Last week I wrote a blog working through a few unknown endpoints. My goal was to bring some attention to these lesser known end points where many apps send their data. This post is split into two sections. The first at the top here are endpoints that do not have landing pages and have not…
Author: James O'Claire
Uncovering Lesser Known Mobile Adtech Domains
AppGoblin has now run over 40k apps in an emulator, tracking millions of API calls thousands of advertising domains. Unfortunately, some of them are dark, meaning they have no landing page of any kind, and I’m unclear who controls these domains. news-cdn.site marketingcloudapis.com kickoffo.site onegg.site lazybumblebee.com qa-analytics.com acobt.tech yastatic.net Let’s see if we can figure…
August 2025: Top Mobile App Advertisers
Want to know which apps are buying mobile app ads in 2025? AppGoblin is excited to share the latest ad network rankings for August 2025, based on our ongoing scans of live mobile app ads. AppGoblin SDK scans already make it clear which apps are monetizing with which ad networks, or which companies provide the…
AI can’t solve novel problems yet
I saw this hilarious exchange in one of the issues covering Apple’s recent changes that make it impossible to download IPA files. Recreating an iPhone’s authentication to Apple App Store is a bit of a cat and mouse game. Apple recently changed it’s backend, so now dozens of projects are trying to find ways to…
The Trackers and SDKs in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity
Well for a quick weekend recap I’m going to look at which 3rd party SDKs and API calls I can find in the big 4 Android chat apps based. We’ll be using free data from AppGoblin which you can feel free to browse at any of the links below or on tables. Data is collected…
How to self host your own S3 in 2025
Well, multiple disks hovering close to 99%, it’s definitely time to increase storage for OpenAttribution and AppGoblin. I needed cheap S3 hosting, and I had a pretty strong urge to do it myself. Parts This should be up to you, but in the end I ended up grabbing an 8-bay Just-a-Bunch-Of-Disks (JBOD) which is a…
Apple: The Silent Advertising Monopoly
The good news just keeps coming: Apple was found to be violating antitrust relating to it’s App Store monetization policies. We (in the mobile ad space) have known this for years here’s me mentioning that Apple is a monopoly on iOS advertising in a blog post in 2022. I’m just happy that the courts are…
Watching the Watchers: What to track when tracking app trackers?
This week I spent a lot of time automating my collection of data via a MITM with an Android Emulator. This lets me peek at the actual traffic and data leaving the device to try and figure out a few things: Who is the app working with? This is the primary question, to be able…
Free Mobile App ASO Tools: Fastest Growing Apps & Keyword Research added to AppGoblin
By popular demand AppGoblin has added a ranking of the current fastest growing apps based on their installs or ratings. These include apps that may have been out on the store for awhile, but have recently seen classic exponential hockey stick style growth. This helps app marketers see what apps are trending in real time….
2025 How to Sniff Android HTTPS Traffic with Waydroid & mitm-proxy
Looking to add traffic analysis to my free mobile app intelligence platform AppGoblin, I needed to get an emulator up and running with a way to track the HTTPs traffic leaving the app. I’ve done this a couple years now, writing down my notes in github.com/ddxv/mobile-network-traffic and it never seems to get any easier 🥲,…