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Apple has big plans to expand its home-grown advertising business. However, it could be a struggle both in dealing with a privacy-focused public image and from its own engineers.
While small compared to behemoths such as Google’s advertising empire, Apple’s own advertising isn’t a small project for the company, with it earning billions from ads served in the App Store and other areas.
However, while Apple has ambitions to grow its ad business in the coming years, potentially hitting $6 billion by 2025, it has to also deal with a fundamental struggle. Advertising is viewed as an anti-privacy industry, whereas Apple is decidedly on the side of privacy being a human right.
This is not just an external image struggle, but one that’s also internal. Engineers working on Apple’s ad technology have signaled that, though Apple wants to get its ad sales bigger, the engineers don’t want it to swell too big.
At least seven people who work with or on the ad team told The Information of apathy among Apple’s employees over the ad business. Two said that some engineers took to internal chatrooms over it, expressing fears Apple could be going too far and potentially harming the iPhone’s premium experience.
Externally, after years of proclaiming to consumers that it cares about privacy and railing against firms that rely on advertising for revenue, Apple is also seeing critics argue that the ad business isn’t going right at all for the company.
“They can’t alienate users by essentially taking advantage of everything they have built their brand on such as privacy, protecting your data and protecting your identity,” said market research firm Insider Intelligence’s director of forecasting Peter Newman.
Apple has also come under fire for displaying gambling app ads next to kids applications and gambling addition recovery apps in the App Store.
Shac Ron, a former Apple engineer, tweeted they were “glad to see Apple getting raked for ads in the OS.” Describing the effort as “disgusting and shameful,” Ron added “I hope they will realize how offensive these are but realistically I doubt it.”
