On Thursday, DuckDuckGo, renowned for its privacy-centric approach, announced the official exit of its App Tracking Protection from beta status within the DuckDuckGo Android browser. This feature, initially introduced in November 2022, is now accessible for utilization on all Android devices.
“App Tracking Protection is now out of beta,” the company wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “It’s a free feature in the DuckDuckGo Android browser that helps block 3rd-party trackers in the apps on your phone (like Google snooping in your weather app).”
Android users have an average of 35 apps on their phones, and those apps send over a thousand tracking attempts to at least 70 tracking companies, DuckDuckGo said in a November 2022 blog post.
DuckDuckGo’s App Tracking Protection feature for Android aims to block third-party trackers across apps and games on your device. The feature will send you daily reports showing how many tracking attempts it has blocked across your apps for the first week after enabling the feature. After the first week, you will get those reports every other week. This feature doesn’t send data back to DuckDuckGo or other remote servers, meaning all data stays on your Android device, the search engine said.
Here’s how to enable the App Tracking Protection beta on your Android device.
1. Download DuckDuckGo for Android or update to the latest version. The latest version is 5.181.1.
2. Open the DuckDuckGo app.
3. Tap Settings.
4. Tap App Tracking Protection beta in the More from DuckDuckGo section.
5. Follow the onscreen prompts, and you’re finished.