What popular apps collect: an audit of App Store privacy labels (Oct 2026)

By category

Five apps in each category.

Every app

All 40 labels, as the App Store showed them.

Tap a column heading to sort. Each app name links to the App Store page we read. The numbers count the label's data categories (for example Location, Identifiers, Health & Fitness), not how much data an app takes.

Source: each app's US App Store page, fetched 17 October 2026, 19:15–19:17 UTC. CSV · raw JSON (with every source URL, fetch time, data type and in-app purchase name).

Our own apps

9 of our 15 App Store apps say Data Not Collected. None track you.

We make apps in the same categories, so we read our own labels the same way, on the same day. They are self-reported too. Here is every one, including the ones that collect something.

Method

Exactly what we did.

1. Picked the apps. Five widely used apps in each of 8 categories where we also make apps: fitness, step counters, period trackers, budgeting, recipes, travel, notes, flashcards & study. We chose well-known names by hand. The US rating count in the table (from Apple's lookup API) is a rough sign of how widely used each app is. It is not a download ranking.
2. Read each App Store page. On 17 October 2026 (19:15–19:17 UTC) we requested each app's US page, https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id<ID>, one at a time with a 2-second gap. The privacy label (Data Used to Track You, Data Linked to You, Data Not Linked to You, Data Not Collected) and the In-App Purchases list were read from the page's own embedded data.
3. Read price and ratings. One request to https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=…&country=us gave each app's name, seller, price and US rating count.
4. Counted. An app "tracks you" when its label has a Data Used to Track You section. Every number on this page is computed from the published JSON when the page loads; none is typed by hand. The fetch script is scripts/research/fetch_privacy_labels.py.

Limits

• Labels are self-reported by developers and not verified by Apple. An app can collect more or less than its label says.
• Labels list categories of data an app may handle. Practices can vary by feature or by your age. A category count says nothing about how much data is taken.
• This is a snapshot of one storefront (US) on one day. Developers can change labels at any time.
• 40 hand-picked apps are not a random sample of the App Store, so the shares here describe these apps only.
• The App Store lists at most 10 in-app purchases per app. Whether a purchase renews automatically is not shown, so the week/month/year count checks purchase names only and is a lower bound.

Use the data

The CSV and JSON are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Please cite: All Things AI, “What popular apps collect: an audit of App Store privacy labels (Oct 2026)”, allthingsn.com/research/app-privacy-labels/, data fetched 17 October 2026. Spotted a label that has changed? Write to support@allthingsn.com.