More detection tools now ship a mobile app alongside the main product. Makes sense. The suspicious media lives on your phone. But a companion app is only as good as the engine behind it, so here is how to evaluate the ones worth comparing.

First, separate the app from the engine. A beautiful mobile app wrapped around a weak detector is still a weak detector, just a prettier disappointment. Evaluate the underlying tool first: modality coverage, published accuracy with test conditions, API access. The app is the delivery vehicle, not the product. I keep repeating this because people keep buying the vehicle.

Then judge the app on its own terms. Does the mobile version cover the same modalities as the desktop tool, or is it a watered-down image-only checker? Some vendors ship a full mobile app to detect deepfake video and images. Others ship a logo and a verdict button. The listing rarely admits which one you are getting, so test it.

Check the sync story. The good setups let you flag something on mobile and continue the investigation on desktop, history carried over. The bad ones are two products that happen to share a name and a color scheme.

Privacy gets its own line. A deepfake detector app from an enterprise vendor usually inherits the company's data policies, which is reassuring or alarming depending on the company. Read them. Enterprise does not automatically mean careful. Sometimes it means the opposite.

Watch the pricing trap. Some vendors include mobile in the main subscription. Others charge per device or gate the app behind a higher tier. For a team rollout, per-device pricing adds up fast. Get the mobile pricing in writing before the pilot, not after. After is when the surprises live.

And keep the hierarchy straight. The mobile app is triage. The full platform is the verdict. Any workflow that ends at the phone screen is a workflow with a hole in it.

The honest shortlist: vendors with real detection research, published testing, and a mobile app that does more than demo the logo. A deepfake scanner app for iOS or Android from a vendor with no published methodology is not a top anything, no matter where it ranks.

For the underlying tools compared properly, accuracy claims, pricing, and media types side by side across 60 options, the database at deepfakedetect.fyi is where I would build the shortlist.