Strong privacy stance on privacy for others (and in media)...but very quiet on 1st party inhouse ability to connect the dots.
I have a hard time seeing how this doesn't end in anti-trust tears for both of them
In Apple’s case, I hope antitrust action comes before they stray too far and whilst their interests are still aligned with mine. I don’t want them to make any money from advertising, because then they have a conflict of interest and their pro-privacy arguments fall flat.
(Google is too far down that path for me to trust them in the future. Anti-privacy is also their core business, whereas Apple primarily makes money from selling devices).
I wonder if Apple is predicting that this wont be the case for much longer (lack of real innovation (excluding the M1) and market saturation), so they're being proactive to dominate another vertical. They will likely capitalize on their current image of being privacy kings.
Absolutely. Advertising and professional services (read: consulting) are both inherently user-hostile channels of revenue, and dangerous enough they should be capped for a company's own strategic good.
Some paths are too seductive and dangerous to naively wander.
Microsoft primarily makes money selling software, too. Despite that they're really tracking happy. You'd think selling stuff incentivized less malicious conduct, but...
Another angle is that captive audiences will be steered to other Google or Apple products. But debatably this only becomes anti-trust worthy when Google and Apple will start to buy more businesses in non-core areas eg. To compete with Amazon as the everything store.
Microsoft is definitely doing this with gaming, buying up many huge game properties.
Using your dominance in one market (computers/phones) to muscle into another (ads) is about as anti-competitive as you can get.
i'd vote for anyone who promises (and has a realistic plan) to fund the anti-trust division with 100× their current funding (the IRS too) to crack down on all these distortions in our markets. i have little hope of seeing such a political candidate however.
0: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...
We’ve all heard the anti trust whining about the App Store for over a decade now. It’s not happening. Nintendo gets to decide what you put on a Nintendo Switch, Apple gets to decide what you put on an iPhone. That’s not monopoly abuse, if you don’t like it buy different console or an Android phone.
Phones have become an important generic computing platform, which is why in different jurisdictions there’s political action to force Apple to loosen control. That wouldn’t be happening if it was so obviously illegal monopoly abuse because then it wouldn’t be necessary. Yet it apparently is.
DDG does track how you interact with their search results and search ads, same as Google.
Interesting example. I found that their service is definitely going downhill.
I’ve been using them almost since they came on the scene. in the past two months I have had to double check search results against Google, where as I expected the results are far superior.
In the previous years I’ve almost never had to double check a result.
So, I don’t know about the future of Apple at all, but I hope the quality stays higher than your example.
And we’ll use that for ads. But it’s fine. It’s locally so it’s fine and you are not a product. All because we convinced people using our deep pockets that they should only care if data is on servers?
Arrogance would be if they rested on their laurels and stopped innovating.
Empathy is a human quality, and not something organizations can have.
Hypocrisy may or may not apply, but at least they aren’t selling my data to the highest bidder. I trust them with my data and they keep it to themselves. I’m OK with that.
What's the mechanism here? Is it something like this? Before the change:
1. I use say a free (with ads) guitar tuner app.
2. That app usage gets shared with Facebook's app.
3. Facebook now knows I'm probably a guitar player, or at least probably play some instrument that is commonly tuned by the player.
4. Companies who want to reach guitar players buy ads on Facebook. A Facebook ad has a good chance of reaching me.
After the change:
1. I use a free (with ads) guitar tuner app, but opt out of cross app tracking.
2. Facebook is less likely to find out I'm a guitar player. This reduces the value of Facebook ads to the companies that want to reach guitar players.
3. They shift some of their ad budget from Facebook ads to ads in guitar tuner apps.
Apple just made the first move. The downfall of third party tracking was inevitable. Google themselves are ending cookie support next year with Chrome.
Unless you’re saying Apple shouldn’t be in the Ad business at all. But then neither should Google, or Meta, and that’s their entire revenue stream.
Regarding 1) Hopefully the EU will help breaking up the monopoly
Regarding 2) Why should I buy apple and pay the premium? I will buy Samsung or Huawei.
Seeing as how Apple managed to avoid dying in 1998 when it’s revenue was $7B and was operating in the red, I am pretty sure an excursion into digital advertising on 1.6B installed devices when they have revenues nearing $400B/yr, with $160B in profit isn’t going to be the death knell.
Send a randomized bundle of ads to each iPhone (the ads must come from my servers). From that bundle, select the ads that fit user interests most closely. Don't report which specific ad the user was served.
This would presumably be quite annoying for advertisers, but it would preserve user privacy and, hey, Apple basically has a monopoly on users who actually pay for apps so what are they going to do? Perhaps the advertiser could be provided with some artificial profiles with statistically representative taste profiles to see how often their ads come up.
But seriously, the aggregated annual revenue of the Top 5 (in the first chart in the article) is $375b. Regardless of what Apple has said or done, why would anyone think Apple wouldn't want a piece of that action?
I'm not defending Apple, only being objective and realistic.
Their brand is strong and consumer perception is everything. Fb has lost all credibility and loosing ground every day which explains their hail mary move with meta and googl with their "don't be evil" backfired really hard after they removed the slogan + change directions on different things + their "graveyard" and failed ventures (google plus, stadia, etc...).
"Luckily" for them (googl/fb), the rest of the world doesn't have the purchase parity of the US and they can milk that cow. Heck, Fb basically is the "internet" in some countries and TSPs have offerings around it (Free Fb, Ig, Ws Navigation).
Just my opinion but I don't much mind some advertisements if I feel like they are not impacting my devices' security or my privacy.
I am a huge fan of Apple's new Lockdown Mode - I have it enabled 99% of the time.
Why is selling billions of thousand-dollar devices not enough? Can't they be satisfied with a successful business selling hardware at high markups to repeat customers? Why do they also need to expand into ads and destroy their hard-won reputation of being a premium brand, to milk those few extra cents per user?
New phones are no longer a growth market. Everyone has one, and buying a $1200 phone every year is something less and less people are doing.
If Apple totally trashes their reputation, who are they going to flock to... Google? That is just jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
No, capitalism & capitalists are never satisfied. The whole system requires constant growth.
I’m just hoping Apple will keep their privacy focus. Ads and privacy do not need to be opposed ideas. Ie, my fav Dutch tech blog tweakers.net recently removed all tracking form their ads and serve them locally. I gladly turned off adblock for them and the site was still pleasant. Ads are tech relevant, well labeled, unobtrusive and not about what I bought 2 months ago, win win.
- Apple has kneecapped ads from competitors, this is acknowledged fact
- Apple services revenue has grown significantly since, which includes ad revenue, this is acknowledge fact (to the SEC no less)
- Apple does not disclose ad revenue as proportion of services revenue, but it's reasonable to think it would grow as well
Digital marketers have personally told me app install ads and the like on Facebook are no longer effective, so we'd expect those dollars to move to other areas.
This is the source the Axios page links to, which is just a Bloomberg writer postulating what Apple might do.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
The narrative doesn’t match the numbers.
Yet, just look at Amazon's if you want to see how fast it can grow. Or how the app tracking prompt popup compares for their own (pretty CTA for "Yes personalized ads please!") vs third parties ("Oh no I don't want spyware!").
Apple canned their mobile ad platform and compared with Alphabet and Meta who's ads are peppered all over the web/search/facebook/instagram - the amount of impressions would be miniscule.
Are you expecting to have an official Apple press release be quoted?
Do we just not report on Apple's ads because they choose not to provide us with first hand information?
I smile remembering "if you don't pay you're the product" which apple lovers lobbied looking at G users, hinting they payment for extra margins will save them from being ad targeted.
But now:
- Paying won't save you from ads.
- You're paying but you're still the product
- And ultimately Apple also gets huge sums from Google, for selling their users.
Reminds me of a throwaway line on West World season 3, “… before the privacy laws...” like what is it going to take to stop this? Ad industry has been an absolute disaster for the human experience IMO.
It's ads all the way down.
TVs are the same. Pay a pretty penny for a high end TV, hello, we'll still stuff this thing full of ads and tracking cookies.
I really, really wish companies would stop asking themselves "Why not both?"
Apple device owners are generally rich, young, impressionable and loose with their money. They are the holy grail for advertisers.
If it wear MS not Apple they would already be fined for anti competitive behavior.
Where is the difference between MS bundling IE with Windows and Apple forcing Webkit in all iOS browsers?
The average person is just checking email, taking pictures of their food, reading garbage news sites, and watching mindless fad videos.
I get what you're saying, but Apple didn't put a health monitoring device on you, or shove a credit card in your wallet. That was your choice, totally voluntary, and as a knowledgeable person you were to some degree aware that your data would be stored and processed as a result. You made a choice to trade privacy for whatever convenience you expected those products to provide you.
The issue is that on the sell page or the produc box there is not a list like
1 this device does not support Google Pay or for Apple
WARNING , before you biu you MUST acknowledge
1 you can only use Safari with skins
2 you can't use apps we think are too mature, or too siple, or might use compete with us, or apps we just don't like
3 if you are in China we will send your data straight tot eh goverment
4 you will not be able to developer or install any app for your device unless we review and anyone your account.
5 apps that are on our store today might be removed tomorrow , or blocked to send you updates
6 ad blockers are more crippled then on other devices,
7 messaging with your Andoid friends will be crippled
8 we will scan your photos for bad images and report you to the police ------
100 ....
So it is FALSE that ALL users know ALL the downsides and ALL future downsides when buying a device.
If I am wrong and you can see this on the online electronic shops or real world shops I would like to see this , I never seen this warnings so far.
That's not really the primary mechanism, as far as I know. My understanding of the flow is this:
Before:
1. You browse Facebook. 2. Companies who want to sell a guitar tuner app buy ads targeted to guitar tuner apps. 3. You click on the ad, and you download the app. Both the app and Facebook get an unique ID identifying you (this is called the "ID for Advertisers" or IDFA). 4. You use the app, maybe pay them money. The app is able to directly attribute you giving them money to the ad it ran on Facebook, and Facebook is able to know that you converted on the ad, which is very good signal. 5. The company is able to accurately track its conversions, and Facebook is able to accurately price ads.
After: 1. You browse Facebook (and opt out of cross-app tracking). 2. Companies buy the ad, you click on it, download the app. 3. You no longer get an ID, instead both Facebook and the company get a scrambled ID that they can no longer link. 4. As a result, Facebook can no longer attribute the results of its ads as effectively, leading to less accurate signal and less confidence from advertisers.
From my understanding, one of the ironic things now is that ATT has forced companies like Facebook to collect even more data (see https://twitter.com/modestproposal1/status/15272970860601139...). Because Apple no longer provides this unique ID for Facebook/advertisers to uniquely track conversions, apps/Facebook are forced to rely on much more data collection in order to probabilistically predict conversions.
Much of my knowledge of this area comes from Stratechery - I think this article, particularly the section entitled "And" explains what "cross app tracking" is: https://stratechery.com/2022/data-and-definitions/
But then you don’t really want ads: you want information (facts about the local business near your position), ideally factual, impartial and unbiased. The fact that a lot of people seem to conflate both is actually a PR tour de force from advertising companies. Do you really want the prominence of local bars being a function of the tax they pay to advertisers?
How would you feel if only the logos of the highest paying corporations popped up? There might be the best Mom and Pop Restuarant that every existed on your route, but you're not going to see it for all the mcdonalds and subway logos they throw at you.
Give it some time. Ads become obtrusive because it works and it brings more revenue.
This is a story about a Corporate Mega Machine with thousands of Corporate Robots all programmed with the same code. To optimize for growth. One robot opposes it. Ten robots will line up to slit its throat and take its place.
it's the same slow decline that happens over and over in these cases. apple is already focused primarily on services, which you can see in their financials. product has stagnated, while services continues to grow, and with it, more and more capital invested in chasing manufactured prestige awards like oscars and emmys.
Truly premium products respect your privacy.
It turns out truly premium goods aren't Google, Tesla, and soon won't be Apple, if Tim&co go down this path.
The problem is that apple intends to make maximum profit. The premium product can produce that, but if they smell that their customers don't care enough about privacy, they could _also_ sell ads on top of the premium tax. So until people starts dropping iphones because of it, they will proceed.
Microsoft is buying the largest game developer for $70B without skipping a beat.
I'm not saying FAAMGs should be able to spend hundreds of billions unchecked in consolidating M&A, but this contradiction when no one flinches at Microsoft buying Activision makes it pretty obvious, in my possibly mistaken opinion, that this is no objective process.
I find it odd that people get so invested in Apple as a company, but while beating them head to head is difficult it’s also potentially extremely profitable.
>There is’t much lock in with phones or tablets as people go back and forth between iOS and Android.
It still complicated to transfer all data and settings from one Android phone to another Android phone. I highly doubt it's simpler to transfer all data from iOS to Android or vice versa
Odd, it’s almost trivial to go from iPhone to iPhone, but I never had 2 Android phones in a row.
Anyway, despite it being a major revenue stream most people purchase minimal if any apps and of those many can make the swap. Money sinks like Clash of Clans generally let you transfer accounts between platforms to keep people hooked. And of course subscription like Disny+ are independent.
Monopoly.
I also don’t see how giving consumers choice on ad surveillance could be seen as anti-competitive. Where is the consumer harm? Where’s the monopoly?
Heck, even ad networks dying weren’t considered anti competitive when AdSense took the industry over when Google exploited its search engine, or when Facebook took on AdSense by parlaying their social media power. Again, you have to prove harm or attempt to create monopoly.
the precedent you point out is what helps apple claim they're not a trust, because the two components, ads and content, go together in one business model. with google, being paid to place ads is the business model, and competing in the various channels for those ads are potential anti-trust encroachments because they're different markets.
as is usual in these cases, the harm is an inflated market price above the non-distortionary baseline.
The only potential market this capability hurts is the market for ads based on surveillance on Apple devices. Would these be seen as an illegal/unfair practice? I find it highly unlikely to be seen as such by any western government.
Otherwise Facebook using its social media site to take over ads from Google would be anti competitive. Or Google taking over with AdSense by using its search engine. Or TV/cable stations taking over from newspapers or radio.
None of this is anti-competitive. They’re different markets that change as the underlying communication medium changes.
And it’s not like ads are somehow killed by Apple. It’s the surveillance based customized ads that have been made less common as customers can deny their use (or approve them!). Ads existed for a century without that level of surveillance.
You think you are able to, but you just got lucky so far.
Focus code is very buggy and work for only a few sites. It's very hard to contribute fixes, so I expect it to stagnate even more. And since the sites we, the tech elite, read are similar to the ones the few maintainers do, those will be well served while all the rest of the internet will not see any improvement. IMO it will probably rot away like reader-mode.
Also, it is trivial for publishers to evade it :( just not a effort anyone even bothers with because of the low traffic.
Real firefox for android allows you to install uBlockOrigin. The only actively maintained adblocker that is being gasslighted everywhere. And that you was never allowed to install on IOS devices thanks to Apple the company.
1Blocker in particular has a great UI for homebrew element targeting, while AdGuard Pro supports arbitrary lists and relatively rich blocklist filter rules.
Both are very actively maintained. The innovation from AdGuard is surprisingly rapid, they are not just resting on feature sets from long ago.
Personally, I don't know that that's true. It may be easier for Apple to do it because the ecosystem is more vertically integrated. But that's a coordination problem, not a technical one. I don't think there's a single major player in the Android ecosystem who wouldn't be willing to go along with a plan to lock things down just as far as laws will allow.
I am also weary of giving "random" third parties access to my browsing. I think that my least bad option on iOS is Mullvad, with all blocking turned on. But the bad part there is no browser integration to whitelist sites.
I wonder if it would be possible for Mullvad to present their system as an ad-blocker to Safari, if you are running Mullvad VPN.
If this article is true, this is some terrifically anti competitive behavior
I’m using Firefox Focus with its native Content Blocker.
Think those are related? I think they are. Who knows. I just respect tail call elimination.
Check it for yourself using your favorite browsers developer console, there are no cookies, unless you set preferences and if so, the cookie is a very short string that indicates your preferences and is obvious not usable as a user id.
What they do is log what is searched for and what results and ads are clicked and that is not tied to you. Because they don’t have a concept of ‘you’, only of that one search.
And that is definitely not ‘same as Google’, Google automatically sets a user identifying cookie once you open the homepage, tries all kinds of tricks to tie this user id to your Google account and tracks anything you do to that account and remembers it forever. That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks. Even if you clear your cookies. That’s Google tracking you. DuckDuckGo does not do that.
And it is really unfair to just accuse them of being ‘same as Google’. They are not same as Google, obviously they are not perfect but they do make the sacrifices while still making it work without tracking everything you do.
> That’s why you only need to search for a car once to get ads for cars for weeks.
I don't think that's right? If you search for things about cars and then click through to a page about cars you'll get tagged with all sorts of advertising cookies, same as if you did that with any other search engine. But I'm pretty sure just searching for something on Google won't affect either (a) what ads you see on future Google searches or (b) what ads you see on non-Google pages around the web.
(Disclosure: I used to work on ads at Google, though not search ads.)
You mentioned Google. I think they are also working hard to find additional income streams. Google has good products in GCP as well as entertainment media like YouTube, YouTube Music, Play books/movies. But they are still too reliant in advertising.
I think Apple will do better than Google in branching out, but to be honest I enjoy both companies products while taking full advantage of Google’s privacy settings, Apple’s Lockdown Mode, etc. if people use Google with default settings, well, that is their decision.
For example, I like the idea that Apple remaining insanely profitable doesn’t necessarily mean I need to keep buying new iPhones every 2 years.
It’s much better for consumers (and our planet by the way) if these devices continue to have increasing average lifespan.
Obviously it would need to be in Apple’s best self-interest to invest literally billions of dollars of R&D in order to get these devices closer to a 10 year lifespan than a 2 year lifespan, it’s not going to happen in a capitalist system if it halves their revenue.
For that equation to work out, factoring in increased market share for making a phone so robust and software so un-bloated, I’d say they would need to earn roughly 3-4x the revenue of selling a new device from each user over that 10 year period from higher-margin services instead.
There are two, again two platforms that matter for phones. That's it. "Well, it is not 1, so we can just twiddle our thumbs and ignore the problem" is not at all convincing. And then people get sidetracked with "but the term monopoly taken literally means...". Yes, nobody cares. Antitrust is explicitly not just about that.
When my $1000 Galaxy started waking me up with Samsung push notification ads I had not opted in to, I knew I was done with Android.
But yes it should be widely known that android on samsung isn't the same as android on nokia or motorola.
That is two different statements. HN users are not Joe Average. Apart from working with the Apple Ecosystem, I cannot get enough privacy on Android. The new changes does not mean that Android is acceptable, it just means that the Iphone is also not acceptable, leaving me with zero acceptable smart phones.
Integration with Apple ecosystem, properly designed OS and not mishmash of dozens visual styles.
That’s basically the reason me and every iPhone owner I know buy one.
Yet. If iOS News app is any indication of how bad their ads will be then I think they really will be hurting themselves in the long term. My guess is there are many like myself who now use Apple products as the “least bad” option rather than truly liking them anymore, that sentiment will grow way faster when people start seeing ads in more places.
I’m one of those people where consistent keyboard shortcuts is the main sticky feature, but that only let’s me put up with so much.
Also - what do you think brings more money for the publisher - ad for outdoor headlamp (that you already bought, but still, you're potentially "lucrative" customer, as you are interested in this product) or a same ad for Windows 10 for 3 years, while you run everything on Linux and never touched Windows in your whole life?
"Tech" is a very very broad category. There's a reason why tech sites serve non-tech ads and personalized ads took over internet.
You’re right on all the numbers stuff
1) shift from hardware to services 2) remaining hardware directions (VR) focused in separating users from the world vs augmenting
Even in their biggest market, the US, they barely pass 50% and the rest is all one very successful competitor. Pretty significant competition.
Additionally, they have and continue to enforce regulatory authority on their platforms, which is the role of government, not a private company. It's anticompetitive for a massive private enterprise like Apple (or Google) to arbitrarily use its' distribution platform to control the economic fortunes of the companies built on that platform.
Remember how Microsoft had 95% market share and how they were actively and overtly abusing that position to embrace, extend and extinguish any threats? Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere. The worst they got was the EU forcing them to put up Windows without Windows Media Player, which then got bought by nobody, and the browser choice pop-up they got rid of after a few years.
If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.
Yes, that's completely consistent with the Brandeis view of antitrust. Cartels are not a competitive market.
> Everyone was crying antitrust and it never went anywhere.
Not facts. It resulted in a successful prosecution by the Clinton DOJ, and Microsoft was ordered to breakup in 2000. The company appealed (dragging past the election) and it was settled by the Bush DOJ, which obviously resulted in weaker policies since the Bush lawyers subscribed to the Borkist view of antitrust.
> If you think anything worse is going to happen to Apple with their 20% market share, or even if you somehow inflate the number to 65%, think again. It’s not going to happen under antitrust law. If anything is going to happen it’s going to be new laws.
Guess we will see. Seems to already be happening based on the defensive moves these companies are making in response to more aggressive regulators, but I agree new laws would help move things along. I didn't "somehow" inflate it. I looked at the recurring revenue streams from the app store instead of device sales, because app store revenue is a massive stream of profit, and devices are low-margin commodities.