Apple is changing the tracking prompt, but only where a regulator demanded it: in five countries the new version is the only one

The prompt asking whether you allow an app to track you will soon look different - but only in part of Europe, and not because somebody decided it looks nicer that way. Apple has agreed to change the rules around that consent after a multi-year antitrust investigation led by the German competition regulator and several other European bodies.

The regulators' objection was not that the prompt exists, but who is exempt from it. The system known as App Tracking Transparency, in their view, gave Apple itself an advantage: its own apps use data collected within its ecosystem without having to display a screen like this. Everyone else has to ask. The rule applies to everyone - except the one who wrote it.

The settlement does not remove the question, nor the moment at which it is asked. What changes is the form. Instead of a pop-up, the screen will fill the page. The word "tracking" is being dropped. The buttons change from "Allow" and "Ask App Not to Track" to "Allow" and "Decline". Colours and formatting change, and developers get a link through which they can explain why they are asking at all. The company will also let them put the question to the same user again one year after their previous decision.

Apps want this because personalised advertising brings in more money than non-personalised. When the prompt appeared, the overwhelming majority of users simply declined - which hit firms whose revenue depends on advertising, Meta above all, while Apple's own advertising business grew. That gap was not an accidental consequence. It was the subject of the investigation.

Apple argued that these screens protect consumer privacy. The claim is not false - the prompt genuinely gives people a choice they did not have before. The problem is that the company simultaneously allows its own apps to show personalised ads based on data collected within its ecosystem. Privacy here is not a principle. It is a line drawn so that the competitors end up on one side of it.

There is also one detail that explains the real logic of the concession. The new version of the screen will be the only one available in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Romania, while in the remaining EU countries developers will be able to choose. In other words, the change arrives where a regulator asked for it. The rest get an option, and an option with nobody standing behind it is merely a suggestion.

That is the lesson worth more than the screen itself. This did not happen because users complained, nor because the company changed its mind after seven years. It happened because one competent authority spent years on an investigation and held out to the end. The question that remains is not whether we have such an institution on paper - but when something it demanded last ended with a rule being changed at a company of this size.