SEC charges App Annie and its founder with securities fraud (opens in new tab)

Sub headline more relevant than the headline: "Company Will Pay $10 Million to Settle First Enforcement Action Against Alternative Data Provider".

This is such an insanely good arb for App Annie it boggles the mind. Paying a $10mm vig to the SEC for a scheme that probably minted hundreds of millions in revenue from hedge funds is a no brainer.

If the SEC actually wanted to disincentivize future bad actors they'd prosecute rather than issue hilariously petty fines.

So (getting my head round this) ... mobile app creators added an App Annie agent to their apps, which downloaded performance / usage data on their app to central servers. And App Annie promised not to sell that data to third parties unless it was "aggregated and anonymised".

(Does App Annie pay the app creators for this?)

App Annie sells this so people can work out which app to advertise on (the one with all the usage!) and which all to invest in (the one with all the usage).

But they found that no-one wanted the aggregated data, or it was nit accurate enough, so they stopped using anonymised data and used the raw data.

but said "it's ok we have permission"

Ok.

So they signed contracts on both sides, which contracts directly contradicted each other - they were always going to get caught.

But this is aggregated app usage data - Apple could publish this in a heart beat and (presumably) it would be legal and App Annie would have no market.

I know that "everything is securities fraud" and if you lie to both sides you will get caught. But this feels like a non-prosecution. The SEC had to - it was so blatent when it gets laid out, but really I doubt anyone thinks this will drain the swamp. It's all usage data.

Edit: less ! marks

So you can deliberately disclose confidential information for the explicit purpose of helping others to ‘unknowingly’ insider trade for 4 years… and the punishment is only to pay less than a month of revenue three years later?

Wow.

No idea if true, but someone once told me that Sequoia essentially owns App Annie and uses the data to win deals on companies before anyone knows they're about to pop. I'm not a lawyer, but if true, pretty brilliant from a purely competitive standpoint (not legal/moral/ethical/etc).

What I don't get is where does App Annie get its data? Implied here is that app developers hand it over, but what do they get in return? And is that the primary source of App Annie's data?

Not directly related but when I was releasing an iOS app recently - App Annie made me realize how "pay to win" building apps is these days. You know a service is expensive when there is only a "contact sales" button on the homepage.

It's impossible for an indie dev to afford the data they provide, and gives a massive SEO/keyword ranking edge to the larger companies that pay for the subscription.

On a more general level, how can you even get close to reality if you want to estimate app downloads or in-app-revenues? Isn’t this complete guesswork with very very little reliability/validity?

> The order finds that App Annie and Schmitt understood that companies would only share their confidential app performance data with App Annie if it promised not to disclose their data to third parties, and as a result App Annie and Schmitt assured companies that their data would be aggregated and anonymized before being used by a statistical model to generate estimates of app performance. Contrary to these representations, the order finds that from late 2014 through mid-2018, App Annie used non-aggregated and non-anonymized data to alter its model-generated estimates to make them more valuable to sell to trading firms.

Interesting.

Curios: Searches of Wikipedia for "app annie" return hundreds of Wikipedia pages, but there is no page for App Annie itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=500&profile=all&n...

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=App+Annie&title=...

My first thought was “there are publicly traded companies that use an app to monitor their app performance instead of relying on data directly from Apple?!”

Surely giving access to your app’s data to a random company is not without risks and is kind of irresponsible specially more so if you’re a public company having fiduciary duties to your investors.

> App Annie and Schmitt assured companies that their data would be aggregated and anonymized before being used by a statistical model to generate estimates of app performance. Contrary to these representations, the order finds that from late 2014 through mid-2018, App Annie used non-aggregated and non-anonymized data to alter its model-generated estimates to make them more valuable to sell to trading firms.

Nice to see the government making a statement about this pretty known practice. When the government doesn’t do anything people think its a tolerated practice. Its better for the government to even lose if it allows for the position of the administration to be made clear.