During WWDC 2020, Apple announced that iOS14 users will need to give explicit permission to apps when collecting users’ IDFAs.  For 8 years, attribution technology used IDFA as the deterministic way of tying advertising sources to installs and was a cornerstone of the industry. Given these new rules for attribution, everyone in the mobile Adtech ecosystem is again on equal footing and there are no exceptions for iOS.

Attribution on iOS14 will take a different form in September. Replacing attribution via IDFA, Apple introduced its own solution called SKAdNetwork. It presents a completely different way of attributing users in the ecosystem that has user privacy as its #1 priority and goes through Apple directly.

Tenjin’s mission is to help mobile marketers make the right decisions based on data and, like Apple, we believe tracking should be transparent and under the user’s control. The specific methods are always evolving, but the goal is the same.

That said, we see a lot of contradicting information getting released by multiple parties about how iOS attribution works using SKAdNetwork and how it will look for iOS14. Frankly speaking, there is not enough official information to suggest how the entire ecosystem will adapt and interface with this new paradigm.

Tenjin is taking time talking with Apple’s teams, and other impacted partners in the ecosystem, to ensure we innovate using this new paradigm in the right way. As we continue to support all non-deterministic attribution capabilities such as fingerprinting, we also want to confirm any opportunities for new deterministic capabilities using SKAdNetwork before making any claims about what it can do and how developers can interact with it.

We’ve always believed that attribution is only a small piece of the marketing puzzle, lowering its cost over the last several years for many developers, but it’s an essential one to get right and support properly as it is a key piece to performance marketing. We applaud Apple for continuing to commoditize part of the attribution technology and will update you on our findings and progress for adapting to this new world in the upcoming month.