Mobile News - Week of November 8, 2021

In April 2021, Apple introduced a privacy policy called App Tracking Transparency (ATT) that moderates a data collection and aggregation practice known as “tracking.” Under ATT, an app must receive explicit consent from a user before that app can collect the user’s unique device identifier, known on iOS devices as the IDFA. Prior to ATT, the IDFA was widely used by advertising platforms for ads personalization and targeting through a process that I detail in this article. ATT’s impact on the mobile advertising ecosystem is consequential: both Facebook and Snap, in recent quarterly earnings reports, described the frictions caused by ATT as having meaningfully impaired their advertising businesses. Apple’s own ad network, Apple Search Ads (ASA), has experienced considerable growth since the introduction of ATT.

Facebook has launched an option for content creators to sell subscriptions inside its mobile apps, encouraging them to link out of the app to a website to make a payment. Apple has banned this since 2011, and the changes it’s made it the last six months in the face of global lawsuits and regulatory pressure do not quite cover this. So, Facebook is daring Apple to enforce the letter of its rules and attract another anti-trust investigation.

AMC won Meta Platforms / Facebook as a data center chip customer, sending AMD shares up more than 11%as it cemented some of its gains against Intel. It also announced a range of new chips aimed at taking on larger rivals such as Nvidia in supercomputing markets, as well as smaller competitors, including Ampere Computing in the cloud computing market.