Why is Apple rebuilding the App Economy?

What motivated Apple to deprecate the IDFA? In order to get there, it’s important to try to understand what kind of a future Apple wants for the App Store and the app economy more broadly. Gauging the impact on the mobile ecosystem of Apple’s recent decision to deprecate the IDFA, it seems that the tendency to minimize the scale of what this...

12h

Podcast: Surfing in a Squall: the future of mobile without an IDFA, with Maor Sadra

In this episode of the Mobile Dev Memo podcast, I speak with Maor Sadra about why the deprecation of the IDFA (announced at this year’s WWDC event) should not have been surprising to people who follow the mobile ecosystem, why deterministic app install attribution wasn’t as reliable as people thought in the first place, and what the future of mobile...

4d

Dear Apple: These changes will improve SKAdNetwork for advertisers

Dear Apple, The privacy protections you are implementing in iOS 14 are indisputably good for consumers: these changes will give iOS users a level of granular control over their data that amplifies trust. In the short term, these changes present challenges to mobile advertisers, most of which have built infrastructure for which the IDFA is integral...

1w

Apple killed the IDFA: A comprehensive guide to the future of mobile marketing

Tremors from Apple’s bombshell revelation at WWDC last week that the IDFA will effectively be killed continue to reverberate. iOS 14 will be released in September, and if past iOS releases are any indication, more than half of all iOS devices will run iOS 14 by October. WWDC 2020 featured Apple’s Thanos moment: with a snap of its fingers, Apple obliterated...

2w

Apocalypse Now: per WWDC, the IDFA is dead

At Apple’s WWDC event yesterday, a number of new privacy features were unveiled that will be rolled out to iOS 14 later this year. Among those — and most relevant to direct response marketers — is the AppTrackingTransparency framework, which requires an app to explicitly request a user’s permission before accessing their device’s IDFA, or unique mobile...

3w

Three arguments against Apple anti-trust accusations

Apple’s App Store approval policies were placed under a public microscope last week when the executive team at Basecamp, the web application development company behind the eponymously-named team productivity suite, revealed that Apple had rejected updates to their recently-launched consumer email product called Hey. In a series of tweets,...

3w

Media mix models are the future of mobile advertising

A recent theme that has seemed to reach critical mass within the milieu of the mobile ecosystem is that performance advertising on mobile is on an extinction course, with the meteor impact event being Apple’s presumed inevitable deprecation of its proprietary advertising identifier. It’s certainly true that the deprecation of mobile advertising...

4w

How to launch a Top 100 Grossing app

Quibi, the streaming video entertainment app helmed by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, will likely serve as a case study for some time in how not to launch a mobile product. Despite having raised $1.8BN in funding, as well as securing $150MM in advertising commitments ahead of launch (some of which are now being renegotiated), Quibi’s debut was...

Jun 2020

Monetization data is critical in a mobile game soft launch

Conventional wisdom has long held that monetization data should play little if any role in the evaluation of a mobile game’s soft launch, with retention data providing the primary insight into whether a game is viable. The crux of the argument supporting retention’s primacy is that retained users can ultimately be exposed to any monetization mechanic...

Jun 2020

Is AR a failed consumer category or a successful mobile gaming genre?

Augmented Reality (often grouped with Virtual Reality, as AR/VR) has been championed as the ascendant consumer tech category since Niantic’s Pokemon Go was released in 2016. Just this January, Tim Cook celebrated augmented reality as “the next big thing,” citing its broad use cases in everyday life, such as in getting specific instructions from an AR...

Jun 2020