When you buy a new mobile device with certain apps already pre-installed on, you’re effectively forced to trust that the device maker or reseller (depending on who pre-loaded the apps) is not up to anything shady or try to remove them (sometimes you can’t).
Or, if you’re a computer science student with an interest in cyber-security like Thijs Broenink, you can reverse-engineer pre-loaded apps and discover for yourself what they do. In his case, he wanted to known what the AnalyticsCore (AnalyticsCore.apk) in his Xiaomi Mi4 does as there was no information online about it.
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