Linked List: September 26, 2015

Saturday, 26 September 2015

My thanks to Mapbox for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. The Mapbox iOS SDK is the new open source framework for making your app location-aware. It comes with beautiful vector maps for any scenario: detailed streets for navigating cities, terrain for adventuring, and satellite imagery for seeing the world up close.

You can even find out how users interact with your map. The analytics dashboard provides a continuously updated view of your user base, from places where your app is popular to better metrics around uses of your app.

Start developing with the Mapbox iOS SDK for free today. Mapbox’s Cocoa API works just like Apple’s MapKit — just swap out MKMapView for MGLMapView. Their “First Steps With the Mapbox iOS SDK” guide shows just how easy it is to switch.

Ben Brooks Surveys the iOS Content Blocker Field ★

Ben Brooks wrote a comprehensive four-part series comparing and testing the top iOS content blockers. Really useful, really interesting information — he put a lot of work and thought into this.

Projecting the Ad Revenue Effect of iOS 9 Content Blocking ★

Ben Ilfeld and Jake Goldman, in a report for 10up:

We invented a hypothetical mid-size publisher based in the United States and reliant on exchange banner ads, using private data from a variety of sources and industry data reviewed in the report, including adoption models that predict equal or greater adoption compared to desktop ad blockers.

Eight months from now, our hypothetical publisher could see a 3.7% drop in ad revenue. With astronomical content blocker adoption (3× desktop rates) driven by App Store visibility and media coverage, that number could be as high as 11%. A potentially severe setback for businesses with thin margins.

If their model is accurate, the effects of iOS content blocking on publishers won’t be too bad. Their 11 percent worst-case scenario requires iOS users to adopt ad blockers at three times the rate of desktop users, which does not sound likely to me.