Trial
Privacy Policy
The short version
Trial is made by one person. There are no ads and no advertisers, and nothing about you is sold.
The app measures how the app itself is used, through Google Analytics for Firebase: which screens get opened, which features get used, whether the app crashed. The iPhone app also sends crash reports through Firebase Crashlytics. None of this reads your check-ins, your photos or your messages. There is more on it below, under How the app is measured.
Your check-in photos are private to the group you posted them in. Nothing you write or photograph is ever sold to anyone. You can delete your account, and everything in it, from inside the app.
Who you are dealing with
Trial is operated by Elisa Ma, an individual developer based in the United States. There is no company behind it. If you email the address at the bottom of this page, the person who reads it is the person who wrote the app.
What we collect, and why
Everything below is listed because it actually exists in the database, not because it might one day. Where a field is optional, it is genuinely optional — the app works if you leave it blank.
| What | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| How you signed in. An email address and password, or an Apple ID, or nothing at all if you chose to start without an account. | So your Trials are still there tomorrow. If you use Sign in with Apple and choose to hide your email, we only ever see Apple's relay address. |
| Your profile. Display name, an emoji or photo, a colour, and optionally a city, a one-line bio and social handles. | So the other people in your Trial know who they are looking at. The city is free text you type — the app never reads your location. |
| Your timezone. | A streak has to know when your day ends. Recorded when you join a Trial so travelling cannot silently break one. |
| Your onboarding answers. What you would notice if things got better, what has stopped you before, what you want to experiment with, when you have the most energy, and what helps after a bad day. | These change what the app does: they pick which experiments are suggested to you, when reminders are aimed, and whether your group is nudged to check on you when you go quiet. Every one of them is skippable. |
| Your check-ins. The date, a photo, an optional caption, an optional 1–10 answer to the Trial's daily question, which tier you managed, and any tags you picked for why the day was hard. | This is the product. It is what produces streaks, the leaderboard and the results at the end. |
| Rest days and notes on missed days. | A planned day off is not a missed one, and a missed day with context is worth more to your group than a red mark. |
| Messages and reactions inside a Trial, including private notes to one member. | The chat. Private notes are invisible to the rest of the group at the database level, not merely hidden in the app. |
| Blocks and reports. | Required of any app carrying user content, and necessary to act on anything reported. |
| Feedback you send from Settings, with the app version. | So a bug report is actionable. We may also quote what you wrote on the website or in Trial's own marketing, without your name unless you say yes first. This is the one thing that outlives your account — see Deleting your account below. |
| Consent records. When you agreed to these documents and to which version, and separately whether you opted into the pattern analysis. | So there is a record of what you actually agreed to rather than an assumption. These are written by the server, not by your phone. |
| Rate-limit counters. How many things your account has written recently. | To stop automated abuse. No content, just counts. |
What we do not collect
- No advertising. No ad networks and no ads in the app. The Android app's usage measurement can read your device's advertising ID, which is explained under How the app is measured. Trial does not use it for advertising or to track you across other apps and sites, and does not share it with advertisers. The iPhone app does not read Apple's advertising identifier at all.
- No location. The app never requests location permission. The "city" on your profile is a word you typed.
- No contacts. The app never asks for your address book.
- No health data. Apple Health is not connected in this version.
- No payment information. Trial is free and has no purchases.
- No push tokens. Reminders are scheduled locally on your device. Nothing about them leaves your phone.
Your photos
Check-in photos are stored in a private bucket. They are not on a public URL and cannot be found by guessing an address. When the app shows you one, it asks the server for a link that stops working after an hour.
Who can see a given photo depends on the Trial it was posted in:
- Private Trials — only you.
- Group Trials — the people who joined with the invite code.
- Public Trials — anyone can follow along, but photos stay hidden unless the Trial's host has turned sharing on. When sharing is set to "what I approve", the host has to approve each photo one at a time.
You can always withdraw your own photo, and your decision overrides the host's. If you opt a check-in out of sharing, it stops being visible to people outside the Trial immediately, whatever the host has approved.
Your photos are never sold, and never shown to anyone outside the rules above — and they are deleted a week after the Trial ends, which is described under How long we keep things below.
Who else can see your information
People in your Trials see your profile, your check-ins, your streak, and your messages in that Trial. That is the point of a group habit tracker.
People watching a public Trial see far less: the experiment, who is in it, which days were kept, and photos only if the rules above allow it. They never see your city, your bio, your social handles, your onboarding answers, or the chat. Those stay behind the membership boundary.
Companies we rely on
- Supabase hosts the database, the file storage and the sign-in system. Your data lives on their servers in the United States (US West). They process it on our behalf and do not use it for their own purposes.
- Apple handles Sign in with Apple and distributes the iPhone app. If you sign in with Apple, Apple tells us an identifier and — only if you allow it — your name and an email address.
- Google, in three roles. Google Analytics for Firebase receives the usage events, and on iPhone Firebase Crashlytics receives the crash reports, described under How the app is measured. Google Play, or Firebase App Distribution during the beta, distributes the Android app. If you sign in with Google, Google tells us an identifier, your name and your email address.
That is the complete list. Nothing is shared with anyone else, and nothing is sold to anyone, ever. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are used under California law — including the usage measurement below, which is not sold, not shared for advertising, and not combined with anything Google holds about you elsewhere for our benefit.
How the app is measured
Both apps use Google Analytics for Firebase to answer questions about the app rather than about you: which screens people actually reach, which features go unused, whether check-ins fail, whether a release started crashing. A habit app made by one person gets fixed faster when the person can see that nobody is finding the invite screen.
What it receives is events about the app and a device-scoped identifier Google generates for this purpose. That means things like "a Trial was created" or "a check-in was posted" — the fact that it happened, and on what kind of device.
On Android, Google Analytics for Firebase also reads your device's Android advertising ID where Android makes it available. This is Google's default behavior for the SDK, not something Trial uses: the app does not read the advertising ID itself and does not use it for advertising. You can delete or reset it at any time in your phone's settings, under Privacy → Ads (the exact path varies by phone maker). On iPhone it does not: the iPhone app reads neither Apple's advertising identifier nor its per-vendor device identifier, so its events carry only the identifier Google generates.
The iPhone app also uses Firebase Crashlytics. When the app crashes, or hits an error it cannot recover from, it sends a crash report: where in the code it failed, the error the code produced, the app version, the phone model and iOS version, and an identifier Crashlytics generates for that installation of the app. Crash reports are not attached to your account.
What it never receives: your photographs, your captions, your messages, your miss notes, your profile, your onboarding answers, your email address, or the content of any Trial. Nothing you write or photograph is sent to Google. The measurement records that something happened, never what it said, and a crash report records where the code failed, not what you were writing.
- Trial does not use it for advertising and does not use it to build a profile of you across other apps or sites.
- Google processes it on our behalf as a data processor, on Google's servers, under Google's own terms.
- Deleting your account does not by itself erase events or crash reports Google has already received, because they are not attached to your account. If you want them deleted, email the address at the bottom of this page and we will ask Google to delete the device identifier they are keyed to.
This is separate from, and much narrower than, the opt-in pattern analysis described next — that one looks at your actual check-in record and requires you to say yes. This one is about the software.
The optional pattern analysis
Trial can look at which days you keep and which you miss, across the people you run Trials with, to find patterns worth telling you about — which weekday you tend to slip on, which experiments hold each other up, whether you do better with one partner than another.
This is off unless you turned it on. It was asked on its own screen, separately from these documents, and declining costs one tap. If you never answered, you are not in it.
- Your photos and messages are never part of it. It looks only at whether a day was kept.
- A comparison involving another person requires both of you to have opted in. Nobody can enrol you by studying themselves.
- You can turn it off at any time in Settings, and turning it off removes you from the analysis rather than flagging you inside it.
How long we keep things
Check-in photos are removed a week after the Trial they belong to ends. Not archived somewhere else — deleted from storage. Your streaks, your adherence, the chart and the shareable result card are all worked out from the check-in records rather than from the pictures, so what the month proved survives; the feed keeps its days and loses its photographs.
The app tells you this on the results screen while the photos are still there, so saving the ones you want to keep is something you get the chance to do rather than something you wish you had.
Everything else stays until you delete your account. There is no separate archive and no backup that outlives the deletion by design.
Deleting your account
Settings → Delete account. It removes your profile, your check-ins, your photos, your messages, your rest days, your notes and your memberships. It cannot be undone.
One exception, stated plainly: feedback you sent through the app survives, with your account no longer attached to it. A bug report that vanishes when someone leaves is a bug report we cannot fix. Nothing identifying you remains on it.
Your rights
You can delete your account from inside the app at any time, and change or clear anything on your profile. If you want a copy of what is held about you, or want something corrected, email the address below and you will get an answer within 30 days. There is no charge and you will not be treated differently for asking.
If you are in California, those are your rights under the CCPA to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing — the last of which is moot here, because nothing is sold or shared.
Security
Every table in the database is protected by row-level security, which means the rules about who can read what are enforced by the database itself rather than by the app asking nicely. Photo storage is private and served through short-lived links. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed by Supabase and are never visible to us.
No system is perfect, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. If you find a security problem, email the address below and it will be taken seriously.
Children
Trial is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and it will be deleted.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the version at the top changes and the app asks you to read it again before you carry on. Your previous agreement is not silently carried over to a different document.
Contact
Questions, requests, complaints, or anything about safety: trytrialadmin@gmail.com
← Back to Trial