Characterize privacy exposure behind gated premium features

Characterize what network data and privacy-relevant behavior the premium functionality behind in-app-purchase gates exposes in the five Apple Vision Pro applications whose gated features were not accessed during testing.

Background

The AVP-Inspect exploration procedure does not create accounts or complete in-app purchases. Consequently, functionality protected by premium-access gates remains unreachable during automated and manual testing. The paper reports that five applications contain subsets of premium features behind in-app purchases, leaving the privacy behavior of those features unexamined. Resolving this question would determine whether the inaccessible functionality generates additional network traffic or undisclosed privacy-sensitive data flows beyond those observed in the accessible portions of the applications.

References

Five apps gate a subset of premium features behind an in-app purchase; because we did not transact, we cannot characterize what those paths would expose.

— AVP-Inspect: Coordinated Cyber-Physical Testing for Privacy Analysis of COTS Apple Vision Pro Applications  (2609.08103 - Xiong et al., 8 Sep 2026) in Appendix, Section “More Discussions,” subsection “Limitations”