Is the Safari in-app browser affected by ITP?

Question

In the Google Analytics account of a client I notice that safari in-app browser sessions have a much higher return rate than the Android webview browsers. The platform is an app - so one for IOS and one for Android. Which is a hybrid so it has some native elements and webview elements.

I've checked the cookie expiration of the _ga cookie and for both Android Webview and Safariin-app the expiration is set to 2 years. When I check safari browsers 12.1+ on the regular website (so not the app) then I notice that the _ga cookie expiration is set to 7 days - that's clearly ITP.

So it seems that the safari in-app browsers are not affected by ITP and that there is another reason for the loss of IOS _ga cookies. However, I can nowhere find if safari in-app browsers are really not affected by ITP?

Answer 1

Apple is turning on ITP by default in WKWebView for iOS and iPadOS starting in September of 2020 with iOS14 and iPadOS14. This means it will affect the Safari browser as well as all other iOS and iPadOS browsers (since they are required to be built on WKWebView). It seems likely that this will affect in-app browsers as well.

SimaHava's breakdown of the new changes

John Wilander's (Apple engineer behind ITP) post about this