APKRadar

APKRadar is a command-line tool that audits Android apps (.apk, .xapk, .apkm) for GDPR-relevant findings: third-party tracking SDKs, sensitive permissions and SDK vendors located outside the EU. It gives each app a score from 0 to 100. It can also check the publisher's email security, SSL certificate and cookie consent behaviour, and prepare a formal GDPR letter to the publisher's Data Protection Officer (DPO).

pip install apkradar
apkradar audit app.apk

Contents

• Why it matters for the GDPR
• What APKRadar is and is not
• Installation
• Commands
• Usage
• Reading the results
• Supported formats
• Full stack analysis with MailRadar and CookieRadar
• Known limitations
• Development
• License

Why it matters for the GDPR

A mobile app is often the main way a company collects personal data, and much of that collection is done by code the company did not write: analytics, advertising and crash-reporting SDKs bundled into the app. Many of these send data to their vendors, often outside the EU. APKRadar makes those components visible by reading the app file itself, without running the app and without relying on what the privacy policy says.

Each type of finding relates to a specific GDPR obligation. The same mapping is used in the DPO letter generated by apkradar send:

What APKRadar is and is not

APKRadar performs static analysis: it inspects the contents of the app file. Its results are technical indicators. They are not proof that personal data is actually processed or transferred.

• A detected SDK shows that the code is present in the app. It does not show whether the SDK is active, what data it sends, or whether consent was collected first.
• A sensitive permission shows that the app declares it may ask for that access. It does not show that the user granted it or that the data is used.
• An extra-EU transfer shows that the app contains code published by a non-EU company. It does not show that data leaves the EU, or which safeguards (such as Standard Contractual Clauses) are in place.

The findings are a good basis for questions to a controller, which is how apkradar send uses them. They do not replace legal assessment or dynamic testing (observing the app's network traffic).

Installation

APKRadar requires Python 3.11 or later.

pip install apkradar
playwright install chromium

pip install apkradar installs everything needed for audit, batch, batch-excel, search and send, including MailRadar and CookieRadar.

playwright install chromium downloads the headless browser that CookieRadar uses. It is only needed for the cookie check in audit --full. On a fresh Linux system Chromium may also need system libraries; install them with:

playwright install --with-deps chromium

Check the installation:

$ apkradar --version
APKRadar 2026.09.29

Commands

Run apkradar <command> --help for the full list of options.

Usage

The examples below are real output from APKRadar 2026.41, with public builds of Bitwarden (GitHub release v2026.9.0-bwpm, SHA-256 954967bb3c9b940c16edb981242461b03c34f0e60671f42793c07a46190d64b3), Wikipedia and Nextcloud (F-Droid). Colours are not shown.

The audit example is generated from the renderer by tests/test_readme_example.py, which fails if this document stops matching what the tool prints. That check has no APK, so it cannot notice the tracker database improving on the real file — which is exactly what made the previous example stale — hence the hash above: re-run the tool on that artifact to confirm the findings. Results for third-party apps and domains change over time.

Audit an app

$ apkradar audit bitwarden.apk

Auditing bitwarden.apk...

📱 APKRadar Report — com.x8bit.bitwarden
Score: 70/100 — MODERATE
100 − 10 (1 tracker) − 15 (3 sensitive permissions) − 5 (1 transfer) = 70

App:     Bitwarden
Version: 2026.9.0 (21909)
SDK:     min=29 target=37
Format:  APK
SHA256:  954967bb3c9b940c16edb981242461b03c34f0e60671f42793c07a46190d64b3

                 🔴 Trackers (1)
╭─────────────┬─────────────────────────────────╮
│ Tracker     │ Package                         │
├─────────────┼─────────────────────────────────┤
│ Crashlytics │ com.google.firebase.crashlytics │
╰─────────────┴─────────────────────────────────╯
  ⚠️  Sensitive Permissions (3)
╭─────────────────┬──────────────╮
│ Permission      │ GDPR Concern │
├─────────────────┼──────────────┤
│ USE_BIOMETRIC   │ biometrics   │
│ USE_FINGERPRINT │ fingerprint  │
│ CAMERA          │ camera       │
╰─────────────────┴──────────────╯
      🌍 Extra-EU Transfers (1)
╭──────────────────┬────────────────╮
│ Entity           │ Package Prefix │
├──────────────────┼────────────────┤
│ Google LLC (USA) │ com.google     │
╰──────────────────┴────────────────╯

⚖️  Provisions applied
GDPR: verified against EUR-Lex (CELEX 32016R0679)
Contenuti digitali dir. 2019/770: verified against EUR-Lex (CELEX 32019L0770)
Codice del Consumo D.Lgs. 206/2005: verified against Normattiva (URN
urn:nir:stato:decreto.legislativo:2005-09-06;206)
  testo vigente
...

Score: 100 − 1 tracker × 10 − 3 permissions × 5 − 1 transfer × 5 = 70. The Google LLC entry covers both Crashlytics and the Google components that are not on the tracker list: Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications), ML Kit and Play Core. For more on this, see Reading the results.

The ⚖️ Provisions applied block lists, for each finding, the provision it relates to and the hash of the legal text APKRadar verified it against — so a citation can be checked against the source, not taken on trust. It is elided above because those hashes and dates change whenever the cached legal texts are refreshed.

The command exits with code 1 if the file cannot be analysed.

Full stack analysis

$ apkradar audit wikipedia.apk --full --offline
...
✅ No extra-EU transfers detected


🔗 Full stack analysis — 1 domains

🔗 wikipedia.org (guessed from package name — unverified)
  📡 MailRadar: 49/100 — POOR
  🔒 SSL: valid until 03/11/2026
  🍪 CookieRadar: 0 pre-consent trackers, none persist

Add --verbose (-v) to print each step as it runs. See Full stack analysis for what each line means.

Audit several apps

Create a text file with one app file path per line. Empty lines and lines starting with # are ignored.

# apks.txt
wikipedia.apk
bitwarden.apk
nextcloud.apk

$ apkradar batch apks.txt

Loaded 3 APKs from apks.txt

Auditing wikipedia.apk...
  🟡 MODERATE — 70/100 — 0 trackers, 6 sensitive permissions

Auditing bitwarden.apk...
  🟢 GOOD — 80/100 — 0 trackers, 3 sensitive permissions

Auditing nextcloud.apk...
  🟠 POOR — 55/100 — 0 trackers, 9 sensitive permissions

The list must contain paths to app files on disk, not URLs or package names. If any app fails to scan, the command prints how many failed and exits with code 1.

Audit apps from an Excel sheet

batch-excel reads the first sheet of an .xlsx file. The first row must be a header. Column names are case-insensitive:

Example input (apps.xlsx):

$ apkradar batch-excel apps.xlsx --output report.xlsx

Reading apps.xlsx...
Found 3 apps to audit

Auditing Wikipedia...
  🟡 MODERATE — 70/100 — 0 trackers
Auditing Bitwarden...
  🟢 GOOD — 80/100 — 0 trackers
Auditing Coin Master...
  ⏭️  SKIPPED — no APK path

Writing results to report.xlsx...
✅ Report saved to report.xlsx
⏭️  1/3 skipped — no APK path

Without --output, the report is written next to the input file as <name>_report.xlsx (here apps_report.xlsx).

APKRadar does not download apps. Rows that have a package name but no file path are marked SKIPPED, with an empty score.

The output workbook contains these columns: App Name, Package Name, Format, Version, Score, Grade (colour-coded), Trackers, Sensitive Permissions, Extra-EU Transfers, Tracker Names and SHA256 — the whole digest, so the artifact each row describes can be identified and checked.

With --augment (-a), the result columns (Score, Grade, Trackers, Permissions, Extra-EU, Tracker Names) are appended to the input sheet instead. The file is written to --output if given, otherwise the input file is overwritten.

Every text value APKRadar writes (app names, package names, versions, tracker names) is stored as text, never as a formula. A crafted app name or input row therefore cannot inject a formula into the report.

Look up an app on Google Play

$ apkradar search org.wikipedia

Looking up org.wikipedia...

📱 Wikipedia
Package:   org.wikipedia
Developer: Wikimedia Foundation
Category:  Books & Reference
Installs:  50,000,000+
Rating:    4.3/5.0

The best Wikipedia experience on your Mobile device. Ad-free and free of charge, forever.
...

If the package is not on Google Play, APKRadar searches the web (DuckDuckGo) for a possible removal reason:

$ apkradar search com.example.doesnotexist.app

Looking up com.example.doesnotexist.app...

⚠️  App not found on Google Play
Package: com.example.doesnotexist.app
No removal reason found — app may have been removed or never published.

Only package names are supported. If you pass an app name such as "Wikipedia", APKRadar prints instructions for finding the package name on Google Play.

Send a GDPR letter to the DPO

send audits the app, checks the publisher domain with MailRadar and SSL, and writes a formal letter to the publisher's DPO. The letter asks for the legal basis, purposes and safeguards for each finding, and exercises the data subject's rights of access (art. 15), information (art. 13), erasure (art. 17) and objection (art. 21). It also states that a complaint to the supervisory authority (art. 77) may follow if there is no reply within 30 days.

Always preview first with --dry-run. Nothing is sent, and no SMTP password is asked for.

$ apkradar send wikipedia.apk \
    --to dpo@example.org \
    --publisher "Example Publisher" \
    --from jane@example.org \
    --name "Jane Doe" \
    --smtp-host smtp.example.org \
    --smtp-user jane \
    --noyb \
    --dry-run
...
Running MailRadar on wikipedia.org...
📡 MailRadar — wikipedia.org: 49/100 — POOR
Checking SSL on wikipedia.org...
🔒 SSL valid until 03/11/2026

--- DPO Letter Preview ---

Oggetto: Esercizio diritti GDPR — Wikipedia (org.wikipedia) — Audit tecnico indipendente

Spettabile Example Publisher,
All'attenzione del Responsabile della Protezione dei Dati
...
2. PERMESSI SENSIBILI — art. 5(1)(c), 9 GDPR

L'applicazione dichiara i seguenti permessi con rilevanza GDPR:

  → ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION: approximate location
  → ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION: precise GPS location
  ...

The letter has six sections:

1. Third-party trackers and SDKs (art. 5(1)(a), 13), with the SHA-256 hash of the audited file
2. Sensitive permissions (art. 5(1)(c), 9)
3. Extra-EU transfers (art. 44–49), with a request to state the art. 46 safeguards
4. Technical measures (art. 32): the MailRadar score, described as inadequate below 60, and the SSL certificate if it is expired, self-signed or issued by an unknown authority
5. Formal requests (art. 15, 13, 17, 21)
6. Escalation (art. 77, and optionally NOYB)

Options:

Without --dry-run, the SMTP password is asked for interactively and is never passed on the command line. APKRadar verifies the SMTP server's certificate before logging in. No letter is sent if the scan fails.

The letter is currently available in Italian only. --lang is accepted, but no other template exists yet, so the Italian letter is always used.

Reading the results

Score

Every app starts at 100 points. Points are deducted for each finding:

The report prints the arithmetic under the score, so the number can be checked without reading the source:

Score: 70/100 — MODERATE
100 − 10 (1 tracker) − 15 (3 sensitive permissions) − 5 (1 transfer) = 70

The printed score never goes below 0, but the sum can: an app with sixteen tracking SDKs comes to −95, and the line then reads … = −95, clamped to 0. Below zero the score stops distinguishing one app from another, which is why the clamp is stated rather than hidden.

It maps to a grade:

A file that cannot be analysed has no score: the report shows N/A and the error, because 0 is the score of the worst possible app and not the absence of a measurement. In batch-excel, rows without an app file are shown as SKIPPED and the score cell is left empty.

The score is a way to compare and sort apps. It is not a legal assessment: one tracker without a valid legal basis can matter more than several permissions that are justified.

It also weighs breadth of functionality heavily. Five sensitive permissions cost more than two tracking SDKs, so an app with no third-party code and no extra-EU transfers can score below one that has both — Nextcloud 35.0.0 scores 55 with nine permissions and nothing else, Bitwarden 70 with three permissions, one tracker and one transfer to Google. The arithmetic line shows which is which, and it is worth reading before comparing two scores.

Trackers

APKRadar recognises 43 SDKs, including Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook App Events, Facebook Audience Network, AppsFlyer, Adjust, Amplitude, Branch, Mixpanel, Segment, OneSignal, AppLovin, Unity Ads, IronSource, TikTok SDK, Yandex Metrica, Crashlytics, Sentry and Huawei Analytics. The full list is TRACKER_SIGNATURES in apkradar/scanner.py.

An SDK is detected in two ways:

1. Manifest: the app declares a component (activity, service, receiver, provider) that belongs to the SDK's package.
2. Code: the SDK's classes are found in the app's compiled code (DEX files). This finds SDKs that declare no manifest component, such as Firebase Analytics, AppsFlyer and Facebook App Events.

Each SDK is listed once, with the package that identified it.

Sensitive permissions

APKRadar flags 23 Android permissions that give access to personal data. Each one is shown with a short description in the "GDPR Concern" column:

These are permissions the app declares. Whether a permission is justified depends on what the app does. A password manager needs CAMERA to scan QR codes, and USE_BIOMETRIC to unlock with a fingerprint.

Extra-EU transfers

APKRadar lists a vendor when the app contains code from that vendor's namespace. It knows 13 vendors:

A vendor is listed if the app declares a component under its prefix, or if a tracker from that vendor was detected. This is broader than the tracker list. Any Google component counts, including push notifications, Play Services and ML Kit, as in the Bitwarden example above. Treat this finding as "code from this vendor is present, so ask how transfers to it are governed". It does not show that data is transferred.

Supported formats

The format is detected from the file extension, or from the file contents if the extension is missing or different. For bundles, APKRadar takes the base APK and ignores split APKs (files named split_* or config.*). See Known limitations.

APKRadar computes the SHA-256 hash of the file as supplied. The console and Excel reports show its first 16 characters, and the DPO letter includes it in full. This lets you show later exactly which file was audited.

Full stack analysis with MailRadar and CookieRadar

apkradar audit <file> --full also looks at the websites behind the app. It collects these domains:

• the publisher domain candidates, each labelled with where it came from: reversing the package name (org.wikipedia → wikipedia.org; generic segments are skipped, so com.game.asteroids_revenge → asteroids-revenge.com) and the developer website on the Google Play listing. Both sources are guesses, and they are treated as such — see Which domain belongs to the publisher
• the known domains of every detected tracker SDK, for example appsflyer.com for AppsFlyer, or googleadservices.com and doubleclick.net for Google Ads
• the deep-link hosts declared in the manifest, which are often the publisher's own site. Links to a platform — the Play store page, a social profile — are skipped: nearly every app declares one.

For each domain it runs three checks:

The CookieRadar line reads:

• N pre-consent trackers, none persist: N trackers loaded before any choice was made, and none of them was still present after rejection.
• VIOLATION — N tracker(s) post-rejection, followed by the tracker domains: these trackers loaded before consent and stayed after the user rejected cookies.
• error: ...: the browser could not run. Usually this means playwright install chromium has not been run, or system libraries are missing (see Installation).

send also runs the MailRadar and SSL checks on the publisher domain, and includes the results in the technical measures section of the letter — but only if that domain has been established, as described next. It does not run CookieRadar.

Which domain belongs to the publisher

An Android package name is the reverse-DNS of whoever built the app, and that is not always who publishes it. it.Beta80Group.whereareu is published by AREU, a regional health agency; reversing the package name gives the domain of Beta 80 Group, the software house that wrote it. com.x8bit.bitwarden gives x8bit.com, a Spanish software company unrelated to Bitwarden.

Google Play's developer website field is not authoritative either: it is free text, and for Coin Master it holds a Zendesk helpdesk tenant whose email posture is largely Zendesk's configuration rather than the publisher's.

So APKRadar consults both, and at most one domain is ever analysed as the publisher's:

The app as a third witness. Neither of the first two sources is independent of the developer: the package name is their reverse-DNS and the Play listing is a field they typed. The APK is a third thing to ask, and it answers about one host at a time — does this package name it, and does the mention look deliberate. It cannot return a domain, so it cannot introduce a target to audit; it can only confirm one that Google Play already named.

Measured on 112 Where ARE U: the base APK names where.areu.lombardia.it nine times, including the URL of its privacy notice, and beta80group.it — the software house that built it — not once. Play names the first. Two parties that did not copy from each other say the same thing, so the domain is established and the DPO letter can state its art. 32 finding without --publisher-domain.

It confirms the Play listing only. The package name and the contents of the APK are both the builder's work, so one corroborating the other would be a single party speaking twice — and an © … line in a credits screen would put the finding back on the supplier. And a mention has to look deliberate: a policy or terms URL, or several occurrences. One string that happens to contain the name is not evidence.

Where it does nothing: abc 123 Tracing mentions neither of its candidate domains anywhere in its package, so nothing is established and the letter stays silent.

Wherever a domain is printed it carries its label, so a guess cannot be read as a measurement — and a domain that was set aside is not printed at all. Reporting it, even under "not analysed", puts a third party's domain in a document about someone else's app; beta80group.it belongs to the software house that wrote AREU's app and it is not a party to anything. --verbose shows it to whoever asks.

A domain that is for sale is never audited. com.gameitech.… reverses to gameitech.com, which today redirects to a GoDaddy for-sale page: its MailRadar score of 0/100 is the mail posture of a lander, the publisher's own gameitech.in scores 14/100, and anyone can buy the name — including after a report quoting it has been written. A row like that invalidates the audit that contains it, so the candidate is fetched once and dropped if it answers with a sale.

In the DPO letter this matters legally: section 4 states a failing under art. 32 GDPR against the addressee. It is written only for a domain that has been established — because both declared sources agree, because the app itself confirms the listing, or because you passed --publisher-domain yourself. Otherwise the section says that the domain could not be established and that no finding is made, which is not the same as finding nothing. An unverified domain is never named in the letter.

Pass --offline to audit --full or send to skip the Google Play lookup. It does not switch off the for-sale check, which is part of the analysis rather than part of asking Google.

Known limitations

• Code obfuscation (R8/ProGuard). Release builds are usually minified, and R8 can rename or move SDK classes. Code detection looks for the SDK's original package names. An SDK whose classes were renamed, and that declares no manifest component, is not detected. "No trackers detected" therefore means "none of the known SDKs was found". It does not mean the app contains no trackers.
• Split APKs. For .xapk and .apkm bundles only the base APK is analysed. Code and permissions that exist only in feature splits (split_*) or configuration splits (config.*) are not seen. Plain .apk files downloaded from a split install have the same limitation, because only that one file is analysed.
• Static analysis only. APKRadar does not run the app or observe its network traffic. It cannot tell whether an SDK is active, what it sends, or whether consent is collected first.
• Declared permissions, not effective ones. Permissions are counted as declared in the manifest. Restrictions such as maxSdkVersion are not taken into account. For example, the Wikipedia app declares GET_ACCOUNTS only up to Android 5.1 (maxSdkVersion="22") but itself requires Android 6.0 or later, so the permission is never requested. APKRadar still counts it.
• Extra-EU detection is namespace-based. Any component under a listed prefix counts, including infrastructure libraries that are not trackers (see Extra-EU transfers). Vendors outside the 13 listed prefixes are not reported.
• Fixed signature lists. Only the 43 trackers, 23 permissions and 13 vendors listed in the code are recognised.
• The publisher domain is still a guess, unless two sources agree. Both the package name and the Play listing can be wrong, and when they disagree APKRadar cannot tell you which is right — it shows both, labelled. Check the domain yourself before relying on --full results, and pass --publisher-domain before sending a letter that quotes them. An SSL hostname mismatch is never stated as an issue in the letter.
• Google Play lookup by package name only. Search by app name is not supported. The removal-reason search depends on DuckDuckGo having a summary for the package, and often returns nothing.
• DPO letter in Italian only (see Send a GDPR letter).
• Options not yet implemented. Two options are accepted and have no effect: audit --lang (reports are in English) and search --audit.

Development

git clone https://github.com/maksimtech/apkradar.git
cd apkradar
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

The changes in each release are listed in CHANGELOG.md. Security issues: see SECURITY.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.