Legal
Privacy Policy
Effective: 29 August 2026 · Last updated: 29 August 2026
UnivMap (the “App”) collects no data, transmits no data, and stores no personal information. There are no accounts and no sign-in, and the App makes no network requests while running. Everything you do in the App stays on your own device.
1. What we do not collect
The App has none of the following:
- Accounts or identity — no registration, no sign-in. We never ask for your name, email address, phone number, or any identifier.
- Location — the App never requests location permission. It declares no
NSLocationUsageDescriptionon iOS and no location permission in the Android release manifest. - Analytics or behavioural tracking — no Google Analytics, Firebase, Amplitude, or anything comparable.
- Advertising or ad identifiers — no ad SDKs. The App does not read the IDFA or GAID and performs no cross-app tracking.
- Crash reporting — no Crashlytics or equivalent. Crashes are never reported to us.
- Contacts, camera, microphone, photos, or health data — never requested, never accessed.
- Cookies or cross-site tracking — the App contains no web view of any kind.
The App’s complete list of third-party packages is: flutter_localizations (localisation), intl (date and number formatting), cupertino_icons (icon font), and shared_preferences (local settings storage). None of them include networking or tracking functionality.
2. The App does not go online
UnivMap is a fully offline app. All astronomical data is baked into offline files during development and ships with the App onto your device. At runtime the App does not query, download from, or report to any server.
A verifiable specific: the Android release manifest does not even declare the android.permission.INTERNET permission. In other words, even if the code wanted to reach the network, the operating system would not permit it.
3. What is stored on your device
The App remembers the following using the platform’s standard preference storage (UserDefaults on iOS, SharedPreferences on Android). This data is written only to local storage on your device, is never transmitted anywhere, and is not accessible to us:
| Item | Contents | Why it is kept |
|---|---|---|
| Map style | The skin identifier you picked | Same look next time you open the App |
| Language | A locale code (e.g. en) | Your override of the system language |
| Projection | On / off | Keeps your preferred drawing mode |
| Z-axis drop lines | On / off | Keeps your preferred drawing mode |
| Home and Work | Two celestial object identifiers | The two shortcuts on the home screen |
| Recent searches | Identifiers of objects you searched for | Ranks them higher next time |
| Favourites | Identifiers of objects you saved | Your own guide of places |
Every item above is a preference about how the App looks and behaves. None of it identifies you.
4. An important clarification about “Home” and “Work”
The home screen has two shortcuts labelled Home and Work, borrowed from ordinary map apps — but they have nothing to do with where you actually live or work.
Each shortcut stores the identifier of an object on the star map — Earth, the Moon, Mars, Alpha Centauri, and so on. The App neither knows nor can know your real-world location: it never requests location permission and never goes online.
5. How to delete this data
- Clearing your search history, removing a favourite, or resetting a shortcut inside the App deletes that entry from your device immediately.
- Uninstalling the App deletes all of the above with it. No copy remains anywhere, because none of it ever left your device.
6. Device backups
If you have enabled iCloud Backup (iOS) or Google device backup (Android), the operating system’s backup mechanism may include the preferences above in your device backup. That backup is handled and encrypted by Apple or Google under their own privacy policies and is not accessible to us. You can exclude the App from backup in your system settings.
7. Third parties
The App itself shares no data with anyone, because it holds no data to share and has no ability to transmit it.
Note, however, that you obtained the App through the Apple App Store or Google Play. Those platforms collect download, purchase, and crash statistics under their own policies. That is platform behaviour, outside the scope of this policy. See:
8. Children’s privacy
The App is suitable for all ages and collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13. It is therefore compliant by design with the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and equivalent regulations elsewhere.
9. Your rights (GDPR, CCPA and others)
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) grant you rights to access, correct, delete, and port your personal data, and to opt out of its sale.
Because the App has never collected or held any personal data about you, we hold nothing to access, correct, port, or delete. We have never sold or shared personal information and will not do so. The preferences stored on your device can be deleted by you at any time (see section 5).
10. Sources of astronomical data
The positions, distances, and motions in the App are offline snapshots taken from the public databases of: the NASA Exoplanet Archive, NASA JPL Horizons, ESA Gaia, SIMBAD/VizieR (CDS, Strasbourg), the 2MASS Redshift Survey, and the Harris globular cluster catalogue, among others. That data belongs to those institutions; the App merely presents it.
This App is a personal project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by NASA, ESA, JPL, CDS, or any of the institutions named above.
11. Changes to this policy
If the App’s behaviour ever changes — for instance if any networked feature is added — this page will be updated and the “Last updated” date above revised before that feature ships. Prior versions of this page can be inspected in the project’s public source repository.
12. Contact
Questions about this policy: [email protected]