Tallyist for Android

Tallyist Privacy Policy

For Tallyist on Android. Last updated: September 11, 2026

Tallyist does not collect your data. Nothing you log reaches the developer.

This page stays in English even where the app’s interface is translated, so that what it claims can be checked against the app’s manifest and its Google Play Data safety declaration.

What Tallyist stores

All of it is stored on your device, in the app’s own private storage. No account is required. Tallyist asks for no sign-in, and has no permission to use the internet.

There is no name in any of it, no email address, no device identifier and no advertising identifier. The app never reads the advertising ID or any hardware identifier. Each drink carries a random identifier generated on your device, which identifies the row and nothing else.

The app has no text fields of its own. Drinks are logged by tapping and by dragging a slider, and times and dates are set on a clock face and a calendar. The one keyboard Tallyist can show belongs to Android’s standard date picker, whose dialog offers to take a date as digits instead of taps. That accepts digits only, and what gets saved is the resulting date, never the characters typed. No string you type is written to the database, to your settings, or to a backup.

Where your data can go

Three paths, and they are the only three.

Android’s own backup. The app keeps a second copy of your log as a file in its own storage, files/backup/log.json, so that your record survives a move to a new phone. That file is written deliberately into the one directory Android’s backup system is allowed to take. If backup is turned on for your device, Android copies the file into your Google account’s backup, and Android’s device-to-device transfer carries it to a replacement phone during setup.

The file holds every drink row and every recorded alcohol-free day, including rows behind entries you have deleted. Your settings are not in it, and neither is the database itself, so a restored phone comes back with the whole log and with every setting at its default, including the introduction.

Android performs this copy. Tallyist holds no permission to use the internet, so it does not and cannot contact Google, and the developer never receives the file and has no way to ask for it. On current versions of Android the backup is encrypted with a key derived from your device screen lock, which Google does not hold. Whether it happens at all is a system setting, under Google, then Backup. Tallyist cannot read that setting and cannot change it.

Share images. A month, a year, or a year in review can be rendered as a picture. A month card carries four figures and a day-by-day grid of that month, each day shaded by how much was logged. A year card carries twelve such grids, so it is a day-by-day picture of a year. Each image is made on your device, only when you ask for one, and goes only where you send it through the system share sheet. Once an image is in another app, it belongs to that app.

The app writes one image into its cache, replaces it with the next card, and empties the folder at every launch. The image carries no identifier and no embedded metadata, and the app does not record whether or where anything was shared.

The home screen widget. If you place the widget, today’s count is drawn by your launcher, which is a different app on your own device. It shows one number and a caption. No dates, no history, no totals, no per-drink detail. There is no widget unless you place one. It is excluded from the lock screen.

What the rest of your phone can see

These are not things Tallyist does. They are things Android does with any app, and this section is here because a policy that left them out would be describing a device that does not exist.

What Tallyist does not do

The only third-party library Tallyist asks for is Vico, which draws the charts on your screen. The rest is Android’s own libraries and the Kotlin language runtime, together with three small utility libraries that arrive alongside them and that the release build strips back out. No Google Play Services, no Firebase, and no networking library is in the build. The app also removes one Android component that would otherwise ask Google Play Services for an emoji font, because that request is one the app never asked to make.

The developer collects nothing, receives nothing, and holds no copy of anything you log. The one path by which any of it leaves your device is Android’s own backup, described above, and that goes to your Google account rather than to the developer.

Deleting your data

Three steps, and only the first is inside the app.

  1. In the app. Any drink can be deleted, one at a time, from Today, from History, or from a day in the calendar. A recorded alcohol-free day can be cleared the same way. A deletion of this kind hides the entry everywhere in the app, but the row stays in storage with the time of the deletion, so that a restored backup does not bring the drink back. Its details stay in that row, and in the backup file, until step 2. There is no single control in this version that erases everything at once.
  2. On the device. Uninstalling removes all of it: the database, your settings, the backup file, and any unreadable backup the app has set aside. The same result without uninstalling is in Android’s Settings app, under Apps, then Tallyist, then Storage and cache, then Clear storage.
  3. In your Google account. A backup Android has already taken outlives both of the above. Clearing the app’s storage does not clear it, and an emptied app will not overwrite it, because Tallyist does not write an empty log over an existing backup. That copy is removed in Android’s Settings under Google, then Backup, or in the Google One app under Storage, then Backups, by deleting that device’s backup or by turning backup off.

Because the developer holds no copy of anything, there is nobody to send a deletion request to. Deletion is in your hands and the platform’s.

One retention detail worth stating. If the app ever finds a backup file it cannot read, it moves that file aside rather than overwriting it, so that a damaged record is never silently destroyed. Files set aside this way are not deleted by the app. Step 2 removes them.

Changes to this policy

This policy describes the app as it ships today. If a future version ever collects data, for example if a server component or an optional cloud backup is added, this policy and the Google Play Data safety declaration will change before that version ships. This page is published in a public repository at https://github.com/semmes/TallyistAndroid, and every change to it, with its date, is visible in that repository’s history.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be raised as an issue on the app’s public issue tracker: https://github.com/semmes/TallyistAndroid/issues.