It’s pretty intense what has been going on and what Samsung has been convicted of doing. The wikis give a good overview.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung

Thanks for sharing, I will go through those wikis. As an user it treats my right. I have the freedom I desire when I'm using their products. And I also get quality among other things. Something that I can't say about Chinese brands, though I've owned Huawei, Xiamoi and ZTE phones before.

I feel like this happens on HN all the time. You make this really grandiose display about all these choices you've made while ignoring that 99.9% of the people using these products are clearly not as informed or aware as you are about the ins and outs of the technologies they're using. That's literally why Apple is pushing for user consent and for users being informed. Not everyone has the same experience you do.

Samsung is actually a company that was specifically called out for bypassing permissions that you denied them. They would dig through the logs of other applications on the filesystem, look through EXIF tags on the files on your camera roll, etc in order to scrape information that they'd send back to Samsung to sell.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/facebook-scraping-call-m...

https://www.xda-developers.com/android-permissions-bypass-pl...

These spyware kits are hardcoded into the first-party apps on Samsung phones that you cannot remove without replacing it with a custom ROM.

Samsung is also the point of the spear on pushing advertising into their television sets and scraping your viewing for marketing purposes.

Buying Samsung products is as bad as using Google or Facebook products in terms of your privacy.

I don't want to pay the Apple tax.

It’s a good thing nobody forced you to buy one, then.

None of this is hidden though. We have the absolute choice of not using Apple products. Simple. None of this seems relevant to the discussion at hand either. We can definitely disagree with two companies at the same time.

Facebook is objecting to allowing people to know that they're being tracked everywhere by them. Lots of people don't really understand how that works. I think this is a good thing Apple is doing in this particular case.

Let's not be apologetic towards oligarchs. Apple had broken EU privacy law by allowing iPhones to track users for advertising purposes without obtaining consent. Apple is doing the rIgHt ThInG just because they got caught. Facebook is complaining because Apple got caught and now their revenue has to suffer.

>>> None of this is hidden though

are you sure about this? "Apple blocks Facebook update that called out 30-percent App Store ‘tax’" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24301332]

disclaimer: I work for fb

“I work for fb“

Does any of this make you want to reconsider that?

When 50% of my customers (in the US) have an iPhone, there's no choice for me, the developer, but to deal with Apple.

If I were marketing to youths, I'd have to deal with Apple's 90% market share among my customers!

In this particular case I don't care because FB is garbage IMO but the point stands - Apple has too much power in the US and we need to force them to allow third party app stores.

> None of this is hidden though.

It absolutely is hidden. Apps are not allowed to be transparent with the user, for how much money is being taken by Apple, directly in the app purchase screen.

That is against the app store TOS, to show as a line item, the cost of the Apple cut.

The Zuckerberg defence: “but Apple stuff is expensive; surely that has to be immoral, right?”. As if it had anything to do with this issue.

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