data retention

It's the opposite - most regulatory frameworks require that you only retain data if you have a "legitimate purpose" for holding on to it; providing app features absolutely is a legitimate purpose, so by having a "wrapped" you can justify holding on to everything a user does - after all, you need it to provide features.

Isn't that just basic data they already kept track of?

I doubt it.

The kind of data used for "wrapped" type summaries are usually the kind of data that users want to be tracked because it powers features they want.

Like Spotify wrapped is based of Spotify play history, and being able to see your recently played songs is a feature people want.

Duolingo wrapped is based on lesson progress, and it has to track your progress else it doesn't know what lesson you're doing.

idk what other apps do this, it's pretty rare for me, but afaict it's all just normal stuff.

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of privacy problems that apps try to fuck with, but I don't think that yearly wrapped is likely to be one of them.

I use the journalling app Daylio, which has a wrapped feature. It's all done locally, on device. Not every implementation of this feature is spying on you.

My to do list app had a wrapped and I was deeply displeased to see it.

Wow pretty problematic

It's also a fun way to see how good their data is

For a few of the apps, the data was very limited and/or very wrong. That made me happy

The only software that could do that for me was Steam; saying when I played which games how long, and if it appeared to be on a Steam Deck or not. It did not nearly track all the Deck data, it seems if the Deck has no Internet connection for long enough it kind of just discards data it held and it never gets synced to Steam. For my desktop it was accurate, but only the game time stats it already let me know it tracks.

Since nothing else could “wrap” my annual data I think I'm going fine.

The whole 'wrapped' summaries thing dovetails perfectly into social media narcissism. It's quite a spectacle to witness.

Edit: the phrase I was looking for came to me:

Sharing 'wrapped' anything is solid gold self-absorbed dipshittery.

That actually requires very little data compared to the amount of data being collected. They collect absolutely everything all the time.

The only app I have that does such a thing does it because it's deliberately gamified to help you build a good habit and tracking/summarizing your achievements for that year. IMO any other kind of app doing that is a gigantic red flag and you ought to delete it and find a replacement in the F-Droid repository (which consists entirely of Free Software that is much less likely to contain those sorts of dark patterns and other antifeatures) instead.

Which apps do that? None of mind have suggested anything.