What Branchward keeps, and why it never leaves your phone

Who is responsibleBranchward is published by Tru Boutique Limited, trading as BlueSignal Dynamics, a company registered in England and Wales with its registered office at 20 Limesway, Maltby, Rotherham S66 8JF, United Kingdom. The director is Jasmine Ledger. We wrote the application, we maintain it, and we are the data controller for everything described in this notice. Write to tru@truboutique.agency about any of it and a person replies within five working days.

The short versionBranchward has no accounts, no login and no server belonging to us. It never asks for your name, your email address or your telephone number. Your lesson progress, the graphs you build in the sandbox and your settings sit in the application's own storage on your own device. Uninstall the application and they go with it. Everything that follows is the detail behind that paragraph.

What is stored

All of the following is written into the private storage area Android reserves for each installed application, which other applications on the device cannot read:

• Lesson progress — which of the eight lessons you have completed, so the course resumes where you left it.
• Sandbox state — the commit graph you have built in free play, including branch names you invented and commit messages you typed, kept so that closing the screen does not discard your work.
• Preferences — graph colours, animation speed and display settings.

Commit messages are the only place in the application where you can type free text, and it is worth saying plainly: whatever you write there stays on the device, but treat it as you would any note on your phone, because anyone holding an unlocked handset can read it. To erase everything, uninstall the application, or open Settings → Apps → Branchward → Storage → Clear storage, which resets progress and preferences and cannot be undone.

We receive no copyThere is no backend of ours, no synchronisation service, no leaderboard and no account for anything to attach itself to. The Git model the application teaches with is simulated entirely in memory on your own processor — nothing is sent anywhere for evaluation, because there is nowhere to send it and nothing that would answer faster than the phone in your hand. We hold no copy of your work and could not produce one if we were asked to.

PermissionsBranchward requests no runtime permissions whatsoever. It does not touch your camera, microphone, contacts, photographs, files, location, calendar, call log or messages, and it requires no internet access in order to function. Every lesson, the simulation engine, the command reference and the checker are compiled into the application itself, so there is nothing to fetch and nothing to fetch it with. Should a later version ever need a permission for some feature, Android will ask you at the moment that feature is used, and this notice will already explain why.

Other companiesBranchward contains no advertising libraries, no analytics libraries and no social network integrations. We build no profile of you, we do not follow you into other applications or websites, and we sell or share nothing with data brokers, having nothing to sell or share. The application does reach you through Google Play, and Google independently collects installation, crash and device information under its own terms, which are outside our control — see the Google Privacy Policy. Where Google Play services libraries are present in the binary they may handle technical identifiers such as device model, Android version and an advertising identifier for the purposes Google sets out. None of that reaches us in a form that identifies you.

Your position

Younger usersBranchward is educational software for a general audience, students very much included. It does not knowingly collect personal information from children, and because it collects none from anybody at all, it holds none belonging to a child. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has sent us personal information — by writing to our support address, for example — tell us and it will be deleted.

If you write to usWe keep your message and your email address for as long as the question takes to resolve, and for up to twenty-four months afterwards so that a follow-up can be recognised rather than answered from scratch. Our lawful basis is our legitimate interest in supporting the people who use our software. Nothing goes onto a mailing list and nothing is passed to anyone else.

Your rightsUnder the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR you may request access to your personal data, correction of it, erasure of it, restriction of its processing or portability, and you may object to processing altogether. Those rights apply here in full, even though there is very little for them to apply to. You may also complain to a supervisory authority — in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. To exercise any right, write to tru@truboutique.agency and we answer within one month.

SecurityApplication data lives in the sandbox Android gives each installed application, isolated from everything else on the device. Because nothing travels, there is no traffic anyone could intercept and no database of ours anyone could breach. We apply reasonable technical and organisational measures to the little information we do handle, while accepting that no form of electronic storage is ever completely secure.

Changes to this noticeIt is rewritten when the application changes or when the law requires it. The date in the header is the date the current wording took effect. If a future release begins collecting anything this version does not describe, the revised notice is published before that release ships, not after somebody notices.