Google details the impact of Apple's upcoming IDFA ad privacy changes, including reducing visibility into app install metrics and affecting bidding on some ads
Apple has prioritized user privacy over targeted advertising, and Google is spelling out today what that means for itself as well as game and app developers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple set the stage in June 2020 when it announced that the Identifier for Advertisers would become opt-in with iOS 14, turning a default-on tracking signal into something users must affirmatively grant. By December, the broader ad ecosystem was still scrambling to adapt with new targeting methods ahead of enforcement.
Today's piece is Google formally quantifying the blast radius: reduced visibility into app install metrics and degraded bidding on some ads, hitting game and app developers that buy through its network. It matters because Google is both the largest buyer-side intermediary exposed to the change and the operator of the rival Android ad stack.
First-order effects
- Game and app developers buying iOS installs through Google lose install-metric visibility and bidding precision, since the opt-in identifier no longer reliably attributes conversions.
- Google's own ads business takes a direct measurement hit on iOS inventory, which is why it is documenting workarounds rather than dismissing the change.
Second-order effects
- Budgets migrate across the aisle: Post-IDFA Alliance data later showed Android ad spending up roughly 21% while iOS spending slipped about 3%, with most iOS users opting out of tracking.
- The pain is uneven among platforms — reporting on ATT's first year found [[a:972287|Facebook's targeting limits pushed brands to raise ad spends and shift some budgets toward Google]], whose search intent signal survives without device identifiers.
Third-order effects
- Control of the identity layer becomes a competitive weapon: Apple constrains cross-app tracking on iOS while Google, facing internal concerns over diminishing mobile ads, delayed matching Apple's ATT changes on Android — leaving the two ecosystems asymmetrically regulated by their owners.
- If the pattern holds, mobile advertising consolidates around whatever signal each OS owner still permits — search intent and first-party data on Google's side, App Store attribution on Apple's — and independent ad-tech intermediaries lose the neutral identifier they were built on.
The trend: Mobile advertising is being redrawn around OS-level privacy controls, with Apple's opt-in identifier shifting spend toward Android and concentrating advantage in the two platform owners themselves.