Apple Puts Ban on Location-Based iPhone App Ads

February 5, 2010 By Dena Cassella

Apple told developers that it will not use global positioning system to distribute location-based advertising.

Without providing any reason, Apple has told developers it will not accept iPhone applications that use the smartphone’s global positioning system to distribute location-based advertising. Knowing Apple, we’re thinking there’s a good rhyme and reason for this ban—we’re going to go ahead and guess Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless may have something to do with this new ban. Quattro’s platform is quite keen on distributing mobile ads, which is probably why Apple scooped it up. The Mac-maker is famous for its secrecy and for preferring to keep things “in-house.” Apple is kind of like Robert DeNiro’s character in the movie Meet the Parents—it has its “circle of trust” and once you’re in, you’re in.

“If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store,” Apple says.

At the rate that people buy and download apps for iPhone, location-based advertising is looking a lot more promising to developers—and now it looks a little clearer as to why Apple put the kibosh on that.

Showing 9 comments

Rizwan at 10:39pm 6th November 2010 I think you are probably right. This would be way too broad otherwise.
Nerd at 8:10pm 12th July 2010 I hope this comment is posted thrice. For Dev team, please insert an if condition in your code to make a string comparison against the recently posted comment and if they both match, do not allow for the comment to be posted. Hopefully that shouldn't be too hard ..
Ian Bell at 9:34am 7th February 2010 I think you are probably right. This would be way too broad otherwise.
tb at 8:54am 7th February 2010 I think the big word here is "Primary", services like Poynt and Buzz'd primarily off valid local content which is organic or "non paid" to users that help them find local POI's nearest to them. Advertising looks to be secondary, not primary. It looks like apple is trying to protect Geo Spamming, or just spitting out ad based on a users location as an application. If they took the word of "Primary" out this would be scary, not just to Poynt and Buzz'd though also Yelp, UrbanSpoon, Superpages, Yellowpages, CitySearch etc.
Ian Bell at 10:33am 6th February 2010 Are you referring to Google buying AdMob? If so that would make sense. Not sure why Apple things they can control everything that is viewed over the iPhone though..
Victor at 12:23am 6th February 2010 Apple is punishing Google for launching a competing phone platform. Their business model will no longer work on an Apple mobile product when Apple is done locking them out. All of that makes sense to me as it is exactly what I would do to someone who sat on our board and stole our ideas for their own use and profit.
Ian Bell at 4:49pm 5th February 2010 Dan, they are banning aps that use location based ads. Poynt and Buzzd, which are both apps, use location based ads from SuperPages in their apps. So I would assume Apple would ban those apps since they would not be able to directly ban the ads that appear from within those apps.
Dan Lingman at 4:35pm 5th February 2010 Yes, but are those location based ads using things like IP address (which advertisers use to deliver localized ads on all platforms) or is it using GPS/Cell triangulation etc, which consume additional power on the phone?

I'm guessing the second is what they want to block, since that would result in an additional power drain when not needed.

The entire title of this article is vastly misleading - they are not banning location based apps, but rather banning location based ads.

Dan
Ian Bell at 3:28pm 5th February 2010 This seems like it would be a huge blow. I know that Poynt and I believe Buzzd both display location based ads in their search results. Sad that Apple it trying to control everything.