> unless it's directly interfering what they're trying to do
That's where the trouble will come. I can see trend emerge where essential functionality could be blocked on account of tracking being disabled. I have some faith policies and people will work against this but i've seen so many dark patterns in freemium that I think this sort of dishonesty could just work.
It is okay for games to have limited gameplay until you use in-app purchases to unlock more features. You could easily have an app that provides a limited bit of functionality, but then allow you to unlock more just by changing this setting. Especially if any of the monopoly cases against Apple forces them to change.
The proper way of handling that would be to show less ads to those who enabled tracking.
Tracked ads have more value because it's more likely that you'll buy something targeted at you. So you need to show less ads compared to untracked ads to extract the same value.
I think that this kind of differentiation is allowed by Apple and probably will be implemented in some apps.
What about a feature that is both useful and, by its nature, requires tracking to even work? (not a dark pattern but technically depends on something that falls under the purview of tracking)
That's where the trouble will come. I can see trend emerge where essential functionality could be blocked on account of tracking being disabled. I have some faith policies and people will work against this but i've seen so many dark patterns in freemium that I think this sort of dishonesty could just work.