Google is taking a page out of Apple’s book today, with a more developer-friendly and open twist: Privacy Sandbox is coming to Android from Chrome to help reign in mobile advertisers. Rather than being a blanket “ask app not to track” user-facing opt-in, though, Google wants to work with developers to figure out a more sustainable approach, dangling a carrot for their involvement now before it starts swinging a bigger enforcement stick later.

For those out of the loop, last year Apple rolled out a new feature called App Tracking Transparency, and it worked very simply: Apps would have to explicitly ask users whether they could be “tracked.” As they say, “if you’re not the customer; you’re the product,” and many ostensibly free services like Facebook actually use your data to serve you ads. Apple's change in how this worked via an opt-in system rather than an opt-out one was meant to enhance customer privacy, but still isn’t perfect. Even if Apple’s new policy made a big dent in Facebook’s bottom line, you’re still trusting developers to actually honor the spirit of the request since there are other ways like device fingerprinting to track users.

The marketable intention behind Apple’s App Tracking Transparency may have been a good thing for customers, but the actual implementation still leaves some holes, if not outright incentivizing developers to find ways to work around it without being caught.

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency changes caused a reported 15-20% drop in advertising revenue, and while customers don’t care about that, developers — especially smaller independent developers — absolutely do since those losses get passed on to them. Android’s ecosystem and independent developers seem more vulnerable to advertising revenue losses since the "free" app business model more common in Android is sustained by advertising.

Google’s approach plans to be a little different, and the company is being very, very tentative about things — in short, it doesn’t want to “pull an Apple,” to coin our own phrase, abruptly interfering with expected developer behaviors or revenue by forcing a sudden policy shift without dialogue. But make no mistake, change is coming.

Google's Anthony Chavez, VP of Android Security and Privacy, tells us this will be a “multi-year initiative,” and it’s currently only reviewing “initial design proposals,” soliciting feedback from developers for how to best implement the intended privacy-enhancing changes to mobile advertising. Pretty obviously, Google’s concerned about the outsized impact Apple’s App Tracking Transparency had on developers, and though it wants to implement similar privacy-enhancing measures, it also wants to hear developer feedback ahead of any actual change.

Through the rest of the year, Google plans to iterate designs for advertisement tracking tweaks based on that feedback. We’ll see a handful of “developer previews” ahead of a beta launch at the end of the year, independent of the Android release cycle — tests will be deployed via another mechanism like Mainline/APEX modules and/or Play Services rather than in a system update. “Scaled testing” will happen in 2023.

The early proposed changes for Android reflect the influence of Google’s Privacy Sandbox in Chrome, with a two-fold approach encompassing both APIs for advertisers to use and tracking protections at the system level, including a future hope for anti-fingerprinting mechanisms. Google hopes the APIs offered will allow advertisers to continue to show personalized ads in a more privacy-respectful way while also not interfering with things like campaign performance reporting and training of machine learning models.

It might seem like Google’s simply establishing another standard for ads without any incentive to encourage third-party advertisers to use it and no way to force them to adopt it, but a less-than-veiled threat was hidden in the announcement: Google's says, “we plan to support existing ads platform features for at least two years,” emphasis ours, stressing in its own way that Google is likely going to mandate the use of these APIs through some enforcement mechanism even for third-party advertisers eventually. From that perspective, it’s better to be a part of the conversation now than forced into the change after all is said and done later.

Google also highlighted big-name endorsements from developers like Snap Inc., Activision Blizzard, Rovio, and Duolingo, all already on board with both the changes and Google’s collaborative approach.

Fundamentally, this extension of the Privacy Sandbox to Android is Google’s take on App Tracking Transparency but taken much more tentatively and slowly as the company hopes to integrate developer feedback — necessary given the platform and ecosystem differences. Right now, it might seem like developers are lacking both a reward for adopting the changes or a threat of punishment if they don’t, but a stick is coming for those that don’t take the carrot.