Mapp Engage: Change in Device Analysis Categorization due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection
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    Mapp Engage: Change in Device Analysis Categorization due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection

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    Article summary

    27 Apr 2023 We are changing the way we categorize devices in Email Message Statistics. Devices that can't be identified because of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection will be categorized as "Unknown Platform". Before, they were categorized as "Desktop".

    The categorization change will become effective with the release of the latest version of Mapp Engage in calendar week 17, 2023. Historic data won't be changed - only message statistics from that week onwards will be categorized accordingly.

    Technical background

    With the release of iOS 15 in 2022, Apple introduced new features to protect their customers' privacy and security. The Mail Privacy Protection - among many other features - truncates the User-Agent string of devices that interact with an email message, making it impossible to identify the device category (Smartphone, Tablet, or Desktop). This feature was gradually rolled out by Apple over the last months, activating it on more and more devices over time.

    • Typical User Agent String of a device without Apple Mail Privacy Protection: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10) AppleWebKit/600.1.25 (KHTML, like Gecko)

    • User Agent String with Mail Privacy Protection: Mozilla/5.0

    As you can see from the example above, the truncated user agent string doesn't allow device category identification anymore.

    Depending on your target audience, the share of devices being categorized as "Unknown Platform" can be very high. This depends on the market share of Apple Mail among your customer base. The global market share of Apple Mail among all email clients is more than 50%, varying by region. Mapp is expecting other Email clients and browsers to implement similar changes as Apple did, preventing device identification for data privacy reasons. This will render device-related statistics and analyses useless over time.

    You can find the Device Analysis in Mapp Engage by navigating to Statistics > Group Messages > Email > "View Statistics" icon > Recipient Activity > Device Analysis.

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