Updated to iOS 14.5 this morning before coffee, which in hindsight was a mistake, because I spent the first twenty minutes of my day tapping "Ask App Not to Track" instead of actually waking up. Apple pushed the update out today and the headline feature, the one every outlet has been writing about for weeks, is App Tracking Transparency. Youve probably heard the pitch by now: apps have to ask permission before they can follow you around the internet for ad targeting. Facebook has been running full-page ads against this for months, which should tell you everything about how much money is riding on the answer being "sure, go ahead."
Im not going to rehash the whole Apple-versus-Facebook fight, because at this point youve read six versions of that piece already and Ill just be adding a seventh. What I actually want to talk about is what it's like on the receiving end, this morning, opening apps one by one and watching them ask.
Some of the prompts are almost funny in how nakedly they try to talk you out of tapping "Ask App Not to Track." A shopping app I have (not naming names, but its a home goods retailer) rewrote the system dialog subtext into something like "we use tracking to personalize your experience and support small businesses," which, sure, buddy. A weather app I installed two years ago and forgot I still had asked too, and I genuinely could not tell you why a weather app needs to track me across other companies apps and websites. I hit decline on that one so fast I think I pulled a tendon.
By 9am I'd gone through maybe fifteen apps and only allowed tracking on two: my banks app, because I trust them more than most, and a podcast app where I dont really care. Everything else got the no. It's a strange kind of satisfaction, actually, clicking through a stack of these in a row. Little bit of a slot machine feeling, except every pull is a win.
A few other things landed in 14.5 today that are getting buried under the tracking story, and I think thats a shame because some of them are more interesting to me personally. You can now unlock your iPhone with an Apple Watch while wearing a mask, which sounds like a tiny thing until you remember most of us have been faceplanting into Face ID failures at the pharmacy for over a year now. I tried it standing in my kitchen with a mask still in my coat pocket from yesterday and it worked on the second attempt, no complaints. There's also proper Xbox Series X and PS5 controller pairing baked into iOS now, so you can pair a DualSense to your phone for cloud gaming without hunting down a third party app to make it behave. And 217 new emoji, including ones that are actually going to get used, unlike whatever the last batch was.
None of that is going to move the news cycle the way ATT is, obviously. But Im old enough now to remember when a point release used to be a big deal on its own, and it feels a little odd that "your phone can now tell an app to get lost" is sharing a changelog with actual features nobody's talking about.
One thing I keep coming back to: I dont think this actually kills targeted advertising, whatever the doom-and-gloom pieces from ad-tech people are saying this week. It just makes the default the sane one instead of the sneaky one. People who want personalized ads can still opt in, apparently some meaningful chunk will (early opt-in numbers from a few dev friends I talked to today are running higher than I expected, something like one in four users saying yes when asked directly). Most people, though, when actually asked in plain English whether a total stranger app can track them, are going to say no. Thats not Apple killing an industry. Thats just what happens when you stop hiding the checkbox.
Also, completely unrelated but worth a mention since I havent written about it yet: NASA's little helicopter on Mars has now made multiple flights since its first hop last week, and I still think that's a wilder story than anything happening on my phone today. A remote control helicopter, on another planet, flying on solar power and a battery the size of a paperback. We buried that lede under app permission dialogs, and thats kind of the whole story of 2021 tech news in one sentence.
Anyway. My thumb needs a break. More tomorrow.