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App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging
This week, Apple announced a series of discovery features that will personalize app recommendations based on users’ interests and behavior, providing a new way for developers to have their app discovered.
At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the iPhone maker introduced Personalized Collections in the App Store, which will showcase recommendations tailored to the individual. These will also include new “App Notes” that explain why the specific apps were recommended to you. Starting this week, you’ll find these new personalized suggestions in various places in the App Store, including the Apps or Games tab or on the Search tab.
Mysk:
Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there’s no way to turn it off.
They can even calculate your typing speed.
[…]
If you don’t like Apple Music privacy options, you can stream music from Spotify. But where else can you download apps on the iPhone?
The data is associated with your account and unencrypted.
Previously:
- No Siri AI in EU
- App Store Search Queries Appear to Violate Data Minimization Practices
- Keeping Your Data From Apple Is Harder Than Expected
- Lawsuits Over Apple Analytics Switch
- Analytics in Apple Apps
- Requesting Your Personal Data From Apple
Update (2026-06-17): Mysk:
The screenshot in the sub-post was taken from a CSV file you get when requesting your data from Apple. It’s called “App Store Click Activity.” Every event contains 110 attributes 🤯
In this PDF, Apple describes the data points collected in this category.
I requested my own data yesterday but am still waiting for Apple to prepare it.
Mysk:
There’s an ongoing class action lawsuit against Apple related to this. In iOS 26, Apple added an option to “reset” the identifier associated with “usage statistics,” but we haven’t seen any effect for this option. The analytics are still identifiable and linked to the user.
See also: John Gruber, Thom Holwerda, MacRumors.
Update (2026-06-19): Mysk:
It is not only about recording your typing skills in the search field, the App Store app even reports how much time you spend on every part of an app description as you scroll, hence recording your reading skills 🙃.
Apple also forces iOS to open any App Store link in the App Store app, and that will immediately log a detailed event that user XYZ has viewed that particular app as well as the referrer.
[…]
This data collection is not new. Apple has been doing it at least since iOS 14 when we discovered it. All data collected is NOT anonymous. The data is associated with your Apple ID. This means that given a court order, Apple has to hand this data to law enforcement.
Mysk:
Just for fun, I generated a 1000-character text and pasted it in the search field in the App Store. Well, the analytics captured the entire text, linked it to my ID and sent it to Apple, before even pushing “enter”. Now imagine you accidentally paste something private in there🙃
Update (2026-06-23): I received my own personal data from Apple and can confirm that it does include my timestamped App Store search queries.
