The changes to Apple's developer agreement made headlines when it hammered the final nail in Flash on iPhone's coffin, but Adobe wasn't the only party the company had in its sights.

Speaking during the D8 conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs cast some light on the other major change in the agreement - the outlawing of app analytics.

The alteration to the agreement prohibited some analytics functions Apple deems a violation of user privacy, but it appears Apple weren't aware of such activities until one particular firm - Flurry – managed to get data that confirmed iPads were being used.

Victim of its own success

"One day we read in the paper that a company called Flurry Analytics has detected that we have some new iPhone and 'other tablet devices' that we're using on our campus," Jobs said during a Q&A session at the D8 conference.

"Their software is sending out information about the device, about its geo-location and other things back to Flurry. No customer is ever told about this and it's violating every privacy policy we have with our developers, and we went through the roof about this."

Speaking candidly as ever, aside from admitting Flurry's actions were 'pissing Apple off', Jobs claimed privacy was the main issue behind the ban on such analytics.

"They can't send data out to an analytics firm who is going to sell it to make money and publish it. That we don't need to do."

All of a Flurry

Analytics will continue to be available for advertising firms, he continued, but he said there was 'no excuse' for firms such as Flurry initially failing to notify users when such data was being collated and sent - a situation since rectified by Flurry itself.

The possibility for widening the use of app analytics remains open, however, with Jobs admitting that Apple would be willing to talk to firms such as Flurry once the dust has settled - although he closed by saying that such a discussion was 'not for today'.



[source: VentureBeat]