A revised academic paper is complicating the price story around Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. Economist Reinhold Kesler posted an updated version of his 2022 SSRN paper on July 31, 2026, now carrying evidence that runs four years past the policy’s enactment. It finds that ATT raised the odds of an App Store app charging an upfront price by just 0.071 percentage points relative to Google Play. A descriptive figure in the same paper moved much further: among apps that survived in the study’s panel, the share disclosing linked data climbed from 10.4 percent to 24.1 percent.
What Is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency?
App Tracking Transparency is Apple’s consent requirement covering access to IDFA, the advertising identifier that lets one company follow a user’s activity across other companies’ apps. An app has to ask before using it, and the user can decline. Declining blocks that one identifier. It does not stop the app from collecting other categories of data about the same person.
A Four-Year Estimate, Revised
Kesler’s paper, “The Impact of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency on App Monetization,” first circulated in April 2022 and now runs 46 pages on SSRN under abstract ID 4090786. Kesler is an assistant professor of economics at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, with affiliations at the Duesseldorf Institute for Competition Economics and ZEW Mannheim. The revision extends the observation window to February 2021 through July 2025 and uses difference-in-differences, comparing App Store apps against Google Play apps as a control group that ATT never touched.
The starting panel held 583,834 Apple App Store apps and 901,182 Google Play apps, tracked in balance across both stores. By March 2025, the Apple side of that panel had fallen to 321,797 apps. Those counts describe four years of app-store churn; the paper does not attribute the drop to ATT, and the two dates involved, July 2025 for the full panel and March 2025 for the survival count, are not the same cutoff.
The Price Effect That Barely Moved
The headline test asked whether losing IDFA access pushed developers to charge users directly instead of advertisers. ATT raised the probability that an App Store app carried an upfront price by 0.071 percentage points relative to Google Play, a relative increase of about 0.82 percent over the baseline paid-app share. In-app purchase prevalence rose by a companion 0.104 percentage points. The price estimate is statistically significant against a control group of nearly a million apps, and economically negligible. Four years and half a million apps produced a shift of roughly seven-hundredths of one percentage point toward paid pricing.
Where the Disclosures Rose
Among the apps that survived in Kesler’s balanced panel, the share disclosing linked data, meaning data tied to an identified user, rose from 10.4 percent to 24.1 percent. The increase concentrated in four declared categories: Identifiers, Contact Info, Usage Data, and Diagnostics. Kesler reads this as developers substituting fingerprinting-compatible data collection for the IDFA access ATT removed, his interpretation of what those disclosed categories enable, not a direct observation of fingerprinting in use. The paper also flags little evidence that user complaints about advertising rose after ATT.
A related but distinct pattern shows up in apps that entered the store after the policy took effect: that entry cohort discloses linked-data collection, contact information especially, at markedly higher rates. That is a separate population from the 10.4-to-24.1 figure above, not the same measurement restated.
A Consent Gate on One Identifier
Kesler’s reading makes this a substitution story rather than a suppression story. ATT gated IDFA access and priced that closure at roughly nothing, 0.071 percentage points of movement toward paid apps. When one identifier closes, attention moves to the next available signal, though not always out of reach of consent. Google’s move to use IP addresses for ad personalization across the EEA, the UK and Switzerland promoted a signal that already arrived with the network connection into a declared TCF purpose, and the consent requirement followed it there: publishers have to surface Feature 3 in the prompt, and Google excludes users whose consent flow doesn’t capture it. Google’s own six-year effort to replace the third-party cookie ended in October 2025 with the cookie still active in Chrome and no deprecation timeline, a second identifier-removal program that didn’t land where its designers pointed it.
Kesler’s paper is posted on SSRN. PPC Land also covered the revision. For anyone still citing ATT as the policy that pushed apps toward paid models, four years of data say otherwise.