If you set brand image aside and just think about the huge amounts of money at stake, it becomes obvious that the whole app tracking transparency thing is just Apple taking over the ad market on iOS. They invented the term “cross app tracking” and defined it to not include their own conversion tracking through their various apps to purchases of their advertisers’ products via Apple Pay. Then they forced their ad-sales competitors to send all their conversion data to Apple, while providing separate APIs with richer data to their own advertisers.
Apple is also selling app install ads in the News and Stocks apps. Tens of billions of dollars are spent on app install ads on iOS each year, so this is a very lucrative market for Apple if they can corner it (and probably necessary if they are going to achieve expected Services revenue growth in the years to come). It remains to be seen whether they’ll take another crack at the rest of the ad market, after the failure of iAd. They seem to be laying the groundwork for it.
