Interesting Reads
The DeanBeat: How the ad ecosystem will cope with Apple's IDFA changes
We’re now four months into the IDFA Apocalypse. And though there’s nothing net-new in this article, it’s a good (and very thorough) recap of the story so far, seen through the perspective of a journalist looking in from outside the blast radius.
Thoughts on the App Store
If you’ve never heard of AltStore, here’s the tl;dr: there actually is a way to ‘sideload’ Apple-prohibited iOS apps that doesn’t rely on jailbreaking.
That’s interesting enough on the merits. But the developer behind AltStore now has some thoughts to share on the future of the App Store monopoly, and the most interesting thing is that — overall — he’s actually a proponent of keeping the App Store mostly the way it is today…with improved sideloading capabilities as the pressure-relief valve that’s currently missing:
At this point, I think the real question is not whether Apple will expand support for sideloading, but whether they’ll do so before legislation forces them to. Australia, Russia, the EU, and the United States are all independently investigating Apple and the App Store for antitrust practices, and it would take just one of them to pass a law requiring Apple to allow apps from outside sources.
PS, if you’re wondering what sort of apps show up on a ‘not-Apple iOS App Store’, the article also highlights a few of the most popular.
Industry Buzz
Twilio Set To Acquire Cloud Customer Data Startup Segment For $3.2 Billion
It’s quite likely that many readers already use (or are at least familiar with) these two platforms
My opinion? Genius move for Twilio, honestly. Segment can supply the central hub to tie in all channel spokes Twilio powers (especially after the SendGrid acquisition from a couple years ago).
Meet Google Analytics 4: Google's vision for the future of analytics
It comes with a fancy new version number, but this is really more like marketing fluff around a collection of incremental improvements, rather than something actually new (there’s plenty of emphasis on buzzwords like ‘modeling’ and ‘AI-powered insights’).
That said, it’s further proof that the future of measurement and analytics isn’t just dumb pipes — it’s having data scale, and the processing intelligence to extract something useful from the chaos.
Walled Gardens
10 app store principles to promote choice, fairness and innovation
This is Microsoft, opportunistically capitalizing on the current anti-Apple news cycle to get some good press for the Microsoft Store.
It’s not exactly a perfect comparison — and they even readily admit that they’re not applying the same guidelines to the Xbox store, which is where this would eventually need to show up if Microsoft is serious about putting its money where its mouth is — but it’s momentum in a good direction.
Privacy & Security
‘A common set of interests between publishers and privacy nerds’: Why publishers are backing the sequel to ‘Do Not Track’
Introducing DNT (Do Not Track) 2.0.
Still way too early to know if this will be all smoke and no fire, but unlike Apple’s iOS 14 changes, at least this isn’t being imposed by single-company fiat. And unlike DNT, it might end up becoming legally binding (the voluntary-ness of DNT was the fatal flaw that Apple used as an excuse to remove support from Safari last year).
Tips & Techniques
Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups
This is a novel-length resource, but it’s awesome.
The authors break down what they see as the three main ways to drive user acquisition for consumer businesses: performance marketing, virality, and content. Then, they analyze how some of the best-known brands in tech applied these practices to get where they are today (including plenty of blast-from-the-past photos and screenshots dating back to the early 2000s…)
Introducing Incrementality for Remarketing
AppsFlyer announced a new built-in report type this week to help with incrementality reporting, and it’s pretty slick.
As a data nerd, I love updates like this: it's not net-new core functionality, but it’s a great example of knitting together existing data and features to productize something that sophisticated customers are almost certainly doing already.
Data
Events, travel, and sports all fall in the ‘highest risk activity’ bucket, and these apps have obviously stayed far below pre-pandemic levels. Interestingly, music streaming is also down...fewer people using music to block out office noise, perhaps?
How YouTube Influencer Marketing impacts app downloads
Following on the incrementality thread, an in-depth data analysis that basically attempts to answer this question:
If I pay an influencer to promote my app, how many net-new installs will I really get?
(Hat tip: the awesome Grow.co newsletter, from Adam Lovallo)
Podcast
CEO & Co-Founder @ Bulbul: Sachin Bhatia
Building World-Class Products From Scratch
Some people stop after creating their first successful company, but Sachin Bhatia has created three products and companies that have flourished. Sachin shares how he got his parents' entrepreneurial spirit by selling water and other items as a child. He started his first company, MakeMyTrip, in 2000, and while they had a successful launch due to word of mouth, they weren’t able to keep up with demand. He learned his lesson: on the launch of his second company, TrulyMadly, they had the campaign to allow people to date not based on creed or religion in India, which picked up a lot of press and was very successful. He then shares the story of how he and his co-founder teamed up again to build Bulbul, a video-based shopping app.
Hear more about Sachin’s story, including his marketing campaign where MakeMyTrip asked for a second chance, his strategy for breaking down his campaigns, and more on this episode of How I Grew This
Listen Now
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Unless you’ve spent the last few days in off-grid log cabin (it’s 2020…this might in fact be a possibility), you already heard that the US Department of Justice sued Google this week.
Given how many recaps and analyses of this story are floating around, there’s not much to add at this point (though, as he often does, Ben Thompson at Stratechery makes a solid case for why we might not even be asking the right questions).
Whatever eventually comes along to knock Google off its perch (and something will, eventually) probably isn’t going to look like another Google. Just as the iPhone didn’t look like a PalmPilot, and the PC wasn’t a cheaper IBM mainframe (and the automobile isn’t a faster horse). As Benedict Evans wrote earlier this year, monopolies often don’t really get ‘broken’ — they’re just eventually bypassed by something else.
Alex Bauer