Mercury
BY ELKENSON
Mercury explores the systems beneath the surface.
In a world increasingly mediated by software, apps have become one of the most revealing, yet least understood, layers of global infrastructure. They are not just tools. They are records of economic relationships, political forces, and social behavior, continuously written and rewritten in code.
Through analysis of app architecture, dependencies, and telemetry, Mercury surfaces the signals embedded within apps. These signals provide incidental and high-frequency snapshots of the political economy, and offer a unique view into how markets shift, how power moves, and how systems evolve.
About Mercury
Mercury maps the connectivity of apps. It provides an easy pipeline to collect and analyze historical versions of Android apps.
It helps analysts to learn how apps work, both past and present, their connections with remote infrastructure around the world, and how those connections translate into and across companies, infrastructures, and jurisdictions. Mercury shows the trajectory of these dependencies, giving analysts the context to understand not just what an app does today, but how it got there.
What Mercury Does
The result is a new form of intelligence:
For companies, clearer insight into risk, dependency, and opportunity
For governments and policymakers, visibility into digital sovereignty and control
For analysts, a way to study the political economy through live systems
Try Mercury
To get started, please reach out to us directly at hello@elkenson.com and we will provide login credentials along with any information you may need to access the platform.
Once you have your login credentials, click the button below to get started.
Alternatively, if you prefer to run the project locally, you can visit our GitHub and download the repository.
FAQs
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Mercury is free to use.
Its development and availability are supported by donations, allowing us to provide access without cost while continuing to improve the platform.
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No technical expertise is required. Mercury is designed for researchers, analysts, and organizations of all backgrounds.
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An APK (Android Package Kit) is the file used to install apps on Android devices. It contains the app’s code and structure, which can be analyzed to understand how the app is built and what it connects to.
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Mercury can trace an app’s development throughout its entire lifecycle, from the earliest available version to the most recent release.
By exploring historical data, you can identify trends, structural changes, and shifts in connectivity that may reveal important insights.
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Yes! Mercury’s complete codebase is open and available on our GitHub at GitHub.com/Elkenson
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There is currently no comparable working system that provides this level of analysis at scale.
While backend connections can be investigated manually, the process is slow and limited. Mercury automates and structures this analysis, making it possible to uncover patterns and relationships across large sets of applications.
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If the app you’re investigating isn’t available in our repositories, reach out to us. We’ll do our best to provide the data or guidance you need to continue your research.
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If a technical problem arises, please contact us. We are dedicated to maintaining a robust and reliable platform, and our team will assist you in resolving the issue.
Make a Donation
If our tools have been useful to you, or if you support our projects, donations like yours help us keep building, improving, and offering these resources openly.