iOS 14.5+: From day one until now | Adjust | Adjust

It’s been two and a half years since Apple first announced the release of iOS 14 at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2020, and more than two years since its release to the public on September 16, 2020. From the initial announcement until the rollout of iOS 14.5 in April 2021, the mobile marketing industry was sent into overdrive and pushed to reassess the way it handles user privacy and its approach to the mobile advertising ecosystem in general.

At Adjust, we’ve remained at the forefront of these changes, working closely with Apple, our partners, and clients to make the transition as seamless as possible and to provide guidelines and solutions that serve the needs of marketers, developers, and advertisers. Mobile Measurement Partners are still essential to mobile marketers. The definition of ‘measurement’ and how we deliver value has simply evolved. It’s no longer just about a strict focus on attribution and deterministic data but a broader, cohesive analysis of aggregated data.

With the official release of SKAdNetwork 4.0 (SKAN 4) and iOS 16 in October of 2022, further change was brought to the space. The way SKAN works was significantly altered, leading the industry to once again reassess its approach to mobile marketing and measurement on iOS—something many businesses had only recently figured out. At Adjust, we’ve continued to test, engineer, and solve for the updates and changes, which is why we have already released our SKAN 4-ready SDK. As with all things iOS, we are constantly reiterating our commitment to investing in next-generation solutions that align with the privacy-centric evolution of the market—moving away from solutions that focus on individual data points and towards optimizing insights for aggregated data. As part of this, we also launched Conversion Hub in 2022, our all-in-one solution for smart, easy, and effective conversion value mapping.

From understanding SKAN up until and including SKAN 4 and AppTrackingTransparency (ATT) to best practices for getting the opt-in, building and mapping conversion value setups, working with Adjust’s Conversion Hub, and creating marketing strategies that perform best in the post-IDFA world, there are a lot of topics and themes to cover.

The industry is becoming increasingly privacy-centric, and Adjust embraces these measures to ensure user privacy and data protection. In this guide, we put a lens on the changes from iOS 14.5+ to iOS 16.1, the significance for the industry, and how Adjust is adapting to deliver value to clients. We examine the ins and outs of working with SKAN and provide a holistic breakdown to ensure that marketers are up to speed with everything they need to know.