Loupe – A iOS app that raises awareness about what native apps can see
Summary
Loupe is a new iOS app that reveals what device fingerprinting data native apps can access, categorized by access cost, and is free and open source.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 06/21/26, 04:30 AM
mysk-research/loupe
Source: https://github.com/mysk-research/loupe
Loupe
Loupe is an iOS and iPadOS app that gives you a hands-on tour of the device fingerprinting surface. It reads real values from public iOS APIs, the same ones any third-party app can call, and shows them to you raw. The point is simple: see what your iPhone quietly exposes, and why each reading helps an app recognize you again.
Trackers don’t need your name, email, or location to recognize you online. Each reading isn’t necessarily unique on its own, but together they form a fingerprint that follows you across apps and websites.
How signals are organized
Loupe groups every reading into three tiers, reflecting the cost of access:
- Passive — visible to any app with no prompt at all (locale, time zone, screen, battery, and more).
- Needs Permission — readings that trigger an iOS prompt (contacts, photos, location, calendars).
- Advanced — clever side-channel uses of public APIs, such as URL-scheme probing via
canOpenURLand Keychain persistence across reinstalls.
Privacy
Nothing Loupe reads leaves your device unless you explicitly export it. Values are shown raw, without aggregation or hashing. Nothing is uploaded, synced, or shared.
A note on how this was built
Loupe was written almost entirely by AI coding tools.
Building
You’ll need Xcode 26 or newer.
- Open
code/Loupe.xcodeproj. - Copy
code/Config/Signing.local.xcconfig.exampletocode/Config/Signing.local.xcconfigand fill in your ownDEVELOPMENT_TEAMand bundle identifiers. This file is gitignored and never published. - Build and run on a device or simulator.
The project uses Xcode’s buildable folders (folder references), so new Swift files are picked up automatically with no need to edit the project file.
macOS
Loupe also builds for macOS. The Mac version is mostly complete, but a few things still need work before it’s polished.
Support the project
Loupe is free and open source. If it helped you see what apps can quietly learn about your device, the best way to support more work like this is to try Psylo, our privacy-first browser for iPhone and iPad. Psylo gives you proxy-backed browsing, isolated tabs, and anti-fingerprinting protections.
You can also read why we built Psylo.
License
The source code is released under the MIT License.
The Loupe name and logo, the app icon, all other images and icons, and the design source files are © Mysk, all rights reserved, and are not covered by the MIT license.
About
Loupe is made by Mysk.
Similar Articles
Lumox
Lumox is a tool that allows users to mirror their iOS device screen to a Mac computer.
Apple vs Claude for enterprise
This article compares Apple's local LLM approach to Anthropic's Claude for enterprise use, highlighting benefits of on-device AI including no usage costs, offline capability, and privacy.
SecureLens - A self-hosted AppSec agent and CLI scanner
SecureLens is an open-source, self-hosted security auditing tool that uses an LLM-powered async pipeline to triage codebases and probe web infrastructure, with an interactive REPL for follow-up questions and patch generation.
@HowToAI_: Someone built a tool that lets Claude Code autonomously test your entire IOS app It navigate your entire app, opens eve…
A new tool built on Claude Code enables autonomous testing of iOS apps by navigating every screen, testing flows, reading debug logs, and producing structured bug reports from a single prompt.
WHOOP 4.0 without a subscription
OpenStrap/Edge is an open-source app that reverse-engineers the WHOOP 4.0 Bluetooth protocol to provide health tracking features without the official subscription, computing everything on-device for iOS and Android.