A look at 493 COVID related iOS apps across 98 countries including each app's permissions requests, developer location and embedded SDKs, sorted by categories
Health and Fitness - Pandemic: The Next App Store Genre? — Since the Coronavirus pandemic began, a host of Covid-19 applications have emerged. Tweets: @d1gi , @rachelcoldicutt , @seanmmcdonald , @justinhendrix , @d1gi , @profcarroll , @arielbogle , and @markhurst Tweets: Jonathan AIbright / @d1gi : Every Covid-related iOS app since March, every permission, every known SDK, mapped, neatly coded, and visualized. https://d1gi.medium.com/... Rachel Coldicutt / @rachelcoldicutt : This is fantastic work, showing the dominance of Google and Apple in contact tracing apps, worldwide. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Sean McDonald / @seanmmcdonald : 493 COVID-related iOS apps across 98 countries (not including Android). Tremendous work putting this together! 🙏🏻 https://twitter.com/... Justin Hendrix / @justinhendrix : Big: Albright dissects nearly 500 COVID apps launched in 98 countries. This data shows a “global shift in the way local, regional, and national authorities distribute and collect data about their citizens during large-scale crises”, and the absolute dominance of Google and Apple. https://twitter.com/... Jonathan AIbright / @d1gi : Covid apps are *directly* linked to election security. US states, local govs, and private-public partnerships are collecting intricate demographic, activity and location data well beyond the Apple/Google exposure notification system. Look at the data! https://twitter.com/... @profcarroll : Quite possibly the most comprehensive analysis of Covid-apps currently available. An essential resource for anyone conducting privacy and data protection work on this emergent category. https://twitter.com/... Ariel Bogle / @arielbogle : This is amazing work. And as noted, shows how much of the world's government public health response to the pandemic is controlled by two American companies — Google and Apple. https://twitter.com/... Mark Hurst / @markhurst : “Hundreds of public health agencies [have] collapsed their efforts into exactly two tightly controlled *commercial* marketplaces: Apple's iOS and Google's Play stores.” Over half of the apps use a Google SDK. Not good. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This dataset closes the loop on a year of COVID app coverage. In April, dozens of tracking apps were already live despite unresolved security and effectiveness questions; then Apple and Google shipped their Exposure Notification API and effectively set the technical template. By June the US rollout had stalled as most states walked away, leaving the surviving ecosystem scattered across 98 countries' app stores.
Jonathan Albright's census of those 493 iOS apps shows what that template produced: over half embed a Google SDK, developer locations span the globe while the distribution chokepoints stay with two US companies, and hundreds of public health agencies now depend on Apple's App Store and Google Play to reach citizens during an emergency.
First-order effects
- Public health agencies worldwide are distributing pandemic-response software through exactly two commercial marketplaces, making Apple and Google de facto gatekeepers of national contact-tracing efforts.
Second-order effects
- With over half of these government-adjacent apps embedding a Google SDK, detailed demographic and location data from health apps flows through commercial ad-tech plumbing — which Albright flags as an election-security risk, not just a privacy one.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward emergency-state digital infrastructure being built on private platform primitives — a dependency later visible when the CDC bought bulk phone location data directly after the app route underdelivered, suggesting agencies reach for whatever surveillance channel works rather than fixing the official one.
The trend: Public-health emergency response is consolidating onto the infrastructure of two commercial mobile platforms, turning SDK choice and store access into instruments of national policy.