Privacy Policy — Brief

Brief is a Wear OS “at a glance” app: a watch complication, a tile, and matching widgets (a phone home-screen widget and, on Wear OS 7, a watch widget) that show the single most relevant thing right now — your now-playing music, an alert from an app you choose, your next calendar event, a low phone-battery warning, the current weather, a scheduled reminder, or today’s date. It comes in two parts: the watch app (which only displays what it’s told) and the phone companion (which gathers the information, sends it to your watch, and shows the same glance in its own widget).

This policy explains exactly what Brief accesses, why, and where it goes. The short version: Brief has no servers, no account, no analytics, and no ads. Almost everything stays on your own devices. The only thing that ever leaves your devices for a third party is an approximate location — rounded to about a kilometre — sent to a weather provider so it can return your local forecast. Everything else — including whatever is shown as a glance — only ever travels between your own phone and your paired watch.

Who is responsible

Brief is an independent app. The developer is the “data controller” for the purposes of this policy. Questions or requests: developerdfa@gmail.com.

What Brief accesses, and why

Notification access is used for two things: to read the active media session (so Brief can show now-playing and forward play/pause), and — only if you turn on the Notifications source and choose which apps count — to mirror those selected apps’ alerts to your watch. Brief looks only at the apps you pick; notifications from every other app are ignored, never stored, and never uploaded. If you don’t enable the Notifications source, notification access is used for media alone.

What leaves your device

• Approximate location → weather provider. When weather is enabled, Brief sends coordinates to Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com) over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection to retrieve the forecast. The coordinates are rounded to about a kilometre before they leave the phone, so your street-level position is never sent, and Brief keeps no location history. Open-Meteo requires no account or API key. See Open-Meteo’s own privacy terms at https://open-meteo.com/en/terms. If you set a manual location instead of using your phone’s location, only that manual location is sent. You can disable weather entirely.
• A location search you type (when choosing a manual location) is sent to Open-Meteo’s geocoding service to turn the place name into coordinates.

Nothing else is sent off your devices to a third party. There is no Brief server — calendar titles, media details, the alerts you choose to mirror, reminders, and settings are never uploaded to the developer or any third party. (Your settings file can be included in your own device’s Android Backup — a system feature under your Google account that the developer has no access to; see “Where data is stored” below.)

Between your phone and your watch

Brief’s phone companion sends the resolved glance, your settings, and media play/pause commands to your paired watch over the Wear OS Data Layer (provided by Google Play Services). This travels directly between your own paired devices over their encrypted Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connection. It is not routed through a Brief server.

When the Notifications source is on, the resolved glance can include a selected app’s name and the notification’s title and text. Like every other glance, this goes only to your paired watch and never to a server. On the phone, the winning glance — including any mirrored notification content — is kept in Brief’s private app storage so the home-screen widget can render it; it is excluded from every backup, replaced as soon as a different glance wins (for example, when you dismiss the alert or its show window ends), and deleted when you uninstall Brief.

If you turn on “mask titles,” event titles and locations are replaced with a generic placeholder before they ever leave the phone, so the real text is never sent to the watch.

Where data is stored, and for how long

• All data Brief keeps lives on-device in private app storage (Android DataStore): the last resolved glance (kept on the phone for the widget and on the watch for the complication and tile), a cached weather forecast, and your settings.
• The cached weather forecast and now-playing details expire automatically (e.g. stale weather and paused/old media are dropped within minutes to hours).
• Mirrored notification content exists only inside the last resolved glance. When a selected app’s alert is the winning glance, its app name, title, and text are stored as part of that glance in the phone’s and the watch’s private app storage — nowhere else. It is replaced as soon as a different glance wins (for example when the alert is dismissed, its show window ends, or you turn notification access off), it is never backed up or transferred to a new device, and uninstalling Brief deletes it.
• Your settings take part in Android Backup, so a new or reset phone comes back set up the way you left it. Only the settings file (priority order, source toggles, units, the reminders you created, and the keywords you choose to hide) is backed up. Cloud copies are made only on devices that can end-to-end encrypt them with your screen lock, are stored under your own Google account, and are never visible to the developer. Backup is controlled by Android’s system Backup setting, which you can turn off at any time.
• Everything else stays out of the backup. The cached weather forecast and its location coordinates, the last resolved glance, any mirrored notification content, and the watch’s caches are excluded from Android cloud backup and device-to-device transfer.
• Uninstalling Brief removes all of this on-device data.

Data sharing and sale

Brief does not sell your data, share it for advertising, or use it for any purpose other than showing your glance — and that includes the alerts mirrored by the Notifications source, which only ever reach your own watch. There are no third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking SDKs in the app. The only third party that receives anything is the weather provider (Open-Meteo), and only the approximate location needed to return a forecast.

Permissions, in plain terms

• Calendar (read-only): read your upcoming events to show the next one. Brief never creates, edits, or deletes your events.
• Location (approximate, including in the background): fetch local weather. Brief rounds your coordinates to about a kilometre before sending them and keeps no location history. Background access lets the forecast refresh even while the app is closed; you can avoid it by setting a manual location or disabling weather.
• Notification access: read the active media session for now-playing and transport controls, and — when you enable the Notifications source — mirror alerts from the apps you choose. The same single grant covers both, and Brief reads notifications only from the apps you pick.
• Do Not Disturb (read-only): check whether your phone is in Do Not Disturb so Brief can mute glances while it’s on. Reading this state needs no permission grant, and Brief never changes your Do Not Disturb settings.
• Exact alarms / run at startup: wake the companion at the right moments (e.g. when an event is about to start) so the glance is timely, and restore scheduling after a reboot. Brief may also point you to Android’s battery-optimization settings so background refresh isn’t delayed, but it does not change them for you.

The low-battery source reads your phone’s own battery level locally and needs no permission.

You can revoke any of these in Android Settings at any time; Brief degrades gracefully (the affected source simply stops appearing).

Children

Brief is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data from children.

Security

Data stays in private, app-scoped on-device storage; network requests use HTTPS; and the phone↔watch link relies on the platform’s encrypted, pairing-authenticated channel.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the “Last updated” date above will change and the revised policy will be posted at the same location.

Contact

For any privacy question or request, contact developerdfa@gmail.com.