Friday, March 19, 2021

Mac Analytics on App Store Connect

Apple:

App Analytics now provides usage metrics for Mac apps, including data on installations, sessions, active devices, crashes, and deletions. And now you can measure user retention to see how often users return to your app after downloading it.

Note that this is just the basic app lifecycle metrics. MetricKit is still iOS-only.

Previously:

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Can I disable those measurements as a user? I don't want that anybody knows how often I use an App or which devices I use.

@Nebula Yes, you can disable it in the privacy preferences pane.

@Nebula Yes, there is a “Share with App Developers” setting in System Preferences.

It is completely anonymized, so there is no "I use an app" anywhere in the data. The developers get aggregate counts. Opting out simply means opting out of being counted as part of the fleet.

"It is completely anonymized"

Not completely. Apple, the "privacy" company, gets to know exactly what you're up to and uses that information for its own benefit.

Do we know that for a fact? Has someone analyzed the traffic? I wouldn't be surprised if Apple does the anonymization on-device.

I don't think there's any way we can ever know for sure. There's some identifying information (like IP address) which can't be anonymized purely on the client side. I assume it also needs to use my Apple ID, in some form, to protect them from someone sending a million bogus reports.

I would be very curious to find out exactly what they are sending, and how.

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