Privacy policy for Lately
Effective 12 August 2026. Lately is an Android app published by Ninth Street.
The short version. Your journal is stored on your phone and nowhere else. There is no account to create, no server that holds your entries, and no advertising or analytics of any kind. Nobody, including the developer, can read what you write.
What stays on your phone
Everything you enter: dates, times of day, activities, partners, who started it, length, place, positions, protection, ratings and your notes. It is kept in a database file inside the app's own private storage, which other apps on the phone cannot read. Your PIN is not stored at all: what is kept is a salted hash of it, held in the phone's own encrypted keystore, and it is never sent anywhere.
The app has no sign-up, no login and no cloud. There is no copy of your journal on any server, so there is nothing for anyone to request, subpoena or leak.
What leaves your phone, and when
Three things, all of them narrow, and none of them your entries.
- A backup, if you export one. The export writes a file wherever you choose to put it. From that moment the file is yours to look after: if you save it to a cloud drive or send it to somebody, it goes wherever you sent it. Lately can put a password on that file, and the password is never stored or transmitted, which also means it cannot be recovered if you forget it.
- A check for app updates. When you open the app it may ask its update service, run by Expo, whether a newer version of the app's code exists. That request carries your device's IP address, the Android version and the version of the app, the way any web request does. It carries nothing from your journal, and there is nothing in the request that identifies you as a person.
- A purchase, if you make one. The one optional purchase is handled entirely by Google Play. Google tells the app whether the purchase exists; the app never sees or stores your card, your name or your email address.
What is never collected
No advertising, no advertising identifiers, no analytics, no crash reporting, no location, no contacts, no photos, no microphone, no camera. The app asks for none of these and contains no code that would use them.
The permissions the app declares
- Internet and network state, used only for the update check and the purchase described above.
- Biometrics and fingerprint, used only to unlock the app on your own phone, if you turn that on. The phone performs the check; the app is told yes or no and receives no biometric data.
- Detect screen capture, part of the option that stops screenshots of the journal.
- Vibrate, for feedback when you tap.
Children
Lately is for adults. It is not directed at children, and it is rated accordingly on Google Play.
Deleting your data
Uninstalling the app deletes the journal with it, permanently, because the only copy is the one on the phone. If you want to keep it, export a backup first. There is no account to close and no request to send, since there is nothing held anywhere else.
Changes to this policy
If the app ever starts doing something this page does not describe, this page changes first and the date at the top changes with it.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or anything else about the app: ninthstreetapps@gmail.com.