What is ATAK? A plain-English guide for program teams

What ATAK is

ATAK is a geospatial situational awareness app for Android phones and tablets. Everyone on a team sees the same live map: where their teammates are, what has been marked, which routes are planned and what has changed in the last few seconds. It runs on ordinary Android phones as well as rugged end-user devices (EUDs).

The name has two expansions. In military settings ATAK is the Android Tactical Assault Kit; in civilian settings it is the Android Team Awareness Kit. The app is the same either way.

ATAK started at the Air Force Research Laboratory in 2010. It is now maintained by the TAK Product Center, a coalition of Department of Defense programs and other federal agencies that also manages the rest of the TAK family. A civilian build, ATAK-CIV, was approved for public release in 2020. That opened ATAK to fire, law enforcement, emergency management and search-and-rescue teams, who now use it alongside military units.

What ATAK does day to day

At its simplest, ATAK answers three questions for everyone on the team at once: where are we, what is around us, and what is the plan.

• Position sharing. Each device broadcasts its location, and everyone else appears on the map as a symbol with a callsign.
• Shared markup. Markers, routes, range rings, drawn areas and points of interest go to the whole team as soon as they are placed.
• Chat and file sharing. Text chat, photos and documents move between users without leaving the app.
• Maps and imagery. Teams load their own map layers, imagery and overlays such as KML, and can cache them to work without a connection.
• Data packages. A mission's maps, overlays and files can be bundled and sent to every device in one step.
• Tools. Range and bearing, elevation, coordinate conversion, navigation and other built-in tools.

Does ATAK need a server?

Not always. Devices on the same local network can share data with each other directly. A server becomes necessary once teams are spread across different networks, when you need to manage users and permissions centrally, or when data must be stored and shared beyond the people who are online at that moment.

The TAK family: WinTAK, iTAK, WebTAK and TAK Server

“TAK” is the umbrella name for the whole ecosystem, and ATAK is its Android client. The clients share a common data format, so a marker dropped on a Windows laptop in an operations centre appears on a phone in the field a moment later.

TAK Server is the hub of most deployments. It routes messages between clients, stores data packages, manages users, groups and certificates, and can federate with other organizations' servers so that agencies share selected data without merging their systems.

How the data moves: Cursor on Target

Every TAK product speaks Cursor on Target (CoT), a message format that MITRE and the U.S. Air Force developed in the early 2000s. A CoT message says three things: what something is, where it is, and how long that information stays valid. Here is a friendly ground unit reporting its position:

<event version="2.0" uid="ALPHA-2" type="a-f-G-U-C" how="m-g"
       time="2026-10-27T14:02:11Z" start="2026-10-27T14:02:11Z"
       stale="2026-10-27T14:04:11Z">
  <point lat="36.7282" lon="-76.5836" hae="12" ce="9.9" le="9999999" />
  <detail>
    <contact callsign="ALPHA-2" />
  </detail>
</event>

• uid identifies the thing being reported, so later messages update it instead of creating a duplicate.
• type describes it. a-f-G-U-C reads as atom, friendly, ground, unit, combat, which ATAK draws as the matching military symbol.
• stale is when the information expires. Clients grey out or remove a marker that has not been refreshed.
• <detail> carries everything else: callsigns, chat text, links to video, sensor readings and custom data.

Because the format is shared, any system that can produce or read CoT can join the picture. That is the basis of nearly every TAK integration: drone and sensor feeds, dispatch systems, tracking devices and databases all become markers on the same map.

ATAK versions: CIV, MIL and government builds

ATAK comes in more than one build, and which one your users run affects what you can deploy.

• ATAK-CIV is the civilian build. It is free, available on Google Play and from tak.gov, and its source code has been public since 2020.
• ATAK-MIL and other government builds add capability that is not publicly releasable. They are distributed through official channels to authorized users.

New ATAK releases arrive regularly, and the TAK Product Center supports several at a time. Most organizations standardize on one release and move all devices together, because plugins and data packages are tested against a specific version.

Extending ATAK with plugins

Out of the box, ATAK covers shared maps, messaging and common tools. Anything specific to a mission is added as a plugin: a separate Android package that loads inside ATAK and adds its own toolbar buttons, side panes, map layers and message types. Common examples include:

• Live video from drones and cameras, with the sensor's footprint drawn on the map.
• Data from radios, sensors and wearables connected over Bluetooth, USB or the network.
• Custom forms and reports that arrive at the operations centre as structured data.
• Connections to an organization's own systems, such as dispatch, asset tracking or a GIS database.

A plugin adds exactly what your mission needs, while the core app keeps receiving updates from the TAK Product Center.

Plugins are written in Java or Kotlin against the ATAK SDK, which developers download from tak.gov. Two parts of plugin work catch new teams out, and we cover both in Building an ATAK plugin.

Plugin or standalone app?

If users need the capability on the shared map, alongside their team and the rest of the TAK picture, a plugin is usually the right choice. If the task stands on its own, needs to run on devices without ATAK, or targets users outside the TAK community, a standalone mobile app that sends CoT when it needs to is often simpler to build and maintain.

What to plan for before a rollout

Installing ATAK takes minutes. A rollout that keeps working for months needs answers to these questions first.

1. Which clients and versions. Decide which TAK clients your users need and which ATAK build and release they will run, then keep every device on it.
2. Where the server lives. On premises, in a government or commercial cloud, or both, and who patches, backs up and monitors it.
3. Certificates and enrolment. TAK Server identifies users and devices by certificate. Decide how devices get their credentials, how they are renewed, and how you revoke a lost device.
4. Networks. Know what links your users actually have, from LTE to tactical radio, and how the system behaves when a device is offline for hours and then reconnects.
5. Groups and data sharing. Decide who sees what, and whether you will federate with partner agencies.
6. Plugins and integrations. List what you need on day one, who builds and maintains it, who owns the code, and how it will be updated with each ATAK release.
7. Training and support. Someone has to own map data, data packages and user questions after the launch.

For more on the server side, see our TAK Server page, or browse the rest of our TAK guides.