Privacy Policy Summary

We only collect data to 

• power our features that require a server (e.g., our weather widget)
• verify if you have unlocked Niagara Pro
• improve our app (e.g., to find bugs)
• and for public research and statistics

We're selling Niagara Pro and not your data. We also do not collect data to show you ads. You can also disable data collection through  Niagara settings > Advanced > Share error & usage reports. If you disable data collection, Niagara Launcher will only collect data to power our features and verify if you have unlocked Niagara Pro; only the most necessary data is sent so that Niagara Launcher still works as expected.

Approximate Location data

Used for the weather: If you enable Niagara's weather widget, we send your location to our server and forward it anonymized (approximated to ~ five km² sized areas) to our weather provider, OpenWeather Ltd. We cache that weather data for performance and economic reasons and return the weather data to your device. We don't link the location to your "identity" in any way and even scramble our logging timestamps to prevent the possibility of linking the data through timestamps.

Used for Firebase: Firebase Analytics, Google's analytics service we employ, uses approximate location, most likely based on your device's IP address (and not the location you entered for Niagara's weather widget), to visualize on a map in which countries our app is used the most. That is very insightful for planning localization, for example.

Firebase Analytics

We're using a tool called Firebase Analytics by Google, which helps us receive crash reports and statistics on how often particular features are being used. To give an example, we saw that many users never opened our settings once, probably because they were a bit hidden. We now also show them when long-pressing an app, which significantly improved our settings screen open rate.

The most popular launchers like  Nova Launcher, Microsoft Launcher, or Smart Launcher, for example, use Firebase, the same analytics software as we do (according to https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org - almost every popular app does that as well). They track very similar data as we do - you can read more about what Firebase tracks automatically and why it does that here: https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy. 

App IDs

Off by default - we only log installed apps' IDs (also known as package names) if you explicitly enable App Categorization or participate in our Digital Wellbeing initiative. We ensure for both services that the data is getting anonymized. You can read detailed explanations of how we achieve that by following the respective links.

Cookies

That is the data we store on your device. For example, Firebase saves an ID, which gets attached to crash reports. We can now also see how many devices the app crashes. Ten crashes on one device might be caused by an edge case that doesn't go away after restarting the launcher. In contrast, ten crashes on ten different devices might be a crash with a higher probability but don't seem to reoccur frequently. If you uninstall our app, all of Niagara Launcher's "Cookies" are gone as well.

Our Server

We store that and other data securely on our virtual private server hosted by Hetzner Online GmbH in Germany and don't sell any data. Only three people on our team have access to the server and the database, which they can only access with hardware security keys.

Digital Wellbeing Initiative

For data related to our Digital Wellbeing Initiative (disabled by default), we offer a dedicated article that goes into every detail of what we collect; you can find it here.

If you have any concerns, please email us at support@niagaralauncher.com.