App X-ray
From exposing hidden tracking practices to identifying security vulnerabilities, App X-ray delivers comprehensive forensic analysis of any iOS app. Our automated pipeline surfaces critical insights about privacy practices, security posture, third-party integrations, and implementations across millions of apps.
Startup development team uses App X-Ray to secure their own app and accelerate development.
Customer
A lean startup development team building a fitness tracking application needed to ensure their own app met privacy and security standards while competing against well-funded incumbents. With limited resources and no dedicated security team, they required efficient tools to audit their own releases for vulnerabilities while simultaneously gaining market intelligence about the privacy and security practices of successful competitor apps to inform their product roadmap and strategic decisions.
Challenge
Early-stage startups face a dual challenge: they must ship secure, compliant applications without dedicated security resources, while also competing against established players with years of technical refinement and substantially larger engineering teams. Traditional security audits are prohibitively expensive, manual competitive analysis is time-consuming and incomplete, and gathering market intelligence requires expertise that is rare and costly. Without these capabilities, startups risk shipping vulnerable code, missing critical features, or making uninformed product decisions. All of these risks can be fatal to user trust and safety, as well as fundraising efforts and economic success.
Solution
Our App X-Ray platform delivers two critical capabilities through a single API: comprehensive security and privacy analysis of the team's own application, plus market intelligence on competitor app characteristics. Before each release, the team analyzes their own build to identify exposed credentials, insecure permissions, privacy vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps. Simultaneously, they use App X-Ray to observe publicly available information about top-performing competitor apps, including SDK adoption patterns, permission requests, technology stack indicators, and observable app characteristics. This dual-use approach provides both quality assurance and competitive market intelligence through analysis of publicly accessible app metadata and behaviors.
Result
The startup identified and resolved three critical security vulnerabilities in their pre-launch build that would have exposed user health data, avoiding a potentially catastrophic breach and regulatory violation. Through market analysis, they discovered that leading fitness apps commonly utilized offline-first architecture approaches and integrated specific analytics SDKs associated with sophisticated engagement features. Armed with these market insights, the team made informed decisions about their roadmap, evaluated similar SDK integrations for their own needs, and adopted architectural approaches validated by market leaders. These learnings significantly reduced technical exploration time. The combined security validation and market intelligence capabilities allowed a team of three developers to make informed decisions with the confidence typically requiring a 20+ person engineering organization.
Impact
App X-Ray has become essential infrastructure for the startup's development and release process. The team now runs automated security analysis on every release candidate, catching vulnerabilities before they reach production and providing verifiable security documentation for enterprise sales conversations and investor due diligence. Continuous market monitoring alerts them to SDK adoption trends and feature patterns among competitors, allowing them to make informed strategic decisions in response to market shifts. The platform's dual value proposition (securing their own app while gaining market intelligence about their category) has become a key competitive advantage, enabling rapid iteration without compromising on security or missing critical market trends.
CISOs and IT executives rely on our app-intelligence dataset to detect vulnerabilities in both internally developed apps and apps sanctioned for employee use.
Customer
Large enterprises and SMBs leverage our platform to obtain deep, continuous visibility into the security characteristics of any iOS application.
Challenge
End-to-end analysis of a single iOS binary (downloading, decompiling, instrumenting, and running dynamic tests) requires niche expertise and dedicated tooling. Extending that workflow to tens of millions of apps exceeds the bandwidth of internal teams and would be financially impractical to replicate through external pentesting engagements.
Solution
Our proprietary automated pipeline provides access to a unique, fully analyzed dataset that surfaces critical vulnerabilities including plaintext credential exposure, embedded keys and certificates, proprietary code leaks, insecure permissions, and many other high-risk issues.
Result
We empower organizations to rapidly detect, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities in their own applications, while also making informed decisions about the risks posed by third-party apps used across their environment.
NBC's Today Show utilized our app X-ray technology to identify and expose privacy vulnerabilities within the popular Temu shopping application, resulting in national broadcast coverage.
Customer
NBC's Today Show and Nightly News investigative teams have leveraged our privacy data intelligence platform into their investigative journalism workflow for multiple high-profile reports.
Challenge
Uncovering sophisticated privacy vulnerabilities within mobile applications requires specialized technical expertise and proprietary forensic tools that exceed the capabilities of traditional security auditing methods. Even enterprise-grade security teams lack the infrastructure necessary to conduct this level of deep application analysis.
Solution
Our proprietary automated analysis pipeline delivers research teams a comprehensive, fully-analyzed dataset that identifies critical vulnerabilities and potential privacy risks. The platform provides timestamped, forensically-sound data with complete audit trails and exportable documentation suitable for legal proceedings and investigative reporting.
Result
Our analysis formed the evidentiary foundation for an investigative segment that aired nationally on NBC's Today Show, demonstrating the platform's capability to deliver broadcast-quality intelligence on application privacy practices.
Impact
The exceptional quality and forensic rigor of our data and analysis has resulted in repeat engagements with NBC News. Both the Today Show and Nightly News teams have commissioned Disconnect for multiple subsequent investigative reports, each resulting in national broadcast coverage.
Law firm leverages our iOS app archive to establish timeline of security vulnerability remediation in active litigation.
Customer
A law firm representing clients in privacy litigation required forensically-sound evidence documenting the evolution of security vulnerabilities and remediation efforts across specific application versions. The firm needed verifiable historical records of application behavior, permissions, frameworks, and privacy and security changes to establish a definitive timeline of when the defendant became aware of vulnerabilities and when corrective measures were implemented.
Challenge
Establishing a defensible timeline of application security changes in litigation requires access to historical application binaries and the technical capability to perform comparative analysis across versions. Mobile applications are continuously updated, with previous versions becoming inaccessible once superseded. Traditional digital forensics approaches cannot retroactively analyze applications that are no longer available in app stores, creating evidentiary gaps that undermine, or may preclude legal arguments. Manual analysis of available versions is time-consuming, technically complex, and cannot address the fundamental problem of missing historical data.
Solution
Disconnect's iOS App Archive provides access to historical snapshots of tens of millions of app binaries, enabling comprehensive longitudinal analysis across application versions. The platform allows legal teams to compare version-to-version changes in behavior, permissions, frameworks, SDKs, data flows, and more implementations that impact privacy and security. Customers can schedule automated alerts to monitor specific types of changes, and the platform delivers forensically-sound analysis that security teams and legal experts use to validate compliance, uncover emerging risks, and maintain continuous oversight of critical or high-risk applications.
Result
Our data successfully reconstructed a complete timeline of the application's security posture across 18 months and 12 application versions. The analysis definitively identified when the vulnerability was introduced, documented the defendant's subsequent awareness through version updates that partially addressed related issues, and established the timeline of full remediation.
Impact
The forensic integrity and comprehensiveness of Disconnect's historical application data provided the evidentiary foundation that was previously unavailable through any other means. The law firm integrated the platform into their digital forensics workflow for privacy and security litigation matters, utilizing the archive to conduct due diligence investigations and build defensible timelines in cases involving mobile application vulnerabilities.
Federal law enforcement agency utilizes iOS app archive to identify hidden surveillance infrastructure for criminal investigation.
Customer
A federal law enforcement agency conducting a criminal investigation obtained a suspect's mobile device and identified the applications installed and actively used by the subject. To build a comprehensive evidentiary picture, investigators required detailed and historical intelligence on the complete network of third-party services, SDK integrations, and data collection infrastructure embedded within those applications to determine which entities possessed potentially relevant data for subpoena.
Challenge
Modern mobile applications integrate dozens of third-party SDKs and backend services that collect, process, and store user data, often without user awareness or visible disclosure. These hidden data flows create a complex web of potential evidence sources that traditional forensic examination of the device itself cannot reveal retroactively. Investigators needed to understand not just what the suspect did within applications, but which third-party companies on specific dates were passively collecting behavioral data, location information, device identifiers, and usage patterns that could corroborate other evidence or establish critical timeline elements. Even if available, manual analysis of each historical version of the application would be prohibitively time-consuming and require specialized technical expertise beyond typical law enforcement capabilities.
Solution
Disconnect's iOS App Archive provides access to historical snapshots of tens of millions of app binaries, enabling comprehensive forensic analysis of third-party integrations, SDK implementations, backend connections, and data collection infrastructure. The platform allows investigators to systematically identify every third-party service embedded within applications, understand what data each service collects, and map the complete surveillance and data collection architecture operating invisibly within the suspect's applications on any given date. This longitudinal analysis capability ensures investigators can examine the specific application versions present on the suspect's device, accounting for changes across updates.
Result
Using the iOS App Archive, investigators identified third-party SDK and backend service integrations across the suspect's applications that were collecting data during the relevant investigation timeframe. This intelligence enabled the agency to issue targeted subpoenas to advertising technology providers, analytics companies, location data aggregators, and other third-party services that possessed evidence not available through direct device forensics.
Impact
The iOS App Archive revealed an entire layer of digital evidence that would have remained invisible using traditional mobile forensics approaches. Agencies adopt the platform as standard investigative infrastructure, enabling digital forensics teams to systematically identify all potential third-party data sources during mobile device examinations and significantly expand the evidentiary scope of criminal investigations involving smartphones.