Do Analytics tools like PostHog or Adjust require App Tracking Transparency, and if so when?

Question

I am planning to integrate Analytics tools like PostHog or Adjust (but also others) into my app, and I find it very vague where I exactly need to prompt (or not) the App Tracking Transparency popup.

I would usually use them to identify the users from their database id, set some of their properties, send custom events, or also get track of crashes.

Would I need App Tracking Transparency for these purposes? Also, do I need to display the popup at the very beginning, or can I independently initialize and configure these SDKs, and wait for the first user identification to prompt the ATT popup?

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

Actually I deployed a react native app a few months ago without App Tracking Transparency and with integrated (self-hosted!) posthog instance - and it was accepted by Apple without problems

I think it's important to emphasize that it was a self-hosted (hobby) instance - which runs on our own servers.

As we added Google Tracking and App Transparency then they had a closer look - but I explained it to them, and they still accepted the circumstance that Google Tracking was only activated when App Transparency was accepted, but Posthog nonetheless was always activated.

Answer 2

App Tracking Transparency is specifically about "tracking across apps and web sites". PostHog doesn't do this cross-app/site tracking so even if you are using a 3rd party hosted variant like PostHog's Cloud offering you wouldn't need to worry about it. With 3rd party data hosting though you should still make sure to have the right privacy policy / terms etc.

Tools like Adjust do need an ATT warning as their whole purpose is to track users across domains using certain device identifiers. The usage of these identifiers is normally what triggers the Apple review process to state it is required.

Disclaimer: I've been responsible for deploying multiple iOS apps in the past and currently work at PostHog