Apple rewrites the EU tracking prompt in iOS 27.2

Apple is changing the App Tracking Transparency prompt in the European Union, and in five countries the old one goes away entirely. In a developer note published September 16, Apple said that beginning with iOS 27.2 and iPadOS 27.2, developers can use an alternative version of the ATT system prompt in the EU — and that "due to legal requirements, only the alternative version of the system prompt is available for apps distributed in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and Romania." If you buy iOS ads in those markets, your attribution baseline is about to move under you.

What actually happened

This is the consequence of an antitrust case, not a privacy upgrade. Germany's Bundeskartellamt accepted commitments from Apple on August 17 closing proceedings it opened in June 2022 under Section 19a of the German Competition Act and Article 102 TFEU. The regulator's objection was structural: Apple exempted its own advertising from the consent screen it forced on everyone else. Apple agreed to strip discouraging wording and symbols from the third-party prompt, design it neutrally, and let publishers fold their GDPR and ePrivacy consent requests into the same flow. The commitments run seven years with a monitoring trustee, and Apple had four months from service of the decision to ship.

TechCrunch reports the new screen is full-page rather than a pop-up, drops the word "track" from the copy, replaces the "Ask App Not to Track" button with a plain decline option, and adds a link to additional information where you can explain why you are asking. TechCrunch also reports developers can re-prompt EU users a year after their last answer. Apple's own note is explicit that the rules for when you must ask have not changed — only the screen.

Why a consent screen matters for your business

Most small companies do not ship an iOS app. Almost all of them buy ads measured by one. Every Meta, TikTok, and Google campaign you run against an app install or an in-app purchase inherits whatever opt-in rate that prompt produces. Neutral wording and annual re-prompts will move that rate. Nobody credible will tell you by how much, which is the point: your conversion data in five EU markets is about to shift for reasons that have nothing to do with your creative, your offer, or your product.

The practical move is to freeze a baseline before iOS 27.2 reaches volume. Pull cost per acquisition, attributed revenue, and match rate by country for the last 60 days and store it somewhere your reporting will not quietly overwrite. When the numbers change in October, you want to know whether you got better at marketing or whether Apple redrew a button.

The larger lesson is the one we keep writing about. A measurement system you do not own can be rewritten by a regulator in Bonn and a product team in Cupertino, and you find out from a developer changelog. First-party data — your own order records, your own email list, your own post-purchase survey asking where people heard about you — is the part of your attribution nobody else gets to redesign.

Sources: Apple Developer News, Bundeskartellamt, TechCrunch.