For those who have the freedom to decide what to use, I recommend looking into rolling your own. Especially if you're writing back-end services for your app anyway.
After Google shutdown Fabric.io, we asked ourselves why even rely on 3rd parties for analytics. All we really wanted to know is basic usage statistics, like uniques, sessions, events. Turns out to be just a few days of work for what amounts to a CRUD service with a worker. Small bootstrapped HTML page to view the stats, no pretty graphs or anything, just numbers. The client code is around 300 lines, basically a simple network request queue. For comparison the latest libGoogleAnalyticsServices.a comes in at ~35mb (wtf?).
From my understanding, the iOS permission to track prompt is only if your app uses user device data for the purpose of targeted advertising by accessing the IDFA. There shouldn't be a problem if you disable the collection of IDFA and you can configure exactly that via Firebase Google Analytics [1]. I don't see a whole sale banning of free analytics SDKs but I do see a positive shift in forcing developers to have more awareness about what data is collected and what it is used for.<p>Edit: Per Apple's definitions of tracking, it also includes sharing user or device data with data brokers.[2]<p>[1]<a href="https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-collection?platform=ios#disable_idfa_collection" rel="nofollow">https://firebase.google.com/docs/analytics/configure-data-co...</a><p>[2]<a href="https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-use/" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/app-store/user-privacy-and-data-...</a>
This is a bit of a stretch - the gist is that Apple is requiring opt-in consent to 3rd party tracking, and will start failing review for people apps that don't provide an opt in.<p>This isn't a ban on Free analyics SDKs at all.
I would not be mad if the Facebook SDK was outright banned, it collects way too much data.<p>But I will take being able to stop them from tracking every time I open third party apps even if I don't log in with Facebook. Even if I have to be prompted every time I install an app.<p>But maybe similar too what happened with iOS 14 and the clipboard alerts, this will force a change on the App Store and finally remove Facebook and Google's stronghold on the web and apps.
It's a red herring. In addition to the IDFA, Apple has something called the IDFV (identifierForVendor). This ID is unique to a publisher, i.e. if a user has 3 of your apps installed, all three will share the same IDFV, so you can even do cross-app or cross-selling analytics. What you cannot do by design is use IDFV to build a cross-publisher dossier on users, or target users based on that ID other than on your own apps.<p>Apple hasn't put any restrictions on IDFV, only on IDFA, which was designed, well, for advertising and needs to be reined-in due to abuses in the Wild West everything goes world of the AdTech surveillance-industrial complex. In fact the existing opt-out "Limit Ad Tracking" setting that already implements what will become opt-in with iOS 14.5 does not apply to IDFVs.<p>Back in 2010 Steve Jobs himself had banned analytics altogether when Flurry's VP of Marketing blabbed and disclosed the existence of the then secret iPad:<p><a href="https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/" rel="nofollow">https://venturebeat.com/2010/06/02/apple-flurry-ipad/</a>
> <i>Apple announced last summer that they will soon require users to opt in before apps can get the infamous “IDFA” tracking identifier for that user.</i><p>I absolutely LOVE that apple is slowly turning the screws on advertisers with these pro-privacy moves. It's been slow and incremental, but also increasingly hostile towards people and services that attempt to identify and market to end-users.
The question is: will it be possible to use facebook and firebase sdk's without the opt-in consent, provided that no use of the idfa is made? My understanding is that as long as the opt-in popup isn't shown, the device won't allow access to the idfa, and as such the sdk you're using does not matter. Both facebook and firebase's sdks seem to have fallbacks in place for when the idfa is not available.<p>This is to be taken with a grain of salt, and I'd love to see somebody more savvy on the matter confirm this...
This really seems like an OSS opportunity for someone or some organization to create an ad-free analytics SDK for “in app” usage & engagement. But I agree with other posts that Apple doesn’t seem to imply they’ll forbid any SDKs … they’re going to have an impact, though, on any information gathering & sharing that involves PII.
> iOS apps currently using the Google Analytics, Flurry, and Firebase SDKs may need to migrate off of them promptly<p>I don't develop in this space, but... Firebase is considered an analytics/tracking API? What happened?
Betteridge's Law at work again [1]<p>But, putting "Apple Banning XXX" in a headline is a sure-fire way to get clicks, so...<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...</a>