TL;DR
- AYANEO has confirmed that the 1,000+ screenshots were caused by a caching bug that will be fixed soon.
- High data usage reports were a tracking error caused by the AYAWindow app sharing a UID with the Android system. We independently confirm the shared UID.
- Further, our independent security analysis found no evidence of nefarious data transmission or of private information being shared.
Just yesterday, we reported on a user accusing AYANEO of spying on them on their Pocket DS after finding over 1,000 screenshots and excessive data usage. The GitHub thread eventually received a technical response that explained some of the findings. We can now confirm that the response was from AYANEO itself. Further, we can also independently confirm what the app is doing, and thankfully, it’s not nefarious.
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Starting off, AYANEO responded to our email with the same comment as seen on GitHub:
Thanks for looking into this and raising the concern. We appreciate privacy-conscious users.
About the screenshots:
- DS has a dual-screen task manager feature that needs to render app thumbnails from the system. This is normal behavior.
- However, there’s a bug – the cache isn’t being cleaned up, causing screenshots to accumulate. Our team has identified this issue and will push a fix soon.
About privacy:
- These images are small and stored in the app sandbox, posing no security risk
- AYA does NOT upload any of this data
- About the data traffic: Android calculates traffic by Linux UID. AYAWindow uses the system UID (android.uid.system), so all traffic from apps sharing this UID gets counted together. You can check other apps with the same UID (like “Phone” in Settings) – they’ll show similar traffic. This is actually total device usage, not just AYAWindow.
I will share further information with you once it becomes available.
The response does not have any new information, beyond implicitly confirming that the GitHub comment was from an AYANEO employee.
Independently, mobile security researcher linuxct confirmed to us that the AYAWindow app does indeed share the UID with the system.
This corroborates AYANEO’s claim on shared UID.
Further, linuxct has statically analyzed the AYAWindow app. According to them, AYAWindow doesn’t appear to be sending any private information other than when the app is started by the user, without any user-identifiable information, and only includes data similar to what a Crashlytics-equivalent service would send. The data sent is related to bug debugging, ANRs (App Not Responding), and Crashes. In short, AYAWindow doesn’t seem to be doing anything nefarious or out of the ordinary so far with the data it is sending.
We hope AYANEO promptly fixes the cache bug to address this issue and close this chapter completely.
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