Google abandoned Privacy Sandbox on Android in October 2025. GAID deprecation still begins this year.
Attribution Reporting API - the Privacy Sandbox component designed to handle cross-app attribution without device IDs - was deprecated due to "low adoption." After roughly 4 years of MMP roadmap rewrites, vendor SDK rebuilds, and industry planning docs, the API is gone.
The catch that's getting missed: GAID deprecation wasn't tied to Privacy Sandbox shipping successfully. Partial GAID removal for a share of Android users still begins in 2026. Full deprecation remains on track for 2027. Those are separate timelines and Google has been clear about that distinction.
The industry read the Privacy Sandbox abandonment as a stay of execution. The GAID clock didn't change.
What actually happened in the accounts that navigated this cleanly: they weren't building around Privacy Sandbox. They were running deterministic and aggregated measurement already - server-to-server postbacks with hashed user IDs through Adjust or AppsFlyer, first-party data capture at signup and checkout, CAPI-backed signal infrastructure where GAID coverage was already gapping. That rig doesn't depend on whether Privacy Sandbox shipped because it was never a dependency.
The teams that are behind are the ones that paused signal infrastructure work in 2022-2023 on the assumption that Google would deliver an SDK-level replacement before removing the original identifier. Five years of "we'll wait for the API" is now a 2026 problem.
My read on the immediate Android UA implication: if GAID-dependent attribution paths still handle a significant share of your Android install volume, the 2026 partial rollout will compress your Android signal coverage into roughly the same range iOS attribution hit post-ATT. That recovery took 18+ months for most mobile UA teams. The measurement gap during that period is where CPP and D7 ROAS visibility degrades fastest.
The architecture principle that held: build for what ships, not what's announced. Google announced an intent in 2022, not a guarantee. Server-side postbacks with first-party identifiers, GAID where it's still available, and aggregated measurement for the coverage gap - that was always the more durable construction.
The teams that ran that rig from 2022 didn't have to rebuild twice.
Ruslan co-founded Tegra in 2017. Runs the Google Ads practice - feed, PMax, search, attribution. Writes weekly about the parts of paid search operators are afraid to touch.