Re:Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps
by rhizome on Wednesday January 30, 2019 @03:58PM
(#19039402)
>I wonder what price this instrumentation is worth to them if $20/mo and PR risk was okay
Legitimate market research focus groups pay $100-200/hr, or more, to regular people for verbal approximations of their own behavior.
Seemed like the WSJ described this tool pretty well [ https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me... ] -- reportedly Facebook employees can just plug in "Snapchat" into the Onavo metrics and see "we estimate [XX] MAU, declining [Y%] year over year and [Z%] month over month", and they can use this info to short/long SNAP or to prioritize building/buying a competitor. Such a great idea.
I am confused that the Google product which also says it can collect usage data from 13-17 year olds [ https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/756613... , https://support.google.com/audiencemeasurement/answer/757381... ] is still allowed by Apple. Maybe Facebook is just learning for the first time that Apple's control over what applications can be installed is arbitrary and capricious at best?
I do feel bad for whatever PM in Facebook (on Project Atlas or whatever) has been watching this news for the past few days and saying "whoa, this seems disproportionately unfair, given that Google and others do the same thing on iOS". I'm just wildly speculating here but that project team is probably getting a firsthand lesson in the "New York Times test" rule: if what you are doing were published on the front page of the NYT, would you regret it? (This is a particularly rough area because I think a lot of current employees probably feel like the NYT and peers have some kind of vendetta against them and probably don't really understand the hostility.)