Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators in its developer forums: submit an app that uses user location data "primarily" for targeting advertisements and that app will be sent right back to you to be changed.
Many mobile developers are planning on monetizing their apps precisely through location-based advertising. There's no clear criteria for how much advertising is too much, and perhaps Apple will exercise discretion in recognizing advertisements as merely supplemental to other features in many apps, but the language used by the company is wholly disconcerting and is another great example of the perils of developing on a closed platform like the iPhone. This is crazy.
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The notification went up yesterday in the Apple Developer forum and was written about hours ago by the blog MacNN.
If you build your application with features based on a user's location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Some people immediately accused Apple of implementing this policy so that it alone could use location-based advertisements on the platform.
But what's with this language about how location can only be used to "provide beneficial information?" Who makes this decision and where on earth does Apple get off making a policy like this? The company says earlier that location may be used to tell phone owners about "nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information." What if the restaurants serve unhealthy food, though? What are you going to spend that ATM cash on if this iPhone app helps you find it? How does Apple determine that advertisements, particularly ones for things you could buy in the place where you are, are not beneficial?
What this means for location based social networking, Augmented Reality, mobile eCommerce and other types of applications is unclear. Apple is going to have to do something about this. Location-based advertising has been expected to make economically feasible a universe of new mobile applications. The prospect of Apple taking an anti-advertising stance in selecting which iPhone apps to allow into the App Store is pure insanity.
I've used a number of apps in the past few days that are great apps, but ask for my location so they can serve me up locally-based ads from the recently Google-acquired AdMob ad network and that was just fine by me. Show me ads for businesses in my town, please! Why can't even apps without other location-based features not be monetized by local ads? This seems totally unfair.
Above: One extreme example of location used to deliver ads on an iPhone. Back to the depths of Hell, iButterfly!
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