How to Thrive Despite Apple’s ATT — Eric Seufert, Mobile Dev Memo

Dec 1, 2021

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On the podcast I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.

My guest today is Eric Seufert. Eric has deep operating experience, having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, but he also founded and sold a marketing business intelligence company, Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories. Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. Over the past year Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Will Apple’s ATT be a net loss for Apple?
Can SKAdNetwork be saved, and does Apple want to save it?
Is focusing on organic traffic a flawed strategy?
What does the future of app install ads look like?

Links & Resources

Eric Seufert’s Links

Follow Eric on Twitter
Mobile Dev Memo
Heracles
Freemium Economics: Leveraging Analytics and User Segmentation to Drive Revenue
Eric is on LinkedIn

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Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello. I’m your host, David Bernard, and for the first time ever, I’m flying solo today. RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting is busy CEO’ing.

My guest today, is Eric Seufert. Having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. He also founded and sold marketing business intelligence company Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories.

Over the past year, Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.

On the podcast, I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.

Hey Eric, thanks for being on the podcast.

00:01:09 Eric:

Thank you for having me on the podcast.

00:01:11 David:

So, we’re going to start off with a bit of a dead horse that’s been beaten over and over again. Apple’s motivation in enacting App Tracking Transparency, but I did want to take kind of a different perspective on it. The most interesting thing to me personally about Apple’s motivation with App Tracking Transparency is what it says about what they are going to do in the future.

Did they build SKAdNetwork purposely handicapped, or did they not really understand how handicapped it was? Were they really trying to kill Facebook, or was that a kind of a side benefit? I think that their motivations are important, because it forecasts what changes they may or not make moving forward as they start to see the impact.

So, I think the first thing I wanted to ask you is, how do you see Apple’s reaction and how they perceive ATT to be going, now that we’re seeing snap drop 25% after the quarterly earnings report, and see more of the disruption that you and others were predicting, but maybe Apple didn’t quite see coming? How do you think Apple sees this going currently? And what does that say about the future of privacy on iOS?

00:02:42 Eric:

I think Apple’s primary motivation was not to capture mobile advertising market share. I don’t think that was a primary motivation. I think that’s happened, and I think they expected that to happen, but I don’t think that was the primary driver of this decision.

What I think they wanted to do was, there’s kind of like a big picture idea here, and then an immediate consequence idea. I think what Apple did not like, was that they had kind of lost control over content discovery on the iPhone.

When the App Store was first launched, that was how you discovered apps. It was through going to the App Store, and some small part search, but then in large part just like the editorial curation that Apple exposes there. That changed over the years, and up until the announcement, or the enactment of of ATT, the way that people discovered apps was through advertising, and primarily Facebook advertising.

Apple totally lost control. The content that people interacted with on their phones was not the result of any deliberate decision on Apple’s part or some deliberate consideration. It just happened to be whatever could scale ads the best. Whatever companies could scale their ads the most efficiently, that’s what people interacted with. That’s what became dominant on the platform, and Apple really had no say in that.

Short term, narrow aperture view of this, they just wanted to regain control of that. They wanted to be the kingmakers. They wanted to be the tastemakers; the people that decided—the party that decided—what became popular on the iPhone and how the iPhone was used.

And I mean, that’s, it’s, if you’ve worked in, in gaming, especially, but if you’ve worked in mobile apps at all and you’ve ever had to go and, you know, go, go through the whole process of pitching your app to Apple, and pleading for featuring You know, that that’s what they want.

They, they like to having that control because that allowed them to percolate their new iOS features into the app community through almost horsetrading it’s like, you want featuring, We’d be happy to give you featuring, but you’ve got to integrate X, Y, Z thing into your app.

Once you do that, we’re happy to feature you. that, that was sort of the, that was the, the, the negotiating process. You know, that that process, even that process itself became less important and less prominent in the life of a developer over the last few years, In 2012 to 2015 that’s what you did every time you were launching a new app, or even if you’re doing a major update, you flew, you flew to San Francisco, you went to Cupertino, you went into a, conference room at Apple HQ and you pitch somebody.

That just stopped being something that people did. Like just people realized that, even if we get featuring, it’s not going to be that meaningful for our business, ...