Nearly 10K iOS apps have enabled App Tracking Transparency prompt, report says

Almost 10,000 iOS apps have adopted permission prompts to conform with Apple's App Tracking Transparency less than a week after the feature rolled out, according to a new report.

Citing its own analytics, app data and analysis firm AppFigures says roughly 10,000 apps on the iOS App Store have enabled permission requests to track user Identification for Developer (IDFA) tags in line with Apple's new guidelines. For reference, recent reports claim the App Store boasts nearly two million titles in its catalog.

Of note, games account for a bulk of ATT early adopters, accounting for 20% of the total. Other categories, like utilities, entertainment, news and shopping, are hovering at around 6% of the whole, while social networking apps, which typically rely heavily on ad targeting for revenue, accounts for a roughly 5% share.

A cursory study of prompts supplied by developers shows a range of requests to track, from detailed explanations to default text and misleading statements. This could change as Apple sifts through the thousands of updates that arrived alongside the release of iOS 14.5 on Monday.

Integrated into the latest iOS, iPadOS and tvOS revisions, ATT is a new feature that requires developers to ask permission before tracking users in other apps and across the web. Heralded by Apple as an important user privacy tool, critics say the requirement to obtain ad tracking permissions will dissuade users from participating and thus hurt businesses reliant on ad revenue.

To assuage concerns of advertisers and developers who rely on ad sales, Apple introduced its own set of ad attribution tools as a privacy-focused replacement to industry standard tracking methods. The systems, including the SKAdNetwork and Privacy Click Measurement, do not directly identify users and can therefore be integrated without express user permission.