One year later, the deployment of App Tracking Transparency has changed nothing (or almost nothing)

It had been one of the most criticized features that Apple has ever implemented. Despite pressure and Mark Zuckerberg's open letter against the arrival of the ATT,l’App Tracking Transparencynevertheless saw the light of day last year. Released with iOS 14.5, this new option from Apple was supposed to give control back to users.

This system was supposed to ask users if they wanted to be tracked using this or that application.A real curse for many advertiserswho saw this as the end of their economic model. But ultimately, after more than a year of use, the ATT has changed no one's life, or almost no one.

A slight drop in revenue for advertisers

In its latest financial report, the Meta group (formerly Facebook) announced that advertising revenues had declined, notably due tothe arrival of ATT on iOS and iPadOS in April 2021. According to Adjust, a company specializing in targeted advertising, the market experienced a drop of almost 4 points last April compared to April 2021.

But behind these figures which try to show that the ATT works well - while wanting to discredit it - we must also see Apple's yo-yo data over the last months before the arrival of the ATT. Between July and October 2021, the market share of iOS devices in ad spending was only 30%, compared to 34% today.

iOS users are very different from Android users

A volatility which can be explained by the iPhone user himself. Indeed, targeted advertising firms have established the idea that people using iOS generally spend more money than people using an Android device. This overconsumption helps compensate for their low numbers and makes both markets just as interesting as each other.

But then, how can we explain that the ATT has changed (almost) nothing? To get the answer, an interesting figure is perhaps the adoption rate of the latter. Data from Adweek reports that one in three people have agreed to always be followed by social networks or mobile games. Here again, depending on the applications, the reflexes are not the same. For financial applications, for example, only 10% of people agreed to always be monitored.