The official White House Android app, released March 27, 2026, contains the OneSignal SDK, a tracker from a U.S.-based technology company, alongside a GPS pipeline capable of collecting user coordinates every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and every 9.5 minutes in the background, according to independent developer reports and decompiled code analysis published March 28.
The White House App has OneSignal’s full GPS pipeline compiled in, polling your location every 4.5 minutes, syncing your exact coordinates to a third party server. https://t.co/0HuNiSitA0 pic.twitter.com/UjLO9VdyVZ
— Thereallo (@Thereallo1026) March 28, 2026
The developer pulled the app’s Android Package Kit (APK) and ran it through decompilation tools, finding that OneSignal’s full GPS pipeline, including interval constants, fused location requests, capture logic, background scheduling, and API sync, was fully compiled in.
Foreground polling was hardcoded to 270,000 milliseconds, or 4.5 minutes. Background polling was set to 570,000 milliseconds, or 9.5 minutes. The developer noted the withNoLocation Expo plugin, designed to strip location permissions from the build, “clearly did not strip any of this.”
Developer analysis independently identified multiple embedded trackers in the app. The primary tracker, OneSignal, is classified as serving location, notification, and analytics functions. The inclusion of such extensive tracking in a U.S. government application presents a direct contradiction with past federal privacy standards that strictly prohibited the collection of geolocation data in official executive branch apps.
🇺🇸 🚀 LAUNCHED: THE WHITE HOUSE APP
Live streams. Real-time updates. Straight from the source, no filter.
The conversation everyone’s watching is now at your fingertips.
Download here ⬇️
📲 App Store: https://t.co/VC8lwiyO0G📲 Google Play Store: https://t.co/zFjVcveGOV pic.twitter.com/xxaaSr1irC
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 27, 2026
A post promoting the app on X accumulated 7.5 million views before a Community Note appeared beneath it, stating the app “tracks users’ precise location every 4.5 minutes (foreground) via third-party OneSignal, syncing coordinates to external servers.” Community Notes require consensus across contributors with differing viewpoints before becoming publicly visible.
Dev Forty Five LLC, the company behind the app, was registered in Utah on March 18, 2026, nine days before launch, with Ty Nielson listed as registered agent, according to the Utah Division of Corporations and Commercial Code Business Registration.
The White House privacy policy, last updated January 20, 2025, makes no mention of the app, GPS tracking or OneSignal.
Amanda Beckham, government relations director at Free Press Action, said in a statement on federal app data collection practices that “when aggregated, all of this data represents the power to influence, manipulate, and discriminate.”
The White House and OneSignal had not publicly responded to the technical findings at the time of publication.
