Privacy Policy

The short version

• The developer collects nothing. We run no server, so none of your entries ever reach us.
• There is no sign-up, no log-in and no user profile.
• Every app, price, billing period and usage figure you enter is written to a local database on your device, and stays there.
• The free version shows ads from Google AdMob. Google, as our advertising partner, receives device information in order to serve them.
• Pro is an in-app purchase. Apple handles the payment; the developer never sees your card details, your name or your address.

There is no database of ours anywhere that knows you exist, and buying Pro does not create one. The only parties who learn anything are Google, for the ads, and Apple, for the purchase — and both are described in full below.

What the app stores on your device

To do its job the app has to remember what you told it. It keeps the following on your iPhone:

• The apps you add, and whether each one is installed or on your wishlist.
• The name, category and icon you gave each app.
• The price and billing period you chose: free, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or one-time.
• The daily usage time you record for each app.
• Your favourites, and preferences such as light or dark mode.

All of it lives in a database file inside the app's own storage area. iOS keeps that area private to the app — other apps on your phone cannot read it.

What the app does not do

• It does not create an account or ask for your name, email address or phone number.
• It does not send your entries — your apps, prices, categories or usage times — to the developer, to Google or to anyone else. The advertising SDK is not given any of it.
• It contains no analytics or crash-reporting SDK. The only third-party SDKs in the app are Google AdMob, for the ads, and Apple StoreKit, for the purchase.
• It does not read your Screen Time or any system usage data — the usage figures are the ones you enter yourself.
• It does not see which subscriptions you actually hold. It has no connection to your App Store account beyond the purchase of its own Pro subscription, and none at all to your bank.
• It does not sell your personal information, and it does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising in the sense the CCPA uses, unless you leave personalised ads switched on — see below.

Ads in the free version

The free version of AppSpend is paid for by advertising. Ads are supplied by Google AdMob, part of Google LLC, which is the only advertising partner in the app. Pro removes them entirely.

To choose and measure an ad, the AdMob SDK collects information about your device rather than about your library. That typically includes your IP address, your device model and operating system version, your general location derived from the IP address, your language and country, and identifiers used for advertising and fraud prevention.

What is never sent: the apps you track, the prices you enter, your categories, your usage times, your favourites or your totals. Your library is not used to target ads, and Google is not given access to it.

Google acts as an independent controller of the data it collects through the ads, and uses it under its own terms. You can read what it does with it in the Google Privacy Policy and in "How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services".

On iOS, an app must ask before it can use the Advertising Identifier (IDFA) to track you across other companies’ apps and websites. If you are shown that permission prompt and choose "Ask App Not to Track", the identifier is not used and the ads you see are non-personalised — contextual rather than based on a profile of you.

• You can change your answer at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.
• Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising controls Apple’s own personalised ads, which are separate from these.
• Buying Pro removes the ads, and with them the AdMob requests.

In-app purchases

AppSpend is free to download. Inside it you can buy Pro, an auto-renewing subscription offered monthly or yearly, which removes the ads and unlocks the rest of the app.

The purchase runs entirely through Apple’s In-App Purchase system. You pay Apple, using the payment method on your Apple Account, and Apple handles the whole transaction. The developer never receives — and has no way to see — your card or bank details, your billing address, your Apple Account email or your name.

What the app receives back from Apple is a receipt saying that a subscription is active and when it expires. That receipt is checked on your device and used for one purpose: deciding whether to show you the paid features. It is not sent to us, and it is not linked to anything you have entered.

Because there is no account, your subscription is tied to your Apple Account rather than to a profile we hold. "Restore purchases" simply asks Apple, from your device, what you have already bought.

Apple provides the developer with sales and subscription reports covering totals — units sold, revenue, cancellations, country. Those are aggregate figures. They do not identify individual purchasers, and we cannot tell from them who you are.

Your payment and subscription information is handled under Apple’s privacy policy and your App Store settings. Managing, changing or cancelling the subscription happens in the Settings app on your iPhone, not here.

Images you choose to add

If you paste an image URL to use as an app icon, your device fetches that image from whichever server hosts it, in exactly the way a web browser would. That server can therefore see your IP address and the usual request information, the same as if you had opened the image in Safari.

AppSpend does not add anything to that request, does not log it and does not receive a copy of it. If you would rather your device made no network request at all, use the built-in icons and do not paste external image URLs.

Backups

If you have iPhone or iCloud backups turned on, your AppSpend data may be included in your device backup along with everything else on the phone. That is handled entirely by Apple, under Apple's own privacy policy and your iCloud settings.

The app itself never uploads anything, and the developer has no access to your backups.

Third parties

There are exactly two third parties involved in the app, and both are described above:

• Google LLC (AdMob) — serves the ads in the free version, and receives the device information described in "Ads in the free version".
• Apple — processes the Pro purchase, and distributes the app.

Beyond those, the app bundles no analytics, no attribution and no other advertising libraries. None of them, including Google and Apple, is given the contents of your library.

The app is distributed through Apple's App Store. Apple collects its own information about downloads and about the device, as described in Apple's privacy policy. That relationship is between you and Apple, and the developer receives only Apple's aggregate, anonymous download statistics.

Children

AppSpend is not directed at children under 13, and is rated accordingly on the App Store. The developer knowingly collects no information from children under 13 — or from anyone else of any age, because we collect none at all.

The free version does serve advertising, so if you are setting up a device for a child, that is worth knowing. Ads can be removed by buying the subscription, and iOS Screen Time can restrict in-app purchases on a child’s device.

Your rights

Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you the right to ask a company what data it holds about you, to receive a copy, to have mistakes corrected and to have the data erased. Those rights apply to data a company holds on its own systems.

We hold no record that you have ever installed the app, so there is nothing to request, export, correct or erase from us. Your library is already entirely in your hands: you can read it, edit any entry and delete any of it at any time, without asking anyone.

The data Google collects to serve the ads is a separate matter, because Google holds it rather than we do. Requests about it go to Google, under its own privacy policy — and the quickest practical control is on your own device: turn tracking off in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, which stops the advertising identifier being used, or remove the ads by subscribing.

Purchase and payment records are held by Apple, so requests about those go to Apple through your Apple Account.

Deleting your data

To remove a single app, swipe it away in your library. An undo option appears for a moment in case you did not mean it.

To remove everything, delete AppSpend from your iPhone. iOS removes the app's local database along with it.

Deleting the app is permanent. There is no server-side copy, so the developer cannot restore your entries for you. Export or write down anything you want to keep before you delete it.

Deleting the app does not cancel a Pro subscription — that is billed by Apple and carries on until you cancel it in Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Your subscription itself is not lost by deleting the app: reinstalling and tapping "Restore purchases" brings it back.

Changes to this policy

If the app ever changes in a way that affects this policy — for example if a future version added an optional feature that used the network — this page will be rewritten to describe it, and the "Last updated" date at the top will change.

Material changes will also be called out in the App Store release notes for the version that introduces them. Continuing to use the app after an update means you accept the revised policy. If you do not, you can stop using the app and delete it.

Contact

If anything here is unclear, or you think the app is behaving differently from what this page describes, please get in touch — that would be a bug worth fixing.