The Trackers and SDKs in ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Perplexity

Summary

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 via de-compiled SDKs and MITM API traffic. Development Tools Let’s look first at the development tools. These were interesting to me because I had assumed I’d see more of the dynamic JavaScript libraries like React. Instead we see these are all classic Kotlin apps. If you click through the Chat App names you’ll see the more detailed breakdowns of which specific parts of the libraries they’re using like io.airbnb.lottie (in app animations library) or Kotlin Coil Compose or Square’s okhttp3. Business Tools Wow, way more than I expected and with quite the variety! I guess it’s enough we can further break these down. Product / Marketing Analytics As is common now, most apps have more than one analytics tracker in their app. First up let’s recognize Google, it’s across every app in multiple ways. The main one that is used in most apps is the gms.measurement.AppMeasurementReceiver. GMS which is required for both Firebase and Google Play Services. Here’s an example of the measurement SDKs related to this: application/meta-data:com.google.android.gms.version application/receiver:com.google.android.gms.measurement.AppMeasurementReceiver application/service:com.google.android.gms.measurement.AppMeasurementJobService application/service:com.google.android.gms.measurement.AppMeasurementService smali:com.google.android.gms.measurement smali:com.google.android.gms.measurement.internal Next was statsig.com and wow! I was blown away I found this one in 3 of the 4 apps. This looks like a super popular company and I was surprised as I hadn’t heard of them before. Looking around, they look a bit more developer / product focused, but have tons of features and look quite popular. Finally in the analytics section we’ll add t...