Privacy Policy

Niek.li Tools is a collection of eight small utilities for Android. This policy explains exactly what the app does with information, in plain language.

Who is responsible

Niek.li Tools is published by an individual developer, Niek van der Meer.

Contact for any privacy question or request: hi@niek.li
Website: niek.li

What the app stores on your device

Everything the app remembers is kept in the app's own private storage on your phone. It is not uploaded anywhere, and it is not readable by other apps.

Uninstalling the app deletes all of it.

If you have Android's Backup enabled, your preferences and favourites are included in your own Google backup so a new phone restores them. Caches, the running Focus timer and the UV reminder are deliberately excluded from backup, because restoring them onto another device would be meaningless or misleading. Backups are governed by Google's own privacy policy, not this one.

What the app does not do

• No account, sign-in, email address or profile.
• No analytics or crash-reporting SDK of any kind.
• No advertising, and no advertising identifier is requested or read.
• No third-party tracking libraries.
• No collection of your contacts, files, photos, call logs or messages.
• Nothing you do is stored on any server the developer controls, beyond the ordinary short-lived web-server logs described below.

Permissions the app asks for, and why

Approximate location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION) — used only by UV index and Rain, and only when you open one of those tools or tap “Locate”. The app requests approximate location only; it never asks for precise location. You can refuse, and both tools still work if you search for a place by name instead.

Camera (CAMERA) — used only by the Food scanner, to read a barcode, and the Colour picker, to sample a colour. The camera preview is processed live on your device. No photo or video is ever recorded, saved or transmitted. Barcode recognition runs entirely on-device using Google's ML Kit; the image never leaves your phone.

Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS) — so the Focus timer can tell you a round has finished, the UV tool can remind you to reapply sunscreen, and Radio can show playback controls.

Foreground service / media playback (FOREGROUND_SERVICE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK, WAKE_LOCK) — so internet radio keeps playing when you leave the app or lock the screen, with controls on your lock screen. It runs only while a station is playing.

Internet and network state (INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE) — to fetch forecasts, rates, station lists and product data, and to know when you are offline.

What is sent off your device, tool by tool

Where a tool uses your location, the coordinates are rounded to two decimal places — roughly one kilometre — on your device before they are sent. The service receives an approximate area, not the spot you are standing on. Your location is never stored by the app beyond the current session, and never sent anywhere except as listed here.

UV index

• Rounded coordinates to open-meteo.com (api.open-meteo.com, air-quality-api.open-meteo.com) to fetch UV, temperature and sun times.
• Rounded coordinates to photon.komoot.io to turn them into a place name, so the screen can say “Amsterdam” instead of “your location”.
• If you search for a place by name, that search text goes to the same geocoding service.

Rain

• Rounded coordinates to buienradar.nl (gpsgadget.buienradar.nl) for the radar nowcast. The request goes straight from your device to Buienradar.
• Rounded coordinates to open-meteo.com for the surrounding forecast, and to photon.komoot.io and geocoding-api.open-meteo.com for place names and search.

Radio

• Your search terms, and the country or genre you browse, go to the community Radio Browser directory (*.api.radio-browser.info), queried directly from your device across the directory's pool of mirrors. No location is sent.
• The name of the track playing comes from the station's own stream, on the connection the audio already uses. Nothing is requested from anyone else to obtain it.
• When you play a station, your device connects directly to that station's own streaming server. That server is operated by the broadcaster, not by the developer or by Google, and — like any website you visit — it will see your IP address and can keep its own logs. The developer has no control over, and no access to, those logs.
• If you cast to a speaker or TV, Google Cast handles the connection under Google's privacy policy.

Food scanner

• The barcode number goes to world.openfoodfacts.org, the Open Food Facts database, to retrieve the product. The camera image itself never leaves your device.
• If a product's ingredient text is in another language, that text is sent to a LibreTranslate instance (translate.disroot.org, falling back to libretranslate.com) to be translated. Only the ingredient text is sent — nothing that identifies you.

Exchange rates

• A request with no personal data to api.frankfurter.dev for the European Central Bank's daily reference rates, with latest.currency-api.pages.dev and cdn.jsdelivr.net as fallbacks.

Time zones, Focus timer, Colour picker

• Nothing is sent. These three work entirely offline.

The unavoidable part: IP addresses

Any time your device requests something over the internet, the server on the other end necessarily sees your IP address, which is a rough indicator of location. This is true of every app and every website; it is how the internet works. It applies to each service listed above, and the radio stations you play.

No part of the app is routed through a server the developer controls. Every request goes from your device to the service that answers it, so there is no log here of what you searched for or where you were. Each third-party service handles its own logs under its own policy:

• Open-Meteo
• Komoot (Photon)
• Buienradar
• Radio Browser
• Open Food Facts
• LibreTranslate · Disroot
• Frankfurter
• Google Cast and Google Play services

Children

The app is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, including a child. It contains no ads and no in-app purchases.

Your rights

Because the app holds no personal data on any server, there is no account to access, correct, export or delete, and no data set from which you could be identified. To erase everything the app has kept, uninstall it, and remove it from your Google backup if you use one.

If you are in the EU or UK and believe any processing described here concerns you, write to the address above. The developer operates no server that the app contacts, so there is no data held here to access, correct or erase.

Changes

If this policy changes, the “last updated” date above changes with it, and material changes will be noted in the app's release notes. The current version always lives at niek.li/privacy.