AdGuard
The ad blocker itself, audited: 7 verified scans on 7 devices, versions 4.6 through 4.14, agree on exactly one SDK - Sentry crash reporting. No ads, no analytics, no attribution in the tool that removes them elsewhere. The permission list is the widest in this batch, and that is the nature of the product: a system-wide filter needs to see every app (QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES), attribute traffic (PACKAGE_USAGE_STATS), start at boot, and update itself outside Play, because Google does not allow full system-wide ad blockers in the Store.
Read from the bytecode.
An app with this permission footprint - seeing all your apps, your traffic, your usage stats - demands more trust than almost anything else on your phone, and the bytecode supports extending it: a single crash reporter and nothing that phones home for marketing. Remember that the full AdGuard is sideloaded from adguard.com, so Play Protect is not reviewing updates; you are trusting AdGuard's own signing chain.
This is static analysis of the APK bytecode installed on real devices: it proves which SDK classes and manifest permissions ship in the app, not what the app transmits at runtime. Traffic analysis is a different measurement.
Hidden inside the code.
What it asks for.
Sees every installed app - core requirement for per-app filtering rules
App usage statistics - used to attribute traffic to apps
Self-update outside the Play Store - a consequence of Store policy against system-wide blockers
Keeps the filter running in the background - expected
Keep reading.
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Similar risk profiles.
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