Comment by greycol

Well it would be pretty good information to have to do analysis against.

You could easily see knowing how often an app is used on an OS to be useful business information if apple wanted to create software to get into a trend before it gets to big.

Of course that doesn't require fine grained time data just daily would be more than good enough.

However you could also see the business use of knowing if two pieces of software are often used together or sequentialy which could inform creating an all in one/integrated experience that would do well in a market. So you need that finer application timing.

Of course that doesn't require tying it to a particular user account,not even a device ID, just a sessionID that changes each time the device restarts would probably be granular enough.

However since we've got that other stuff in place per device wouldn't it be great to see if there's a correlation between people using an app on there Mac and using it or another App on there iphone, ipad, or watch. What piece of data can we include to match up a user across all their devices? Maybe some kind of obfuscated or derived userID.

Of course you'd hope that other interests such as a commitment to privacy would rule out the use of such a dataset. If Apple did have such a dataset then you'd hope they'd be doing whatever processes (social, business, and technical) it can to obfuscate and seperate how that dataset is tied to a specific user.

The only real argument against Apple not having it is the balance between the cost of creating/exploiting such a data set, the expected profit, and the legal and reputational costs of such behaviour.