But the public claim, "it saves battery life!" would not make it defensible for most analytics companies, in my opinion. That would mean Google and Apple get duplicated access to just about all mobile analytics data in the world overnight. They already get vast data from the mobile phones through telemetry and their own apps; I think the largest third party analytics providers would revolt. They would all be at the mercy of Apple and Google's benevolence, which is basically backing their business into a corner. You don't want to be reliant on the whims of a giant tech company.

There are probably also some (maybe weak) anti-trust arguments against it, because all analytics other than e.g. Google Analytics become literal second class citizens on the phone. That would basically be telling app developers they're not allowed to send requests to specific hosts within their apps, only Apple and Google can do that (on their respective phones).

So I don't know if this is a missed opportunity, so much as Apple and Google realizing it would burn their walled gardens to the ground.

Would anyone care? I don't think a game company is going to refuse to publish on iTunes or Google Play because some tool they use for analytics stops working.

Nothing against analytics companies, but they just aren't a relevant party in Apple's (or Google's) ecosystem.

I don't see why these companies can't simply push all analytics to their own servers then out to the analytics company, bypassing apple/google.

Most of the biggest mobile games companies have custom analytics engines and likely do this anyway.

Furthermore, from experience, duplication within a single app often happens all on its own because, say, different departments use different toolchains with different integrations, thus want different analytics providers and it's easier to just have the app send to both. It's inefficiencies all the way down because the only one to really pay for this is the user, and the user doesn't know they're paying for this (be it in battery life, PII leakage, etc).

In the short term you're probably right, nothing would "burn" except a lot of developer good will. But in the long term it'd be a great way to get many different parties thinking hard about how to get off your platform or replace you.

Twitter wiped out dev support even more completely than is suggested here, and it hasn't really hurt them aside from some persistent grumbles.

I was not thinking about the anti-trust implications by not allowing folks to send data back but perhaps there is a middle ground.

It could also increase transparency for consumers by allowing the opt in opt out on the device for each app and letting customers know “this app is tracking your clicks on it”.

The one point about them essentially getting all data, don’t you think they are already doing this? Look at the amount of calls the iPhone is doing back to Apple or the amount of data Android is shipping to Google. I believe they literally are already doing all of it, this would just be a way to give developers access to what they want transparently and reduce the number of unnecessary calls, all the calls would still happen but server side.

Wait, what? How would a client app get SSL certs from letsencrypt?