Google did announce and begin testing more privacy-preserving ad tech on Android (Privacy Sandbox) in 2022, with the explicit goal of limiting cross‑app identifiers like the Advertising ID and moving to on‑device APIs, which was framed as a softer, more gradual analogue to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT).(blog.google) However, these changes have not been fully rolled out in a way comparable to Apple’s ATT. Privacy Sandbox on Android has remained in limited beta on subsets of Android 13+ devices and required explicit enrollment by ad-tech and app partners, rather than being a universal, default change.(cyberinsider.com)

By 2024–25, industry reports and Google’s own materials continued to describe the GAID/Android Advertising ID deprecation as a future event, with marketers being told to prepare for coming signal loss rather than describing it as already complete.(appsflyer.com) In parallel, GAID remained widely usable on Android, and roadmaps from ad‑tech vendors talked about a GAID sunset around 2025–26, not as something that had already happened.(oemad.ai) In October 2025 Google then effectively ended the Privacy Sandbox initiative (for both Chrome and Android) and backed away from fully removing third‑party cookies in Chrome, citing low adoption and regulatory pressure.(en.wikipedia.org) This undercuts the premise that Apple‑style tracking limits have actually been imposed at scale on Android so far.

On the advertiser side, there is clear empirical evidence that Apple’s ATT materially hurt ad effectiveness and raised acquisition costs, especially on iOS, and that some of this pressure spilled into broader digital ad markets.(macrumors.com) But the incremental effect specifically attributable to Android OS–level privacy changes after 2022 is not cleanly observable yet: Android’s Privacy Sandbox has been partial and experimental rather than a hard switch, and platforms like Meta have reported recovering or improving ad performance by 2024–25 thanks to AI‑driven targeting and measurement, which complicates any simple “ads will only get worse from here” story.(ts2.tech)

Because (1) the key mechanism Chamath pointed to—full, Apple‑style rollout of privacy restrictions on Android—has not actually occurred at scale yet, and (2) available data do not let us isolate a clear, Android‑driven step‑up in CAC beyond the already‑known Apple and regulatory impacts, it’s too early to say whether his specific forward‑looking claim about Google’s Android changes making growth “meaningfully more expensive” has come true.