The system prompt required by Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency framework doesn’t leave a ton of wiggle room.
Apps have just a brief customizable text field above the fateful choice – “Allow tracking” or “Ask app not to track” – where they can share how they use data and why that data sharing might benefit a user.
But there are some nuances that can’t be expressed in a single sentence.
Listen please.
Take Audiomack, a free youth-focused music streaming service with 5 million daily active users across its app and mobile web experience.
Audiomack has a compelling reason to ask for an opt in: Unlike an ad-supported mobile game, which only has a small cost of revenue when people play – basically, the marginal expense of paying for bandwidth and servers – Audiomack has a hard cost to pay each time one of its users streams a song.
“If you listen to 1,000 songs, we have to pay 1,000 rights holders, which means there’s a real cost anytime someone plays music,” said Dave Edwards, Audiomack’s VP of revenue. “This is something we want to explain, that we have ads not just to line our pockets, but to pay the rights holders who own the music content.”
In preparation for the wide release of AppTrackingTransparency along with iOS 14.5 in April, Audiomack tested and implemented a pre-prompt that would pop up before Apple’s more utilitarian system prompt.
