Privacy for RefreshMyPhone on Android

This is the policy for RefreshMyPhone on Android phones. The iPhone app has its own, and so do the Mac apps: RefreshYourMac and RefreshYourMac Storage.

The app

• No account. There is nothing to sign into.
• No analytics, no adverts, no tracking. No usage data, no counts of what you cleaned, no advertising SDKs.
• No internet access. The app does not hold Android's network permission, so it cannot connect to anything, ours or anyone else's. You can check this yourself: long-press the app's icon, tap App info, and look at its permissions.

Your photos and videos

With your permission, RefreshMyPhone reads the photos and videos on your phone to find duplicates, similar shots, blurry photos, screenshots, large videos, chat-app media and motion photos. If you allow access to only some photos, it looks at those alone.

All of the analysis happens on your phone, using small image-analysis models built into the app. To suggest the best of a set of similar shots, it checks whether faces have their eyes open and are smiling. It does not recognise or identify anyone, and it keeps no record of the faces it saw. No photo, video or anything about them is uploaded, and we never see your library.

If you use the folder duplicate finder, you choose the folders with Android's own folder picker, and the app reads only the files in those folders to compare them. You can remove a folder from the list at any time.

Compressing a video or keeping only the picture of a motion photo saves a new file next to the original, on your phone. The original stays until you choose to remove it. While videos are being compressed, Android shows a notification with the progress, if you allow notifications.

The app keeps a few things on your phone between uses: its settings, the folders you chose, a focus score for each photo it has checked for blur, which photos it has found to be motion photos, any videos still waiting to be compressed, and whether your subscription was active the last time Google Play said so. These let the next check look only at what is new. They stay inside the app and are removed if you uninstall it.

Nothing is removed without your say-so: every clean-up shows what it will remove, and Android asks you to confirm. Removed photos and videos go to your phone's bin, where you can restore them for 30 days. Other files from your folders, such as documents, cannot go to the bin, so the app says they will be deleted for good and asks before deleting them.

Buying

The annual subscription is sold and charged by Google through Google Play. When you subscribe or restore it, the Google Play app on your phone tells RefreshMyPhone whether your subscription is active. That exchange happens on your phone, between the two apps. We never receive your payment details. Google gives developers an order record for each purchase, such as its order number, date, country and price, which we use only to handle refunds and support.

Crash reports

If you have chosen to share usage and diagnostics data with Google on your phone, Google may collect crash reports for this app and show us totals and crash details in Google Play's developer tools. They come from Google, not from the app, and do not tell us who you are. If you don't share that data with Google, nothing is collected this way.

Email and this website

If you write to [email protected] or use the support form, we use your message and email address only to reply, and delete them once the conversation is finished with. This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

Changes

If the app ever needs to collect anything, this page will say so first, the Google Play listing will say so, and the app will ask before doing it. A version of the app that could reach the internet would have to ask Android for that permission, and it would show on the app's info screen.