Farhad Divecha – MD and Founder of AccuraCast – on the impact of iOS 14.5 on businesses

Most people in business heard the rumours – when iOS 14.5 comes in, it’ll bring with it a new app policy which requires all users to ask for permission to track them across third-party apps and websites. Although this seems like an out of the blue announcement, Apple had said that this would happen in early 2021. When it didn’t, most businesses put it to the back of their minds…. but now, it’s upon us – with just one weeks’ notice.

This is bad news for businesses that haven’t heeded the warnings and subsequently prepared for this huge change. While it’s understandable that they may have been dealing with shorter term problem like the pandemic, we always knew it was coming – it was just a matter of when, so businesses should have started planning for this eventuality.

Of course, Apple had taken an interesting approach to this – not just in the timings but by not being clear on what this new update will look like, the results of the testing and subsequently, how many will be affected. Businesses are almost walking blindly into a new playing field.

Conversions will inevitably go down and many businesses won’t understand why. This is the first way to overcoming this hurdle; acknowledgement. Once businesses know why this is, they can work around it – but they need to act now.