Yesterday, there was some fresh information regarding Apple’s policy on outside advertisers in iPhone apps, and now federal regulators are planning to investigate this policy, according to the Financial Times. It’s still being decided whether it will be the FTC or the Department of Justice will investigate the policy, which could harm consumers by offering developers fewer advertising options that would allow them to be financially sustainable and to continue to offer products to the public.
The biggest problem is that although independent third-party advertisers would be allowed to stand alongside Apple’s own iAds, anyone affiliated with other mobile devices or OSes would not qualify. The biggest player this addendum affects is AdMob, one of the biggest players in mobile advertising, who was recently acquired by Google, creator of the Android operating system. The irony here is that Apple was actually sniffing around picking up AdMob before Google closed the deal (but ended up buying Quattro instead), and now Apple is blocking AdMob from working on iPhone and other iOS products.
To make things clear, Apple is not against other non-iAd advertisements showing up on iPhone; the whole mess actually came up to stop nosy analytics firms from mining device and geolocation data. It’s a pretty funny story, check it out.
It’s hard to say if federal regulators will force Apple to open their advertising policies further to include agencies involved with other manufacturers, but one would imagine that that is a two-way street – how would Google feel about allowing iAds onto Android?
[via CNBC]