I think that the author speaks about the play store because they are an Android dev.
Unfortunately the grass is not really greener on the other side. Apple's app store is also focusing on the free with ads model.
As far as tracking goes, my experience as an app dev is that we have been adding the same sdks on both platforms at the same time with roughly the same possibilities and limitations.
I have only worked on high profile apps, so these SDKs were not on the shady side, but I have seen the spam as well.
I should note that even though the sdks are not shady, we are still tracking a LOT of data. I have a pretty neutral opinion on this though .. our only use for this is to look at how new features influence our metrics.
Which can be positive for everybody. It is good to know that feature x has improved customer satisfaction by 5% so it is worth continuing to invest in it.
I wish there was more regulation on what we can collect, how we can use or not use that data, etc.
Having a standard for TOS where you can use customer data internally to improve your service but are forbidden to sell it might be beneficiary. Right now we have tons of pages of lawyerspeak for each and every app or service.
Even reading only those of the main services you use is a very time consuming task. Especiaylly when they change every five minutes for some companies.
The Play Store requires each developer to include a contact email address, which is then published in the store listing for each app. This makes it very easy for someone to scrape all the store listings to collect all of the contact emails to spam.
By contrast, the App Store only requires a support URL to be included in the listing, not an email address.
Apple does not publish the developer's e-mail address but they are usually trivially available on the developer's website.
Personally I have not received any of the offers mentioned in the article. Rather, I get spammed semi-regularly by 1. marketing firms/individuals promising to SEO and ASO my app to top places, 2. design/coding shops located in remote locations to help me with development
If any of the companies actually read the description of my app they would know that their services make no sense for me but hey, I guess they need to find the clients somewhere.
Part of the problem is also that Google promised developers a large Android community, und users free apps. Obviously there's a slight problem with getting paid for work here.
With this culture of "free", it's no wonder if app developers cave and sell out to shady companies.
App Store apps in general have significantly fewer ways to be “truly malicious”, and App Store review is somewhat more stringent than Google’s process from what I’ve heard. However, run-of-the-mill tracking SDKs are commonplace on both stores.
Both stores use automatic detection for malware, the manual testing used by _both_ store is mostly there for business reasons in my experience.
Google used to be laxer about what you could do with its APIs, but it has started to become way stricter one or two years ago.
It always cause some drama in the dev community when they stop apps from misusing an API (even if the misuse was not shady) but it is mostly for the best.
Unfortunately the grass is not really greener on the other side. Apple's app store is also focusing on the free with ads model.
As far as tracking goes, my experience as an app dev is that we have been adding the same sdks on both platforms at the same time with roughly the same possibilities and limitations.
I have only worked on high profile apps, so these SDKs were not on the shady side, but I have seen the spam as well.
I should note that even though the sdks are not shady, we are still tracking a LOT of data. I have a pretty neutral opinion on this though .. our only use for this is to look at how new features influence our metrics. Which can be positive for everybody. It is good to know that feature x has improved customer satisfaction by 5% so it is worth continuing to invest in it.
I wish there was more regulation on what we can collect, how we can use or not use that data, etc.
Having a standard for TOS where you can use customer data internally to improve your service but are forbidden to sell it might be beneficiary. Right now we have tons of pages of lawyerspeak for each and every app or service.
Even reading only those of the main services you use is a very time consuming task. Especiaylly when they change every five minutes for some companies.