It’s a tough balance. Apple here is doing this for consumer privacy reasons, however on a corporate level it’s also a strategy to weaken competition or at least influence them heavily out of self-interest. It’s a slippery slope.
And it’s also one more example of how they are using their market dominance to decide what is acceptable and not (hence anti-trust cases). Lastly, Apple has proven to be hypocrites themselves when dealing with China and Russia where they gladly bend their own rules and values to sell more products and services. They want to have it both ways.
So although I like what they do out of personal interest (consumer privacy), on a corporate level I am concerned about this behavior, because there is more to it than we consumers realize.
I am sure no one is surprised by your "concern", given your usual anti-Apple bias.
What you need to understand is, as far as any country is concerned, Apple follows the rules of the land. For example, in the middle-eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, iPhones did not have FaceTime.
Similarly, in Russia and China, Apple has to follow the rules made there.
Apple is within its rights in the US to do the things it does (probably some things are in question now, with the anti-competitive investigations, etc.), so it does.
At the end of the day, Apple is making money for its shareholders, who are US citizens. If Apple decided to take its ball and go home from every country that had laws that contradicted Apple's views, it would be very childish of them and they wouldn't be doing justice to their shareholders.
It’s a tough balance. Apple here is doing this for consumer privacy reasons, however on a corporate level it’s also a strategy to weaken competition or at least influence them heavily out of self-interest. It’s a slippery slope.
And it’s also one more example of how they are using their market dominance to decide what is acceptable and not (hence anti-trust cases). Lastly, Apple has proven to be hypocrites themselves when dealing with China and Russia where they gladly bend their own rules and values to sell more products and services. They want to have it both ways.
So although I like what they do out of personal interest (consumer privacy), on a corporate level I am concerned about this behavior, because there is more to it than we consumers realize.
I am not sure how this weakens competition. I just had a look at the Adjust IOS SDK on GitHub (yes, their source code is freely available), and Apple does not offer any of the services that Adjust offers to their 50,000-odd clients (at least not through the SDK itself). There is no competition to weaken here. The latest version of the SDK code (merged 6 days ago), easily removed the offending code, and life goes on. Adjust will likely keep their 50,000 clients - at least those that were not using the Adjust SDK for illegally tracking the users of their apps without their knowledge. As for end users of those apps - they will not notice anything different... they will still get as many in-app adverts pushed at them. The more observant users may notice that fewer adds are now following them from one app to the next.
Comments
What you need to understand is, as far as any country is concerned, Apple follows the rules of the land. For example, in the middle-eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, iPhones did not have FaceTime.
Similarly, in Russia and China, Apple has to follow the rules made there.
Apple is within its rights in the US to do the things it does (probably some things are in question now, with the anti-competitive investigations, etc.), so it does.
At the end of the day, Apple is making money for its shareholders, who are US citizens. If Apple decided to take its ball and go home from every country that had laws that contradicted Apple's views, it would be very childish of them and they wouldn't be doing justice to their shareholders.