AppMates

Privacy Policy

AppMates is operated by Paolo Augello, a private individual based in Belgium acting in a non-professional capacity, reachable at appmates.contact@gmail.com, who acts as data controller for what's described below.

The pre-flight checks need no account

Screenshots, keyword field, listing text, niche, markets, competitors, rank, and Play testers all run from an App Store id or bundle id you type in. Nothing about you is sent anywhere to use them — every lookup is public App Store or Play catalogue data, read live, cached only in your own browser's session storage (cleared when you close the tab) and never uploaded anywhere on our end.

The "who's on the site right now" globe

The sponsor page's live globe needs no account either, but — unlike the pre-flight checks above — it isn't purely local: while you have a tab open, your browser pings us roughly every 20 seconds so the counter and globe can reflect who's actually here. Each ping carries a random id generated for that browser tab (not tied to any account or device fingerprint), your country, and a coarse device family — one of iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android, Windows or Linux, and nothing else about your browser. The country is read from Cloudflare's own edge network as your request already passes through it: no third-party geolocation service is called. We do not store your coordinates. The globe places a dot at the middle of a country, which your own browser works out from the country code — so the map can't show anything more precise than a country even in principle, because nothing more precise ever reaches us.

Pings older than five minutes are deleted, so the "here right now" row for your tab disappears shortly after you close it.

What is kept as visit history

The sponsor page also shows how much traffic the site gets — a running total and the busiest countries of the past week. That comes from two counters, and counters are all they are:

There is no per-visitor history of any kind. To count a tab once a day rather than once every 20 seconds, we keep a two-column list of (day, tab id) — no country, no page, nothing else — and it is deleted after two days. Neither counter records what you read, and neither can be traced back to a person: they are totals, and a total does not remember who was in it.

What's collected if you create an account

Only the marketplace (testing exchange, leaderboard, messaging, "Feature your app here") needs an account. Creating one stores:

We never store a password — sign-in is a one-time emailed link, so there is nothing to leak on that front.

Who it's shared with

Never sold, never used for advertising. It's processed by the infrastructure that runs AppMates:

Other developers' public feedback and reliability stats derive from testing activity you can see because it's about your own listing — nobody's raw session data is exposed beyond that.

Cookies

One functional cookie keeps you signed in (an opaque session token, not readable by any script). While AppMates is in private preview, a second cookie remembers that you've entered the preview password. Neither is used for tracking or advertising, and no third-party analytics or ad cookies are set anywhere on the site.

How long data is kept

For the globe and its counters: five minutes for the "here right now" row, two days for the once-a-day tab list, 30 days for the per-country daily counts, and indefinitely for the all-time per-country totals — which are aggregate numbers with nothing personal left in them.

For everything else: as long as your account exists. Ask appmates.contact@gmail.com to delete your account and we'll remove your email, display name, and listings; message content already sent to another member as part of a completed test may be retained on their side of the thread, the same way it would be in any messaging product.

Your rights

You can ask, at any time, to see what's stored about you, correct it, or have it deleted, by writing to appmates.contact@gmail.com. If you're in the EU/EEA or UK, this reflects your rights under the GDPR/UK GDPR; you can also lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

Children

AppMates is a tool for app developers and is not directed at, or knowingly used by, anyone under 16.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page will change with it.