Calm Notes privacy policy

Hello, I'm Oscar Thiébaut, the developer of Calm Notes. A mood journal holds some of the most personal things you can write down, so the app is built to keep them on your phone and nowhere else. This policy explains what that means in practice.

In short

• Calm Notes collects nothing. I never receive your entries or any other data.
• The app has no account, no ads, no analytics and no crash reporting.
• The app does not have the permission to access the internet.
• Your journal is stored encrypted on your device.
• Your data only leaves your phone when you export it yourself.

What the app stores, and where

Everything you enter stays on your device: your entries (date, mood, title, text, emotions and tags), the emotions and tags you create, your reminders, your first name if you give one, and your settings.

The journal is kept in a database encrypted with a key generated on your phone and held in the Android Keystore. Neither the key nor the data is ever sent anywhere, and I have no way to read or recover them.

The app is excluded from Android's cloud backup and device-to-device transfer, so your journal is not copied to your Google account or to a new phone unless you make a backup yourself.

Backups and exports

Calm Notes only writes a file outside the app when you ask it to:

• Backup: a file encrypted with a password you choose. You decide where it is saved or which app it is shared with. To let you make later backups in one tap, the app keeps a key derived from your password on your device, never the password itself. If you forget the password, nobody can open the file, me included.
• Readable export: a Markdown file that is not encrypted. Anyone who gets the file can read it.

Once a file has left the app, it is handled by the place you saved it to, for example a cloud storage service, under that service's own privacy policy.

Permissions

• Notifications: to show the reminders you set up. They are scheduled on your phone and do not involve any server.
• Run at startup: to reschedule your reminders after the phone restarts.
• Biometrics: to unlock the app with your fingerprint, face or screen lock if you turn on the app lock. This check is done by Android. The app never sees or stores your biometric data.
• Vibration: for notifications.

The app does not request access to the internet, your contacts, your location, your camera, your microphone or your files. Files are opened and saved through Android's own file picker, which only gives the app the file you select.

Third parties

Calm Notes contains no third-party advertising, analytics or tracking code, and shares no data with anyone.

The store you install the app from, such as Google Play, may collect its own information about installs and updates. That is covered by the store's privacy policy, not this one. The app contains a link to its Google Play page, which opens outside the app when you tap it.

Deleting your data

You can delete any entry in the app. Uninstalling Calm Notes erases the journal and its encryption key from your phone. Backup and export files you saved elsewhere are yours to delete.

Children

Calm Notes is not directed at children, and it collects no data from anyone.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the new version is published at the same address with a new date at the top. Its history is public in the app's source repository.

Contact

If you have any questions about this policy, write to me at contact@oscarthiebaut.dev.