Facebook/Meta reported its fourth-quarter results on Wednesday, and sentiment was very different from Apple’s last week. Facebook missed expectations with lower earnings and a bleak outlook that caused the stock to plummet about 25 percent. And that’s all Apple’s fault.

The reason for this is the app tracking transparency that Apple introduced in iOS 14.5 in April last year. This is a simple dialog box that appears when you first launch an app. Before using the app, you will receive a message asking if you want to allow the app to track your activities on other companies’ apps and websites.

Tap “Allow” and things will continue as you are used to. However, select the “Ask app not to track” option and the app will be blocked from tracking your activity once you leave it.

It might seem like a small thing, but tracking is big business for a company like Facebook that relies on ads. According to Dave Wehner, Meta’s CFO, “The overall impact of iOS is a headwind for our business in 2022… on the order of $10 billion.” The price slump when the stock market opened on Thursday initially destroyed $ 200 billion of Facebook’s market value.

Facebook complained that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) favors companies like Google because ATT “exempts browsers from the tracking requests Apple requires for apps.” Wehner went so far as to accuse Apple of ignoring the “policy discrepancy” because “Apple continues to make billions of dollars a year from Google search ads.”

Apple built strong protections against tracking in Safari long before ATT was introduced, and Google has insisted that it doesn’t sell personal information and has multiple ways to disable tracking in Chrome and Search. In addition, Google has developed its own version of ATT as part of its Android operating system, as well as a new cookie-free advertising system in Chrome called Topics, which includes short-term, handpicked data analytics that “represent your top interests for this week based on your browsing history “.

But it’s hard not to see how ATT is affecting Facebook in particular. Despite an ad campaign opposing it and a page explaining how allowing ad tracking “helps businesses that rely on ads to reach their customers,” iPhone users have disproportionately grown opted to disable tracking. And now it’s starting to seriously affect the bottom line.

What Facebook still has more or less to do, Snapchat seems to have already overcome – revenue losses due to Apple’s Ad Transparency. Snap Inc. had revenue of $1.3 billion last quarter, leaving a profit of 22.6 million US dollars. After Facebook’s bad figures, Snap’s share price also plummeted by 26 percent, and the comparatively good balance sheet led to a recovery in after-hours trading – 42 percent plus. According to Snap Inc., it has adapted its app to Apple’s requirements and is now doing quite well with it. Facebook wants to redesign its entire ad system in order to continue to enable tracking for targeted advertising. (Macwelt)