Notes / 26 Jul 2026

One app, two stories: what the same apps tell Apple and Google

As of today the archive records every tracked app's privacy self-declaration in both stores: Apple's App Store privacy label and Google Play's Data Safety section. Same app, same developer, two mandatory disclosures — which makes disagreements between them visible for the first time. Three examples, quoted from today's captures:

Tuta tells Apple: "The developer does not collect any data from this app" — the App Store's strongest possible declaration. Its Play listing, the same day, declares data collected (email address, user IDs, optional contacts) and data shared (payment info).

Threema is the mirror image: on Play, "this app doesn't collect or share any user data"; on the App Store, "Data Linked to You" — contact info and identifiers, plus diagnostics.

X tells Play "this app doesn't share user data with other companies or organizations", while its Apple label declares "Data Used to Track You" across seven categories, from location to browsing history — and Apple defines tracking as linking or sharing user data with data brokers and advertisers.

Now the caveats, because they matter. The two stores force different taxonomies: Google's "sharing" definition exempts transfers to service providers and several other cases; Apple's categories cut the world differently; and an iOS build can genuinely differ from an Android build. A discrepancy is therefore not proof that anyone is lying — it may be honest platform differences, definitional gaps, or one stale form. What it is, in every case: two public claims about the same product that do not say the same thing.

That is exactly the kind of fact this archive exists to hold. Both declarations are now fetched daily, hashed, and diffed — so when either side of any of these pairs quietly changes, the change becomes a dated, citable event. The raw captures: Tuta/Apple · Tuta/Play · Threema/Apple · Threema/Play · X/Apple · X/Play.

The quotes above are the declarations as archived on 26 July 2026. The links point at the archive's live copies, which keep updating — if one no longer matches its quote here, that means the declaration changed after this note was written, and the change will be in the record with its date. A note frozen in time plus an archive that moves is the design, not a defect.

— ScanRecords, 26 Jul 2026. Subscribe by RSS · corrections