💄 Makeup & Read

What the app saves

The game remembers where she got to. That is the only reason it writes anything down at all. Five things:

• Her progress — points earned, points left to spend, which makeup and outfits she has bought, which outfit she is wearing, and how many rounds she has finished.
• Her language — English or العربية.
• Sounds — on or off.
• Whether she has seen the how-to-play card, so it stops popping up.
• A made-up name for the save file — a p and eight random characters, invented on the device the first time the app opens, like p7k2m9x4b. It exists so the save has something to be filed under. It is not your device's ID, it is not connected to you or to anything else, and it never leaves the device.

That is the entire list. There is no name, no age, no birthday, no email address, no photo, no voice recording, no location, no contacts, no phone number, no advertising identifier. The app never asks for any of them and has no place to put them.

All of it sits in this app's own private storage on the phone or tablet — the area only this app can read. Deleting the app deletes it from the device. If the device itself is backed up to iCloud or Google, a copy rides along in that backup — see Backups and How to erase everything below.

What the app never does

• ✔ No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into.
• ✔ No analytics, no crash-reporting service, no ad network, no tracking. The game — every rule, every drawing, every word your child reads — is written by one person. It is wrapped in Capacitor, an open-source shell that lets that one set of files run as an iPhone and Android app instead of only in a browser; on Android it rests in turn on AndroidX, Google's standard building blocks that almost every Android app is built from. What the shell does here is small and checkable: it draws the window, colours the bar at the top, writes the save file, and takes the splash screen away. It brings no advertising, no analytics, no crash reporting and no tracking with it — those are separate products a developer has to go and add, and none of them are in this app. Saying it exactly: this app contains code written by other people, and none of that code watches your child. (In a browser there is no shell at all — the page is the game.)
• ✔ No server. The whole game — the rules, the scoring, the save — runs on the device. There is nothing to sync to and nothing to go wrong when the plane door closes.
• ✔ No purchases. The shop inside the game spends points she earned by reading correctly. It costs no real money, it cannot be topped up, and there is no way to spend a penny inside this app.
• ✔ Nothing sold, nothing shared. Not as a promise to behave — as a fact about the plumbing. There is nothing held anywhere that could be sold or shared.

The two times the app reaches outside itself

Both of these need a deliberate tap, and neither one is us.

• The speaker button (“read it to me”). It hands the instruction sentence — always a fixed game phrase like “Put pink lipstick on her lips” — to the voice already built into the phone, the same one that reads your notifications. Nothing is sent to us, and the sentence never contains anything about your child.
• The bug report. If the game hits an error it shows a card offering to tell the author. Tapping Send opens your own email app with a message already typed out: what broke and where in the code, which screen she was on, the language setting, the phone's browser-engine description, and her current points. It does not send by itself. You can read it, edit it, or throw it away. If you never press send in your email app, nothing goes anywhere.

Backups

If iCloud Backup (iPhone, iPad) or Google's automatic backup (Android) is switched on for the device, her save is carried along in that backup, exactly like every other app's data. That copy lives in your Apple or Google account, under your control. We cannot see it, reach it, or ask for it. Turning that backup off in the device's own settings keeps her save on the device alone.

This is the one copy that can outlive the app on the phone, so it has its own steps in How to erase everything below.

How to erase everything

• Just her progress: open Settings (the ⚙ button in the top corner of the menu) and tap Start over (erase points) twice. Points, purchases and outfit go back to the first day.
• From the device: delete the app. The save is inside the app's own private storage, so the phone removes it along with the app. Nothing is left behind on the device.
• From your backup, if you keep one: deleting the app cannot reach into a backup that was already taken. If iCloud Backup or Google's automatic backup was switched on (see Backups above), a copy of her save sits inside it, in your account, until you remove it or it is replaced. To clear it:
  • iPhone, iPad: Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Backups → the device → find Makeup & Read in the app list and switch it off. iOS then deletes that app's data from the backup. (Apple moves this screen around between versions; it is always inside Settings → your name → iCloud, in the backup list for that device.)
  • Android: open the Google One app → Storage → Device backup → the device, and delete the backup; or turn backup off first in Settings → Google → Backup so a fresh copy is not taken. Left alone, an old backup is dropped once the device stops backing that app up.
• There is nowhere else to look. No server holds a copy, because there is no server — so there is nobody to write to and ask, and nothing of hers for anyone to hand over.

This page used to say that deleting the app erased every trace. That was not quite true and it was the sentence a parent would have relied on: the device backup is a copy, and it is the one place a save can outlive the app. It is your copy, in your account — but you should be told it is there rather than reassured it is not.

Children

This app is built for children, and it is built the way an app for children should be: it collects no personal information from anyone, of any age, because it collects no personal information at all. There is nothing for a parent to request, correct or have deleted, and no company holding a file on your child.

If you would rather hear that from a person than read it on a page, write to me. It is one developer, not a support desk.

The website

The same game runs in a browser at makeup-and-read.vercel.app, and behaves the same way — the save lives in your browser's storage for that one site. The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps the ordinary web-server logs every host keeps (the requesting IP address, the time, the file requested). We do not read them, and no game data is in them. The app does not touch that website at all.

If this ever changes

If a future version ever collects anything, this page changes first and the date at the top changes with it. An app that behaves differently from what is written here is a bug — please tell me and I will fix it.

Contact

Questions, worries, or a bug: mawad10101@gmail.com