If Facebook and Google are annoyed, Apple must be doing something right

Welcome to our weekly collection of all the Apple news you missed this week, in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

Annoying the right people

I feel like you can generally tell how well you’re doing your job by looking at who’s getting annoyed. Are you punching up, or punching down? Are you speaking truth to power, or just sucking up to it? In short, are you—as you should be—comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?

It doesn’t get much more comfortable than Facebook and Google, whose parent companies recorded 2021 profits of $39 billion and $76 billion respectively. And going by the two companies’ response to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency measures, both are feeling quite afflicted. I think that’s probably a good sign.

ATT, for those who haven’t been keeping up, reveals the data collected by your iPhone and iPad apps, and obliges developers to ask for permission if they want to track you across other apps and websites. Seems like a pretty good idea, right? That all depends on your business model.

Last week we covered Google’s accusation that ATT is “ineffective,” and its proposal of an alternative system… which appears to be less effective, is described in far vaguer terms, and won’t be here for another two years. Android Privacy Sandbox may eventually become an effective privacy tool, but the odds are against it, because Google’s business model, or a large part of it, is turning user eyeballs into advertising revenue, and tracking is fundamental to that process.

Facebook’s incentives are even more tilted towards the needs of the advertiser, and the company has been predictably shrill in its condemnation of ATT from the start. It claimed back in the summer of 2020 that the changes would “hurt many of our developers and publishers at an already difficult time for businesses,” but in the end, it was Facebook itself that experienced the biggest hurt: $200 billion wiped off its value in a single day after a disappointing earnings report…