Tell HN: IDFA access on iOS 14 may still be disrupted

7 points

6 years ago

Figured I would make a post about this because I am not seeing this mentioned really anywhere, and discovered this while testing my app on the iOS 14 GM yesterday evening.

Although the initial release of iOS 14 makes the IDFA available until early 2021, ASIdentifierManager's "isAdvertisingTrackingEnabled" is still deprecated (1) and returns "NO". This means that most existing ad SDKs (including MoPub, AdMob, etc) will not use the IDFA and will be treating iOS 14 users as DNT.

Currently, the prescribed logic flow is to check whether advertising tracking is enabled prior to accessing the IDFA. Naturally, this fails when checking this always results in a "NO".

MoPub has stated that they will be releasing an update on September 28 to address this. Google has currently not provided information on when their advertising SDK will be updated to resolve this. Until apps can be updated to address this, developers will be losing out on significant revenue from all iOS 14 users.

I encourage any developers on HN that have relationships with their ad networks to raise this issue and check-in. I also believe that this is an oversight on Apple's part when re-enabling the IDFA. I am told that filing bug reports (2) with Apple may help bring this up the chain.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/adsupport/asidentifiermanager/1614148-isadvertisingtrackingenabled

[2] https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

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