Hi All,
This is a situation I have been going over in my head for several weeks and I have made the decision to remove SAU from the Tapatalk app as well as to remove the SAU native app (built by Tapatalk) from the app stores.
The reasons for removing it are pretty simple and are laid out below.
Tapatalk has a very unsavoury reputation when it comes to privacy and user data. It uses the user data from the forums it integrates with to work with online advertisers to sell the data and target ads. Ie, the track you. They also store all external link clicks from websites indefinitely with no ability to delete the data or stop the tracking. So long as we stay integrated with Tapatalk they can do what they wish with your data and thats not good.
There is also a cost involved in having the native, SAU branded apps which we could do without, along with the work involved to keep those apps up to date.
Note that all functionality provided by Tapatalk is still available through the web version of the site. Its fully responsive and you can do the same things on it and all without needing to use a native app.
Please see links below from other forums making the same decisions. Also click the top link (Reef2Reef) to see how to add SAU to your home screen.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-reef2reef-tapatalk-app-is-going-to-be-disabled-soon.639203/ https://freevps.us/thread-16404.html https://drugs-forum.com/threads/tapatalk-removed-due-to-privacy-security-violations.247751/ https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/tapatalk-is-going-away.351617/ https://thephins.com/threads/tapatalk-support-to-be-disabled.91788/
And here are some other sites with relevant info.
http://www.sixcrazyminutes.com/threads/privacy-and-tapatalk.78293/
This one is particularly good as its from a reputable source; https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/09/07/dozens-of-ios-apps-secretly-collect-location-history-for-data-monetization-analysis-says
The last point worth noting is that we don't seem to get much of our traffic through Tapatalk so I'm not convinced that this will be too much of an issue to our users.