The sentiment is good, and we need a way of protecting user privacy and data. The problem with the way apple decides whether or not they’re collecting data and what counts as third party.

If an app developer doesn’t look at how their app is used then it won’t improve as fast as the apps that collect a lot of analytics. Where are we losing users, does this new design work better, which of these two ways of doing something is better. That is all user data collection, even if it is never used to for ads or commercially.

The other issue is third party data sharing. Under apple’s rules using a sass analytics service is considered exactly the same thing as selling all user data to data brokers for resale. It’s insane. The cost of running everything without any sass services is really high. And for what? Posthog and others committed to not using or selling their customer data.

With Nos we run our own notification system which talks directly to apple, but all apps that use a service for notifications are sharing data with third parties.

I think most developers lie or ignore apple’s rules about hosted sass services. But that just means they’re vulnerable to being taken down.

So yes. Don’t collect what you don’t need for bug / crash reporting, don’t sell data or give it away. But current appstore rules don’t really cover those cases at all.