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Another explanation I’m predisposed to, due to personal involvement: I was on the Shop[1] team when it was transitioning from Arrive to Shop, and shifting from a package tracking application to a shopping cart. If you gave the app access to read your emails, we’d scan for tracking #s but also parse through emails from Amazon to pull data about what you ordered straight into the app, so you could track everything from one place. Shortly after Shop started gaining major traction in late 2019/early 2020, Amazon started pulling more and more details from their order confirmation emails, and we were less and less able to provide actionable info on your Amazon orders until they finally put the entire order behind a login, and all we could tell you in the Shop app was you had placed an order at Amazon.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/shop-package-order-tracker/id1...

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hooksfordays|4 years ago

Slightly unrelated, we noticed this happening _before_ we renamed the app in the App Store from Arrive to Shop, but after the rename happened in, I think, March of 2020, negative reviews about the missing Amazon data started flooding in. People associated the name/design change with the degraded experience, when really the experience had already been degraded for a couple months by that point. The initial rebrand only changed mostly superficial things, like colours and the name!

tomcatfish|4 years ago

That's interesting and completely changes my views on Amazon's actions.

I thought they were blocking an action that is kind of "opt out" and you're saying they might be blocking an "opt in" action. Neat to hear this before I got too confident in my position.

universa1|4 years ago

German Amazon still lists what was ordered in both order confirmation and shipping notification mails. It also lists the tracking number and the shipping company, even though they link to their own tracking overview...

So looks like it is not yet globally at the same low standard, and might also be because of different laws.

hooksfordays|4 years ago

Interesting! Yeah, it’s maybe a little bold to claim we’re the cause for Amazon’s change, the timeline just lines up so well. Could be different laws, could also be that Shopify (Shop’s parent company) is still very US-centric and perhaps they didn’t feel as threatened by us or other similar products in Germany as they did in the US. I can’t say anything for sure, but it’s fun to hypothesize!