Developers and Advertisers Will Design New Ways to Monitor Apps

Advertisers still need app data from iOS to make effective decisions about ads. Since individual device data is now largely out of reach for them, we’re going to start seeing more innovation on this side, too. Companies are going to start focusing on broad data that they do have to make plans based on what they do know – in other words, what users are doing directly on the app itself, instead of on the entire device.

Apple is helping with this, too: The company has announced a new SKAdNetwork platform that is essentially designed to replace some of what the IDFA program used to do. It doesn’t track individual device activity, but it does track overall interaction with apps, so creators will still know things like how many people are downloading apps, where they are downloading from, and what features are getting the most use, etc. The key will be finding ways to make intelligent ad decisions from that collective data, and looking for synergistic ways to share it with partners – something advertisers traditionally haven’t done much in the past.