Privacy Policy

your letters are nobody's business — not even ours

The short version

  • Your letters never leave your phone. Your letters, your pals' replies, your name, your description, your portrait — all of it lives in the app's private storage on your device, and nowhere else. Ever.
  • The AI is on your device. Replies are written by a small language model (you choose which of two) running locally, while your phone charges. Nothing you write is sent to any server, ours or anyone else's.
  • The one thing that can leave: anonymous crash reports. If the app crashes, a technical report (what broke, your device model, no letter content) is sent to our crash-reporting tool so we can fix it. That's the only network traffic the app ever generates on its own.
  • No account, no ads. We don't collect a profile of you, or sell or share anything — there is nothing to sell or share.
  • Delete the app, delete the data. Uninstalling removes everything stored on your device. There are no copies of your letters to ask us to erase — we never had any.
the long version below just says this more carefully.

What Dear Friend is

Dear Friend (package: com.inmasterveritas.dearfriend) is a correspondence app. You write letters to fictional pen pals, and an AI language model running entirely on your device writes back — slowly, over days, the way letters used to work.

The app was designed around a single idea: what you write to a friend at your desk should never leave your desk. This policy explains how that idea is carried through technically.

What is stored — and where

Everything below is kept in the app's private storage on your device. No other app can read it, and it is never transmitted anywhere by Dear Friend:

Kind of dataWhy it exists
Your letters So they can sit in your drawer and be read again.
Pals' replies & drafts The finished replies, and the intermediate drafts the on-device AI writes and discards while composing them.
Your name & “about you” Optional. Given only to the on-device model, so pals can address you and write letters that fit your life.
Your portrait Optional. A copy of the picture you choose, kept privately by the app. Picked through Android's system photo picker, so the app never sees your other photos.
Preferences Theme choice (daylight/lamplight), which AI model you picked, whether onboarding was completed, and similar app settings.

none of this is “collected” — it is stored for you, on your device, like files in a drawer.

What leaves your phone: crash reports, nothing else

Dear Friend requests a small set of Android permissions, and only one of them involves a network:

  • Notifications — to tell you when a letter has arrived (generated and shown entirely locally).
  • Running in the background (a foreground service, plus an optional battery-optimization exemption you grant through a system prompt) — so the on-device AI can keep writing a reply while your phone charges with the app closed. This keeps work running on your device; it moves no data.
  • Internet access — used for exactly one purpose: sending an anonymous report to us if the app crashes, so we can fix the bug. See “Crash reports” below for exactly what that contains.

Nothing else in the app talks to a network. Your letters, replies, and profile are never uploaded and never phoned home — the one crash-reporting tool described below is the only third-party service in Dear Friend, and there is no advertising SDK.

There are no user accounts and no sign-ins.

The AI runs on your device

Replies are composed by a small language model that runs locally, typically while your phone is charging. You choose which one in the app — Gemma 4 E2B (published by Google) or Qwen 2.5 1.5B (published by Alibaba Cloud) — and either way it runs the same: the model reads your letter (and, if you filled them in, your name and description) in memory, on your device, and writes a reply into the same private storage. Neither publisher receives anything from your phone — the model is a file the app downloads once and runs offline.

No AI provider, cloud service, or server of ours is involved. Your words are never used to train anything.

Crash reports

Dear Friend uses Firebase Crashlytics, a Google service, to learn when the app crashes so we can fix it. This is the one piece of telemetry in the app, and it runs automatically — there's no separate consent screen, because there's nothing personal in what it sends:

Sent on a crashNever sent
The stack trace of what brokeAnything you've written — letters, replies, drafts
Device model, OS version, app versionYour name, description, or portrait
A Firebase-generated installation identifier (not tied to your name or any account)Any identifier tied to your Google account or real identity

This data is governed by Firebase's Privacy and Security policy and, upstream, Google's Privacy Policy. It's used only to diagnose and fix crashes — not for advertising — and it is never combined with anything else, because Dear Friend collects nothing else to combine it with.

Google Play & Google Play services

Two more pieces of plumbing are handled by Google's software on your device rather than by Dear Friend itself, and are likewise governed by Google's Privacy Policy:

  • Downloading the AI model. The language model you choose is delivered through Google Play (Play Asset Delivery). The Play Store app performs that download; Dear Friend only asks Play for the pack and receives the file. No data about you or your letters is included in that request.
  • Fonts. The app's two typefaces (Lora and Caveat) are fetched once by Google Play services' font provider. Again, this involves no user data — it is a request for font files.

Deleting your data

Because everything lives on your device, deletion is entirely in your hands:

  • Uninstall the app — Android removes all of Dear Friend's private storage: letters, replies, profile, portrait, preferences, and any downloaded models.
  • Or clear the app's storage in Android settings for the same effect without uninstalling.

There is no copy anywhere else — Dear Friend also opts out of Android's device-backup system, so your letters are never included in a device backup and won't transfer to a new phone. They exist on this device, and only here. That also means there is nothing to request deletion of from us — the right-to-erasure request every privacy law grants you is, here, a button on your own phone.

For adults (18+)

Dear Friend is intended for adults aged 18 and over, and is not directed at children. The pals' letters are written by an AI language model, and no AI's wording can be fully guaranteed — so the app is not meant for minors. As with everyone else, no personal information is collected from anyone: everything a person writes stays on the device they wrote it on, and the only data that ever leaves is the anonymous, content-free crash diagnostics described above.

Changes & contact

If this policy ever changes — for instance, if a future version of the app adds a new online feature or a new third-party service — the policy will be updated here before that version ships, and the change will be called out in the app's update notes. As of this version, the only network traffic Dear Friend generates on its own is the anonymous crash report described above; anything beyond that would be disclosed here first.

Questions are welcome: inmawbao@inmasterveritas.com