Just want to cover the recent steps I took in learning about how to get Geo Location information for OpenAttribution. The first step I took was to look into two existing open source analytics platforms that are alternatives to Google Analytics: Umami and Matomo. Umami I love using umami.is! It’s definitely the smaller of the…
Author: James O'Claire
AppGoblin New Features, Mobile Stats and Breakdowns
Theme & Svelte updates First off, new theme courtesy of the upcoming v3 for skeleton.dev, a great UI library for Svelte. The new Skeleton v3 is pretty awesome and was quite easy to update along with moving from Svelte 4 to 5. Svelte 5 was a bit trickier with all the new runes, but overall…
WIP: Sharing the Monetization channels for mobile apps
Edit 2025: See the full list of the top monetization and ad networks on appgoblin.info/companies/ad-networks For a week or two I’ve been working on updating the appgoblin.info top ad networks and MMPs. Currently both are still up, which should change but I’ll give an overview of the process of changing and what might be next…
What does DIRECT mean for App-Ads.txt?
Recently I started working on a project on appgoblin to estimate the number of client apps for all mobile advertising and data collection companies. In doing this there are currently two sources of data: decompiled SDKs of which I have only done ~20k apps and app-ads.txt which I have scraped closer to ~200k apps’ app-ads.txt…
Svelte 5 Data Table Comparisons
Update 2025: While tanstack v8 still doesn’t support Svelte 5, it is quite easy to get working, I wrote up a how to here. While working on a new analytics dashboard I wanted to find a good table tool manage my table like data from the backend. My main goal is to have dynamic group…
How to figure out which 3rd Parties might be integrated with an iOS App?
In the past couple months I built out scraping for Android apps which downloads, decompiles, scrapes the `AndroidManifest.xml` then analyzes the Android app for known 3rd party ad networks or trackers. I enjoyed this a lot, but the other half of the equation, iOS remained elusive. I was surprised how much more difficult this turned…
See which MMPs and Networks Apps and Games are Using
Edit 2025: I’ve significantly overhauled AppGoblin to track hundreds of mobile app ad networks, trackers and other mobile app services which track your mobile app data. I recently added a free feature to AppGoblin to see which advertising/monetization ad networks and MMP partners apps are using. You can break down the results by category and…
Is this a TikTok security vulnerablity for ad fraud?
I de-compiled TikTok (“com.zhiliaoapp.musically” v33.3.3 from Feb 2nd, 2024) from ApkPure.net and noticed that the way it called AppsFlyer looked a bit different than what I expected and quickly led me to a GitHub issue which makes it seem like they are using an outdated way to collect install information from Google Play which may…
Before You Agree: What data does TikTok collect before Terms of Service?
Would you like to see what data is coming out of TikTok when you first open it up? Let’s get to it. Didn’t this used to be easy to do? As security for iPhones and Androids increased it continually made viewing the traffic leaving your own device more difficult. This is in stark contrast to…
ClickHouse: Refreshing Take on Materialized Views
Working on my Open Source MMP I have been seeing how much of it will work with ClickHouse. Unfortunately combining multiple streaming data sources in ClickHouse was proving difficult as data would semi randomly not join correctly. This led to a potential fix by using the very recent ClickHouse refreshable materialized views. These refreshable views…