Jesus I hate being A/B tested without my consent. Particularly, why is Apple of all places doing this, given their otherwise strong track record of standing up for their users in regard to tracking and other bullshit by major players?!
The App Store is a joke.
All that said, it’s still currently way better than other big tech - but I am not blindly accepting their behaviour, for now its good enough for me but that can change in the future
From what we can tell, This here is not a trial connected to revenue. It’s connected to Siri and other ML-frameworks, but not to, say, the Apple Store or Music applications.
Mark my words in two or three years Apple will ban developers from using third party A/B testing frameworks and require them to use the Apple-provided solution based on triald.
And some of the differentiation that IS being done is not A/B testing in the usual sense of the word. i.e. if one particular hardware model needs a different version of an asset, those models can be assigned to a separate set, but that does not really make it an A/B test.
Users, particularly those who paid thousands of dollars for the hardware, are not guinea pigs.
The alternative to A/B testing in UX design is not some more rigorous trial with fully-informed consent. Instead, it‘s the older and still predominant mechanism of “let’s just change it”.
Consent in medical tests is important because it involves a ‘B’ that is a substance or procedure that has not (yet) been shown to be safe & effective. The trial is less restrictive than the alternative scenario, where it would be illegal to just treat you with ‘B’.
None of that applies: both the A and B in A/B tests are software versions, for which there are zero legal requirements. Neither version will have an impact on your health or kill you, which cannot always be said for untested pharmaceuticals. A tailor is absolutely free to suggest dark navy to one customer and anthracite to the next, even if they flip a coin to decide and/or mentally take note of what customers like.
The possible harm from A/B testing is the maximum of the harms of A and B. If you wouldn’t complain about either alternative, there is no legitimate reason to complain about the combined A/B harm.
> None of that applies: both the A and B in A/B tests are software versions, for which there are zero legal requirements.
There should be, that is my point.
All that A/B testing and the constant other changes even in minor patch versions only lead to update hesitancy in people, which in turn leads to security issues because people don't update their software because they don't want to be disrupted in their workflows.
Not to mention that most A/B testing is essentially pseudoscience at best if not outright fraud that's being peddled by people wanting to sell A/B testing "solutions", or the implications on user privacy because of the mandatory phone-home.
FWIW this is what made Microsoft so big in the corporate world: for decades you could expect that nothing major would change, you would not need to re-train your employees or buy new software. That changed with Windows XP (although it was easy to roll back at least the optical changes) and got exponentially worse with the utter crap that is Windows 11.
If I pay for a product, I expect to be treated with respect. Being turned into a guinea pig to save on feedback cost isn't being respectful. Doing so without notice or consent is even worse.
There's no law against it, of course, but that doesn't mean it's good or even okay.
If it in anyway restricts bandwidth or causes other harms, eg uses up the last of your HDD space causing an issue, then that's an additional crime according to UK law.
These laws shouldn't just be applied to individuals.
Citation needed, Apple have an advertising identifier built into the os to help advertisers track you, they share analytics about how you use their os by default, they analyse the data you store with them in iCloud.
I know Google, Microsoft, Amazon they all do these anti-user things thats not my point, my point is that Apple say they have a strong track record of standing up for their users and their users believe them regardless of their track record.