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

1 day ago 2

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 the classic segment.com (marketing analytics) and sentry.io (deployment analytics) which get to call OpenAI and Anthropic as it’s clients. It’s always interesting how every company from games to AI end up needed multiple analytics platforms and probably still depend most on their home BI/Backend.

Monetizations!

Here’s where the money is at. Now SUPER cool is that RevenueCat is now in both OpenAI and Perplexity. RevenueCat helps to use react native updatable web payment / subscription walls so that marketers can change those sections of the apps without needing to do an entire app update. I believe Perplexity is using Stripe, but that could also be a part of their bigger app ecosystem

livekit.io (AppGoblin livekit.io) is an AI voice platform which is used by OpenAI and Grok. I’m surprised that OpenAI uses this, as they were quite early to the voice game, but perhaps they use this for some deeper custom voice tools.

Perplexity has the most interesting third party tools with MapBox and Shopify. I believe MapBox, which delivers mapping tiles, is used for some of Perplexity’s image generation tools like adding circles/lines etc to maps.

After seeing Shopify in Perplexity, I realized there wasn’t a Shopify SDK found for OpenAI (despite checking recently). They have been rolling out shopping features as a way to monetize their app, so I am curious if these are just implemented via API or if they were obfuscated well enough to not be found.

API Calls

If you’re still interested, you can also check out the API calls recorded by each app while open. The data is scrubbed, and I’m not sharing the clear text JSONs associated, but you can see some of the endpoints related to the SDKs. If you have further questions about these, or have a specific piece of data (say GPS, or email) that you’d like to check if it is sent along to any of these, just let me know and we can do further research:
https://appgoblin.info/apps/com.openai.chatgpt/data-flows
https://appgoblin.info/apps/com.anthropic.claude/data-flows