Apple Announces the Tracking Prompt, Then Delays It

What Changed

Apple announced the change at its developer conference.¹ With iOS 14, apps would need users' permission before tracking them across apps and websites owned by other companies, or before accessing the IDFA. The prompt was the core of what Apple called App Tracking Transparency.

The strongest early reaction came from Facebook. On August 26, 2020, it said it would not collect the IDFA in its own apps on iOS 14, and warned that the change might make its Audience Network, which places ads in other companies' apps, so ineffective on iOS 14 that it might not make sense to offer it. In Facebook's own test, publisher revenue on Audience Network fell by more than 50% without personalized ads. It also told app advertisers to run iOS 14 install campaigns from a separate ad account, so that the aggregated reports from SKAdNetwork, Apple's privacy-preserving attribution framework, stayed apart from everything else.²

On September 3, 2020, shortly before iOS 14 shipped, Apple said that to give developers time to make the necessary changes, apps would be required to get permission to track users starting early the next year.³ iOS 14 launched without the requirement.

Why It Mattered

The delay gave the industry about seven months to prepare. Ad networks and attribution providers worked on SKAdNetwork and on new ways to model campaign performance without user-level data. Facebook, now Meta, ran full-page newspaper ads in December 2020 arguing that the change would hurt small businesses that relied on its ads.⁴

The months between announcement and enforcement also set up later disputes. On October 23, 2020, four French advertising associations, including IAB France, asked France's competition authority to act against the framework before it took effect. The authority declined to impose interim measures on March 17, 2021, but kept investigating the case.⁵ It fined Apple in 2025.

Enforcement began with iOS 14.5 on April 26, 2021.