Seismor Launcher collects no data, and the released app cannot transmit any. It has no internet permission. Your arrangement — what you have hidden, renamed, favourited, grouped, recoloured or put in the vault — is stored on your device and nowhere else.
Why the app can see your installed apps
A launcher's whole purpose is to show and start the apps on your phone, so it must
be able to ask Android what is installed. That is what the
QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission is for.
The list of your installed apps is used to draw the home screen and nothing else. It is never transmitted, never logged and never shared. The released app has no way to send it anywhere. A copy of the list is kept in the app's own private storage so the home screen can draw immediately at startup instead of waiting on Android; that copy never leaves the device either, and is rebuilt as apps are installed and removed.
Hiding apps, and the vault
Two features here need describing plainly, because it would be easy to read more into them than they do.
Hiding takes an app out of the list. A switch in Settings brings the hidden ones back.
The vault is a second list, reached through a 4-digit PIN you choose. It is meant for apps you would rather were not on the home screen where anyone glancing at your phone can read the name.
The PIN guards a list. It is not encryption, and it is not a password. It is stored in the app's private storage as the four digits you typed, not scrambled or hashed. Android keeps other apps out of that storage, but anyone who can reach the phone's files with developer tools, or who has root, can read it.
Nothing about an app changes when you hide or vault it. It is still installed, it still runs, it still appears in Android's own Settings and app list, and it can still be opened from there or from a search. Both features tidy your home screen. Neither is a defence against someone holding your unlocked phone.
The PIN is set once and the app has no screen for changing or removing it. If you forget it, the way back is to clear the app's storage in Android Settings, which also clears the rest of your arrangement.
What the app stores, and where
All of this is written to app-private storage using Android's standard preference system. None of it is transmitted, and we never receive any of it.
- Which apps are hidden, which are favourites, and which are in the vault
- Custom names you have given apps, and the groups you have filed them into
- Custom icons and text colours
- Which system apps you have chosen to show
- Your display preferences — theme, typeface, and whether real app icons are shown
- The vault PIN, as described above
- A cached copy of your installed-app list, so the home screen can draw at once
Exporting and importing your settings
The app can write your arrangement to a JSON file so you can keep it or move it to another phone, and read one back.
- Both use Android's own document picker. You choose where the file is written and you choose the file to read. The app has no storage permission and cannot browse your files, list them, or touch anything you have not picked in that dialog.
- The file holds your per-app settings, your groups and your display preferences. The vault PIN is deliberately left out of it, so a settings file cannot carry your PIN to another device or to anyone you send it to.
- It does record which apps you hid and which you put in the vault, since that is the arrangement being saved. That is worth knowing before you put the file somewhere shared or send it to someone.
- Importing merges the file into what you already have rather than replacing it.
Once a file is exported it is an ordinary file under your control, outside anything this app can protect. How it is looked after depends on where you put it.
Uninstalling an app from the launcher
Holding an app offers a trash icon, which opens Android's own uninstall
dialog — the same one you would get from Settings. That is what the
REQUEST_DELETE_PACKAGES permission is for: without it Android silently
refuses to show the dialog to the app that asked.
The permission lets the launcher ask. It does not let it remove anything on its own. Android draws the confirmation, Android decides, and nothing is uninstalled unless you agree to it there.
Permissions
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES |
To list the apps installed on your device so they can be shown and launched. |
REQUEST_DELETE_PACKAGES |
To open Android's uninstall dialog when you tap the trash icon. It cannot uninstall anything by itself. |
Those two are the whole list. The released app has no internet permission, and no access to contacts, location, camera, microphone, your call log, or any file beyond the one document you explicitly pick for export or import.
Sharing and third parties
Nothing is shared. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising library, no Google Play Services and no third-party service in the app, and no data leaves your device for us to receive. The app is built on Flutter plus three small open libraries — one to ask Android what is installed, one to read and write the preference store, and one that draws the colour wheel. All three run on the device and none of them make network requests.
Paying for the app
Seismor Launcher is a paid app, bought once per Google account for a lifetime licence. The purchase is handled entirely by Google Play. We never see your card details, your billing address or your name, and the app itself contains no payment or billing code. There are no in-app purchases, no subscriptions and no premium tier. What Google does with the transaction is covered by Google's own privacy policy, not this one.
The app also contains no licence check. With no network permission it could not verify a licence with a server even if we wanted it to — so there is no sign-in, no activation, no account, and nothing that reports back that you are entitled to use your home screen.
Backups
The app opts out of Android backup, and additionally excludes its data from device-to-device transfer, which on modern Android is a separate channel that has to be refused separately. Your arrangement is not copied to Google Drive and does not follow you to a new handset.
This matters more here than it might elsewhere: because the vault PIN is stored as plain digits, a backup that included it would put it on someone else's server. It is excluded from both channels. Moving your setup to a new phone is what the export file is for, and that file leaves the PIN behind.
Keeping and deleting your data
Everything the app stores stays on your device until you remove it. Individual choices can be undone from inside the app — un-hide an app from the Hidden Apps screen, take one back out of the vault, remove it from a group, reset a colour you set.
There is no single button that resets everything. To clear the lot — settings, groups, preferences and the vault PIN — clear the app's storage in Android Settings. Uninstalling the app deletes everything it has stored, apart from any settings file you exported yourself, which stays wherever you saved it. Removing the launcher does not uninstall or alter any of your other apps. Because we never receive any of it, there is nothing for you to request from us and nothing for us to delete on your behalf.
What we declare on Google Play
Google Play asks every developer to complete a Data safety form. Ours says the app collects no data and shares no data, and that no data is transmitted off the device. That declaration matches this policy because the released app has no means of sending anything anywhere.
Children
The app is suitable for all ages, and it collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. It shows no advertising, contains no purchases, and cannot display content fetched from the internet, because it cannot reach the internet. We do not knowingly collect information from children because we do not collect information from anybody.
Security
The app relies on Android's application sandbox, which keeps its stored settings unreadable to other apps. Since nothing is transmitted, there is no traffic to intercept and no server holding your information. Releases are signed by us, so Android will only install an update that came from Seismor.
The one thing we will not overstate is the vault. As set out above, its PIN is stored in the clear and it hides names from a glance, not from an attacker. If you need an app's contents to be genuinely protected, use that app's own lock or Android's, not this one.
Your rights
Laws such as South Africa's POPIA, the EU and UK GDPR, and similar rules elsewhere give you rights to see, correct, export or delete the personal information a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to look up, correct or erase. The data the app keeps is on your device, under your control, and you can delete it at any time as described above. You may still contact us with any question about this, and you have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in South Africa, the Information Regulator.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the revised version will be posted here with a new effective date.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@seismor.com
Seismor (Pty) Ltd, South Africa.