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South Africa
In force since 1 July 2021

POPIA compliance for a mobile app

Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (South Africa). This page applies it to one kind of product (mobile app), so you get the obligations that are actually yours instead of a summary of the whole statute.

Does it apply to you?

Processing personal information of people in South Africa.

What a mobile app typically processes

  • device identifiers and advertising IDs
  • device permissions such as camera, location or contacts
  • crash reporting and mobile analytics SDKs
  • in-app purchases through the store

Each of these is processing you have to disclose. Adding an SDK later adds to this list — which is why a policy written once goes stale.

Documents you need

The intersection of what POPIA requires and what a mobile app actually does:

  • Privacy policy

Rights you must honour

POPIA gives people in South Africa the right to:

  • Access a copy of their data
  • Correct inaccurate data
  • Have their data deleted
  • Object to certain processing
  • Ask for human review of an automated decision

Cookies and trackers

Nothing non-essential may load before the visitor agrees. Analytics and marketing scripts must be blocked until then — a banner that only informs is not enough.

On mobile, the store asks too

There is no cookie banner in a native app, but Apple App Privacy and Google Play Data Safety both make you declare the same processing — and a declaration that contradicts your privacy policy is the version reviewers notice. The policy has to be reachable at a public URL before you submit.

See what your site is actually missing

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Primary sources

  • s. 11 — Conditions for lawful processing
  • s. 18 — Notification when collecting personal information
  • s. 22 — Notify the Regulator and the data subject of a breach
  • s. 23 — Right of access to personal information

Everything we track about POPIA →

POPIA for other kinds of product

Other frameworks for a mobile app

This page is an engineering summary of publicly available regulatory requirements, generated from LexVibe's framework registry — not legal advice. Every framework links to its official text so you can check it yourself. For decisions about your own compliance posture, consult the primary sources and a lawyer qualified in the relevant jurisdiction.