App Tracking Transparency, Apple's new requirement that apps and games that use tracking variables ask the user for permission first, has been wreaking havoc on the ad industry since it officially rolled out in April.
I've looked at it from a few angles already, and many others have as well, but while we all talked about apps and games that complied, there wasn't much talk about those who didn't.
So, what happened to those that didn't want to ask users for permission?
Easy! Apple killed them.
The App Store grows at a pretty standard pace of 1% - 2% every month. You can see it pretty clearly in the chart.
Well, almost every month.
In June, about a month after ATT rolled out, and after Apple's warning expired, 420,000 apps and games disappeared. That's a whopping 21% of the App Store. Gone. Just like that.
This sort of natural sweep is something we see every few years on the App Store, so it's not surprising that it happened. But what I do find surprising is the scale. Hundreds of thousands of developers didn't take ATT seriously or didn't care about their apps and games that were feeding 3rd parties party data enough to bother updating them.
This should come as good news to active developers -- there's less competition now.
December saw a curious split: downloads dropped 2% while revenue sat at $1.3B. ChatGPT and TikTok dominated both charts as the mobile industry enters a new maturity phase.
Wall Street bet $2 billion on Polymarket, and downloads surged 1,172% in December. The prediction market banned in 2022 is now where Wall Street looks for signals.