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Dropping adds seems good to me, but dropping analytics doesn't seem great from a game dev perspective. New features and game balance is often driven by analytic

Dropping adds seems good to me, but dropping analytics doesn't seem great from a game dev perspective. New features and game balance is often driven by analytics data. For example, if no one's using a certain feature in the game then maybe it needs more attention brought to it or maybe attention won't be focused on it for the next update. I understand that there's a fine line between game analytics and farming PII but I think it's an important line. I'm sad to see Apple forcing you to use a first-party analytics solution. Smaller indie devs often won't have the time to set up their own data pipeline and depend on things like Unity Analytics or Flurry to help them do data analysis.

dsjoerg 7y ago
I guess I should start a service that provides small indie devs with "first party" analytics. I provide the software, it runs on a server dedicated to you, your data is separate from anyone else's. That's first-party, right? But I suppose I would have to charge 3x more for that than Amplitude does.
- itake 7y ago
  There are a few OSS projects that do this. I am not sure how well they integrate with mobile apps though. https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/
yalok 7y ago
I agree, the part about analytics sounds like a bad news, given that there's no fine line... Also, I'm very curious how would they impose it? Suppose I still want to use my analytics provider as a SaaS, but will just relay traffic to it via my servers, and would only use that analytics for game tuning - how would Apple know about it?.. Another problem is that nowadays each app usually uses quite a few 3rd party libs/services, and each one of them may have analytics of one sort or another, even when the app doesn't explicitly use them for that, f.e. Crashlytics, Firebase, Logentries... With a strict approach there, I'd be worried about stability of kids apps, if devs would be forced to disable those services...
cbsmith 7y ago
As you point out, the rule doesn't prevent ads or analytics. It just prohibits third party ads or analytics. Cynically, one might say that prohibits best-of-breed ads or analytics. ;-) It's not hard to see how this might turn out to be a case of a policy that sounds good, but in practice is a disaster.

dsjoerg 7y ago

I guess I should start a service that provides small indie devs with "first party" analytics. I provide the software, it runs on a server dedicated to you, your data is separate from anyone else's. That's first-party, right? But I suppose I would have to charge 3x more for that than Amplitude does.

itake 7y ago
There are a few OSS projects that do this. I am not sure how well they integrate with mobile apps though. https://matomo.org/ https://matomo.org/

yalok 7y ago

I agree, the part about analytics sounds like a bad news, given that there's no fine line... Also, I'm very curious how would they impose it? Suppose I still want to use my analytics provider as a SaaS, but will just relay traffic to it via my servers, and would only use that analytics for game tuning - how would Apple know about it?.. Another problem is that nowadays each app usually uses quite a few 3rd party libs/services, and each one of them may have analytics of one sort or another, even when the app doesn't explicitly use them for that, f.e. Crashlytics, Firebase, Logentries... With a strict approach there, I'd be worried about stability of kids apps, if devs would be forced to disable those services...

cbsmith 7y ago

As you point out, the rule doesn't prevent ads or analytics. It just prohibits third party ads or analytics. Cynically, one might say that prohibits best-of-breed ads or analytics. ;-) It's not hard to see how this might turn out to be a case of a policy that sounds good, but in practice is a disaster.