Apple has its finger on the big red button again.
The adtech industry has been up in arms this week over a new Apple update in iOS 27 that could wreak havoc on web advertising.
Apple’s change blocked several major ad tech companies from using advertising identifiers in its device browsers and, in some cases, also disrupted their ability to serve ads to Apple users across the web.
First reported by AdExchanger, the blocking occurred via WebKit, the technology that powers Safari and all other browsers running on iPhones.
Apple has long taken an anti-tracking stance, reiterating its principle that privacy is “a fundamental human right.”
What particularly irked the adtech industry was that Apple didn’t just restrict cookies or IDs this time around – it completely blocked calls to certain adtech domains, in some cases preventing ads from serving on affected browsers unless the companies found a workaround.
Apple told The Trade Desk on Monday that it has made changes to a new beta version of iOS. These changes appear to have prevented The Trade Desk’s ad serving domain from being blocked alongside its advertising identifier, Unified ID 2.0.
This update is only available in beta at the moment, said Dustin Cha, co-CEO of adtech company Ad-Shield. This means that The Trade Desk’s ad serving domain will remain blocked in practice until iOS 27.2 ships.
“Which would probably put it in the second half of the fourth quarter, in time for the holiday season,” Cha said.
Apple also hasn’t solved the industry’s broader problem: IDs are still on the naughty list, and Apple has shown it’s willing to add companies to that list without prior warning.
Companies affected
The companies that will suffer the most from the update are those whose businesses rely heavily on alternative identifiers and other post-cookie technologies. The blocked domains included those operated by The Trade Desk, ID5, LiveRamp, Permutive and Audigent.
The broader impact concerns advertisers’ ability to identify and reach people on the open web. By blocking the identifiers that many ad tech companies use to recognize users on websites, Apple is effectively narrowing the pool of people that advertisers can target.
This is also bad news for publishers. If advertisers are able to identify fewer visitors, their advertising inventory may lose value. This could potentially divert more marketing money from the open web to platforms with vast stores of first-party user data. (It turns out that Apple also has a growing advertising business.)
For CMOs, this potentially means less reach, higher prices to reach audiences they can still identify, and poorer campaign performance across the web. It may also be more difficult to monitor how often people see an ad and to determine whether those ads actually worked.
It’s the latest example of how seemingly minor changes to Apple’s backend can cause tremors across the advertising landscape.
Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature in 2017, limiting the ability of ad tech companies to track users across the web using cookies, sparked a game of cat and mouse. The industry responded in part by developing alternative identifiers designed to recognize users without cookies. Apple’s latest move directly addresses these workarounds.
Apple’s privacy crackdown has also extended to apps. In 2022, Meta said Apple’s app tracking transparency change could hurt its advertising business, leading to a $10 billion loss in revenue.
Adtech professionals say what’s particularly concerning about the new ruling is the unusual opacity around which companies Apple blocked, why they were selected and how quickly that could change.
“It’s becoming more and more aggressive,” Mathieu Roche, CEO of ID5, told me.
AdExchanger reported Friday that Apple has created a broader list that can dynamically block potentially hundreds of ad tech, business technology and data companies. The way the list is constructed means it can be updated remotely without Apple releasing another version of iOS, the outlet reported. Affected businesses may not even know they’ve been blocked until something stops working.
Tony Katsur, CEO of the IAB Tech Lab, said it should be up to governments to control the internet, rather than individual companies.
“When governments pass laws and regulations in the interest of consumer privacy, they apply them to everyone and are consistent for everyone,” Katsur said. “When a company like Apple comes up with something like this, it’s unequal.”
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