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I love Apple’s Privacy Protection, but as a Creator, it’s a Nightmare.
It’s Apple’s world. We all just have to try and live in it.
Apple’s glitzy developer conference this June, WWDC, gave us our annual peek at the latest and greatest software the company is bringing to our devices, from iOS 15 to major updates to macOS, iPadOS, and more.
This year, as with other years, privacy improvements across Apple’s operating systems were front-and-center. Building on its anti-tracking pop-up boxes introduced last year that targeted cross-app tracking, iOS will now allow users to block email senders from tracking whether or not people are opening their emails.
Open tracking is one of the few ways people who send email are able to understand how well that email was read. Email marketers, as well as newsletter creators that send emails via platforms like Substack and Revue, use simple transparent pixels embedded in emails that load when an email is opened by a user, indicating that the email was read (or at least opened).
Unlike tracking on the web or in apps, this doesn’t tell you much about the user other than the general country they’re located in, and whether they actually looked at the email, which is used to determine the newsletter’s ‘open rate’ and figure out whether or not certain subscribers are still engaging with your emails.
As a user, I like the idea of features like this that allow me to choose my privacy settings. As a creator, however, it’s increasingly difficult to ignore Apple moving toward a world where the only acceptable business model is the company’s: building apps that monetize through platforms owned by Apple.
Falling afoul of those restrictive rules can be devastating, as the makers behind Fanhouse, an app that allows fans to pay creators, recently found out: Apple demanded they add its in-app payment gateway instead of taking payments via the web or it would remove its app, which would mean paying the company 30% of subscription money, resulting in less for the creators at the other end.
