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a bit different than what I expected and quickly led me to a GitHub issue which makes it seem like they are using an outdated way to collect install information from Google Play which may…
Author: James O'Claire
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…
AppGoblin: Free App Stats & Info
Update: 2025 AppGoblin just keeps growing! Now covering >4m apps, thousands of advertising companies, 50k apps scanned for SDKs, and free ASO marketing tools for app marketers. The past few weeks I spent building a front-end for an app store crawler that I made. The end goal is just to provide an open front-end for…
Keeping Mobile Gamers Engaged with App Widgets
I love using widgets. I probably have too many of them on my phone’s home screen. News apps, weather apps, stocks, stats. I love being able to glance through them without opening the corresponding apps. This led me to realize though that I have seen very few widgets for mobile games. As I started working…
Stay up to date with the latest tech new with Hacker News Widget & App
Hacker News is one of my go to sites to read the best takes on the latest tech news. Probably the reason I keep going back to it is the honest discussions and supportive community. But you probably already know this, since Hacker News is one of the most popular tech news sources out there….
I built my own very simple strategy game
It certainly isn’t anything amazing, but it was something that I really wanted to do for myself. After recently stepping away from my position at Bubbleye and taking a month or two to enjoy some camping, family time and generally enjoying life I finally got back to Taipei and realized I had a unique opportunity…
How to see traffic from your Android Device
GREEN: background processes for emulator and mitmproxy. RED: Running game (portrait but on side) with a pink banner ad at bottom. YELLOW: mitmproxy captured traffic with another example banner ad.
Is Someone Else Using Your Game’s Monetization IDs?
Looking around app-ads.txt files one of the first things I was excited to check was whether DIRECT publisher IDs show up on other unrelated apps. To do this I ignored any apps that shared the same developer contact URL or Developer IDs. This doesn’t catch 100% of the legitimate publishers I checked, as the examples…
What A Mobile Ad Monopoly Looks Like
Google’s market share in in-app advertising is unmistakably dominant. The data above was scraped from 100k+ Google Play Store & Apple App Store apps (with a slight emphasis on games) who use advertising for monetization. This public data is made possible by adoption of IAB’s app-ads.txt standard which allows buyers and sellers to cross verify…