How iOS 15 App Privacy Report Tracks Domain Contacts

Apple's iOS 15 App Privacy Report provides users with transparency regarding how installed applications interact with remote servers by recording and summarizing their network activity. Over a rolling seven-day window, the feature monitors every outgoing connection made by an app, categorizing these network interactions into direct app connections, cross-app domain contacts, and website-initiated requests. This overview details how the operating system collects, aggregates, and presents domain contact data to help users identify potential tracking and background data transfers.

App Network Activity

Under the App Network Activity section, the report lists every installed app that has accessed the internet. Selecting a specific app reveals a reverse-chronological list of every unique domain that the app contacted.

The report distinguishes between domains inherent to the app’s core functionality (such as an app reaching its own API servers) and third-party endpoints. Beside each domain, iOS 15 displays the exact number of times the app contacted that address, along with timestamps for the most recent connections. This breakdown allows users to see whether an app is communicating with analytics providers, advertising networks, or content delivery networks (CDNs).

Most Contacted Domains

To highlight broader data-collection patterns, the Most Contacted Domains section aggregates domain interactions across all installed software.

Rather than organizing by application, this list ranks external domains by the total number of apps that have contacted them. When a user taps a domain from this list, the App Privacy Report shows:

  • Every installed app that contacted that specific domain.
  • The frequency of contacts initiated by each app.
  • The date and time of the latest contact.

This centralized view makes it easy to identify pervasive third-party trackers, ad exchanges, or cloud infrastructure services operating silently across multiple separate apps on the device.

Website Network Activity

Apps frequently load web content using embedded in-app browsers, such as Safari View Controller or WebKit instances. The Website Network Activity section separates these interactions from standard app traffic. It logs the domains contacted by web pages visited inside apps, showing which trackers or external resources were loaded during browsing sessions.

Data Collection and Aggregation Methods

The App Privacy Report functions entirely on-device to preserve user privacy:

  • 7-Day Rolling Window: The system retains domain logs for seven days before automatically discarding older records.
  • Granular Timestamps: Each connection attempt is logged with date and time information, revealing whether data transmissions occurred while the app was actively used or running in the background.
  • Exportable Data: Users can export the summarized data as an unencrypted NDJSON (Newline Delimited JSON) file to analyze raw domain queries, IP resolutions, and connection timestamps using external tools.