Michael Tsai - Blog - App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging
Friday, June 12, 2026
App Store Personalized Recommendations and Keylogging
Sarah Perez:
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 勞
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.<br>App Store iOS iOS 26 Mac Mac App Store macOS Tahoe 26 Privacy
19 Comments<br>RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Benjamin
June 12, 2026 3:58 PM
But I thought Apple cared about our privacy!
Bri
June 12, 2026 4:17 PM
It's for reasons like this that it concerns me that Siri AI can supposedly read the screen and everything you're doing and adjust its behavior on that. It's a black box and we have nothing but the trust we place in Apple (which I think would be misplaced trust) that they're not going to be siphoning off and processing all of that data for all manner of privacy violating reasons.
Even if they aren't now, what do you think they're going to do with that data when their normal revenue sources inevitably level off and they still need to generate ever growing profits?
Plume
June 12, 2026 4:17 PM
> But I thought Apple cared about our privacy!
But they do. Please note that they do not allow any other company to sell you apps, ensuring that no other company can ever keylog you while browsing for apps on an iPhone. Doesn't that make you feel happy, warm, and safe?
Bart
June 12, 2026 8:28 PM
They’re putting this much effort into monitoring everything about my keyboard except how bad the actual typing experience is.
Hammer
June 12, 2026 8:45 PM
Even if they weren't keylogging and it was encrypted, keystroke biometrics are an identifying / fingerprinting metric (like a person's gait).
Apple is a PRISM company.
Ruffin
June 13, 2026 7:41 AM
Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪
@mysk_co
Jun 10
If you block (xp . apple . com) then it [the key...