Universe Alerts — Privacy Policy
Universe Alerts sends you alerts you schedule yourself. This policy explains what happens to your information.
Summary
- There is no account and no sign-up.
- Your alerts, their history, your rules and your settings are stored only on your phone.
- The app has no server. The developer cannot see any of it.
- Only a few things leave your phone, and all of them are optional: public data lookups for weather and prices, and the AI assistant (only if you add your own Google Gemini key).
- Notification rules and the voice assistant are off until you turn them on.
What stays on your device
- Your alerts: name, note, time, repeat and, for data alerts, the city, coin or currency pair you chose.
- History: what fired and when, capped at the most recent entries.
- Latest values: the last temperature or price fetched, so a notification can show it.
- Notification rules: the apps and words you chose to watch for, and your alarm settings.
- Notification counts: which app notified you and when — never what the notification said.
- Matched notifications: for a notification one of your rules acted on, its text, capped at the most recent 100.
- What the assistant remembers: the facts you asked it to remember.
- Your Gemini API key, if you add one: kept in the Android keystore, not in ordinary app storage.
- Preferences: your theme choice.
Android Auto Backup is disabled, so this data is not copied to Google Drive by the app.
Notification access (optional)
Notification rules need Android's "notification access", which you grant by hand in system settings. While it is on, the app can see notifications from other apps. What it does with them:
- It counts which app notified you and when, so the Report can show which apps interrupt you most. The text is not stored for this.
- It checks each notification against your own rules. If one matches, it rings the alarm you configured and keeps that notification's text on your phone so you can see what set the alarm off.
- Nothing read from a notification is ever sent off your phone, to us or to anyone else.
Turn the access off in system settings at any time and this stops immediately. Settings → Delete everything also clears what was recorded.
Microphone (optional)
The voice assistant listens only while you have the microphone turned on in the assistant, and only to turn your speech into text. The app does not record, store or upload audio, and never sends it to us.
The speech-to-text itself is done by Android's own speech recognition, not by this app. The app asks for on-device recognition wherever the phone supports it, so the audio stays on the phone. Where it does not, Android falls back to its normal recogniser, which on most phones is Google's and may process the audio on Google's servers under Google's own privacy policy. You can avoid this entirely by typing to the assistant instead of speaking. If you never open the assistant, the microphone is never used.
The AI assistant (optional, your own key)
The assistant does nothing until you add your own free Google Gemini API key. If you do:
- What is sent to Google: your question, the recent messages in that conversation, and the facts the assistant has remembered about you. This is sent directly from your phone to Google's Gemini API using your key.
- What Google does with it: on Google's free Gemini API tier, Google uses submitted content to improve its products, and human reviewers may read it. Do not tell the assistant anything you would not want reviewed. Google's terms and privacy policy govern this: ai.google.dev/gemini-api/terms
- Nothing goes through any server of ours — we never see it.
- Remove the key in Settings and the assistant stops sending anything.
What leaves your device for data alerts
Requests for public data, made directly from your phone over an encrypted connection:
| Service | What is sent | Why |
|---|---|---|
| MET Norway (Norwegian Meteorological Institute) | The coordinates of the city you picked, and an app identifier they require | Weather |
| Coinbase | The coin and currency you picked, e.g. BTC-INR | Crypto price |
| Frankfurter (European Central Bank data) | The currency pair you picked | Exchange rate |
These services see your device's IP address, as any internet request does. They each have their own privacy policies. No account information, contacts, location permission or advertising identifier is involved — the app requests none of them.
Advertising
This app shows ads from Google AdMob on its own screens. Ads are never shown on a screen while an alarm is ringing. Nothing from your alerts, rules or notifications is ever shared with AdMob or used to target ads.
AdMob may collect and process the following to deliver and measure ads and to prevent fraud, sent encrypted in transit:
- your IP address, which may be used to estimate your general location
- interactions such as app launches, ad views and taps
- diagnostic information such as app performance
- device identifiers, including the Android advertising ID and the app set ID
Where required by law (for example in the EEA and UK), the app asks for your consent before personalised ads are shown. You can change your choice at any time in Settings → Ad privacy choices, and you can reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone's own settings.
Versions of this app distributed outside Google Play contain no advertising at all. Those builds do not include the advertising ID permission and never contact AdMob.
Learn how Google uses data from apps that use its services: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
Notifications
The notification permission is used only to deliver the alerts you create and the alarms your rules trigger. Alert text is prepared on your phone and shown by Android; it is not sent anywhere.
Children
The app is not directed to children under 13.
Deleting your data
Settings → Delete everything removes every alert, all history, all stored values, your rules and everything the assistant remembered. Removing the AI key is a separate control in Settings. Uninstalling the app removes all of it. Because nothing is stored elsewhere, there is nothing else to request.
Changes
If this policy changes, the updated version will be published at this address with a new effective date.
Contact
Questions: support@nivarostudios.com