Nicotine Free is built to keep your information on your phone. There's no account, no login, and nothing to sign up for. This page explains the few narrow cases where any data leaves your device, and the much larger set of things that never do.
The short version
- Your entries stay on your phone. Your day count, streak, reasons, journal entries, letters, moods and settings are stored only on your device. We have no server that can receive them.
- No account, no personal profile. We never ask for your name, email, phone number, or location, and we don't build a profile of you.
- No ads, and no advertising trackers.
- The app works fully offline. It only uses the internet in the two cases below.
What stays on your device only
Everything you create in the app is written to your phone's local storage and nowhere else: your quit date, day count, streak, the days you recorded using and any reduce-mode logs; your reasons, journal entries and letters; mood check-ins, notes, milestones and settings; and the savings calculations made from your own numbers. You can export all of it to a file yourself at any time, and import it on another device.
The two times the app uses the internet
1. Anonymous usage counts (optional, off with one tap)
To understand which features are worth improving, the app can send anonymous, aggregate counts of which features are opened — for example how many times the breathing timer was started. If you leave "Share anonymous counts" on in More → Your data, each count sends the name of an event from a fixed list, the time, the app version and language, and a session number that resets after an hour of inactivity. There is no installation, device or account identifier, so separate sessions can't be linked together over time. The counts go to Aptabase, a privacy-focused analytics service, which works out an approximate country and operating system from the connection and does not store your IP address.
It never sends anything you write, or any personal figure — journal entries, letters, reasons, notes, moods, dates, day counts and money amounts are never transmitted. The app is built so that free text is structurally impossible to include. You can turn this off any time; when it's off, nothing is recorded or sent.
2. Purchases
If you buy the upgrade or a subscription, the payment is handled by Google Play on Android or the Apple App Store on iPhone, and by RevenueCat, which we use to manage and restore purchases. They process a purchase token and a random app-user identifier not linked to your name or email. We never receive or store your payment-card details. See the RevenueCat, Google and Apple privacy policies. Buying is optional; the counter, streak, your reasons and data export are free forever.
This website
This page is about the app, but the website you're reading it on counts visits too. nicotinefree.app uses Vercel Web Analytics to see which pages people read, in aggregate. It uses no cookies and doesn't store your IP address. Instead, a visitor is recognized by a hash of the incoming request that's thrown away after 24 hours, so a visit can't be followed across days or across other websites.
Each page view records the page address, the site that linked you here, an approximate location (country and city), your browser, operating system and device type, and the time. None of it is tied to you or combined with anything from the app, and nothing you write in the app ever reaches the website.
It also counts a few anonymous actions on the site: clicking through to the App Store or Google Play (and which button you used), switching language, opening a question in the FAQ, reaching the pricing section or the end of an article, and clicking the contact email. Nothing you type is recorded. Vercel Speed Insights measures how quickly pages load and respond, reported with the page address, device type and browser, and nothing that identifies you. See Vercel's analytics and Speed Insights privacy documentation for details.
Notifications
If you turn on the daily reminder, it's scheduled locally by your phone. No reminder is sent from a server, and setting one doesn't transmit anything.
Your choices
- Turn off anonymous counts: More → Your data.
- Delete everything: uninstalling removes all data on your device. On Android you can also clear the app's data in Settings; on iPhone, deleting the app removes its data.
- Take your data with you: export a backup from More → Your data.
Questions about privacy: support@nicotinefree.app