Last week's insight into which apps use Apple Search Ads resulted in a few questions from readers about the connection between App Tracking Transparency and Apple Search Ads.
So this week I used our SDK Intelligence to look at how many apps use App Tracking Transparency and which categories those apps come from.
According to our intelligence, 58 thousand apps and games request access to track their users. While that may sound like a lot, when we put it in the context of all apps it ends up being just about 4%.
Where are those apps?
The games category has many of those, a little under 9 thousand games use App Tracking Transparency. Games need to track users so they can show them ads, something ATT hit hard and lowered ad revenue across the board. I expected games to lead the way.
Shopping, at second place with almost 7 thousand apps, was a bit of a surprise. Shopping apps don't advertise like games (in most cases) but rather need to track users so they can connect between mobile and web users to engage them better (aka. get them to buy more) and also to be able to track the impact of their ads.
Utilities, right behind Shopping, is using it for a mix of the three, and I'm pretty sure that's the case for the rest of the categories that make up the top 10, which include Lifestyle, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, and News.
Overall, these numbers feel very low to me, and considering how hard Apple made tracking users, I expect more apps to drop the ATT requirement and forgo internal analytics and attribution to reduce possible friction.
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