Privacy Policy

One save file holds your campaign level, the best grade you have earned on every level you have cleared, your journey counters (first-try S levels, best quality combo, daily streak), the chapter of ten levels you are in the middle of, your settings (sound, vibration, reduce motion, appearance), and how far you got through the tutorial. The run in progress carries its board seed and the list of taps you made on it, so a board can be replayed exactly; that list never leaves the device either.

While you are signed out I never receive any of it. Deleting the app removes the file the way your phone normally does.

Two more files appear only once you have used the features that need them. Signing in writes the session file described under the account below. Opening the leaderboard writes a copy of the page of rows it just fetched — other players’ public display names, their counts and their positions — so the board can be shown at once the next time you open it instead of leaving you at a spinner. That copy is refreshed about every ten minutes while the card is open, holds nothing that is not already public to every signed-in player, and is never uploaded anywhere. Google’s ad SDK also stores your answer to its consent form, where that form applies to you, so it is not asked again on every launch.

When ads start

Not at launch, and not in your first session. The ad SDK, the consent form below and — on iOS — the App Tracking Transparency request are not started when the game opens. They start the first time a banner is actually due, which is after you have finished the tutorial chapter (the first ten levels) and never during the session you installed the game in. Until then there is no advertising in the app at all, the hint described below is free, and nothing has been asked of you.

Where ads appear

Two placements and no more. A banner is anchored to the bottom of the screen while a card is open — Settings, the how-to guide, the leaderboard, and the level-completed and level-failed cards. A rewarded video plays only when you choose it: the card under a finished level offers to show you half of the shortest solution. That is the only rewarded offer in the game, and it is marked with an ad badge.

No progress is ever behind an ad. Every level you clear opens the next one at every grade, and a level you have lost twice in a row offers a free skip with no video attached. Declining costs nothing — Try Again is free and always there.

What is shown, and by whom

Both come from Google AdMob. Serving them means Google's advertising SDK runs inside the app, and Google receives information from your device to select, deliver, measure and protect those ads against fraud. That typically includes a device advertising identifier, coarse information about your device and app, and whether an ad was seen, tapped or watched to the end.

What Google does with it is governed by Google's own terms, not mine: see Google's Business Data Responsibility page and How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

Your choices about ads

On iOS, the game asks your permission to track before it reads the advertising identifier. The first time an ad is due — which, as above, is after the first ten levels — iOS shows its own alert: "Allow Quintap to track your activity across other companies' apps and websites?" Nothing is read and no ad is requested until you answer. If you choose Ask App Not to Track, the identifier is not used and you still get ads, just non-personalised ones; the game plays identically either way. The alert appears once per device, and you can change your mind at any time in Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Tracking.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, a Google consent form appears after that and before any ad is requested, and your answer decides whether ads can be personalised. Consent is asked first and the ad SDK starts afterwards, so nothing is requested while the question is still open.

On Android there is no tracking alert — the platform has none — and you can reset or delete your advertising ID in your phone's Settings ▸ Google ▸ Ads. On iOS, Apple Advertising in Settings controls the equivalent.

Or remove them. One purchase turns the banner and the rewarded offer off for good — see the purchase below.

How it starts

It starts when you tap Continue with Google or Continue with Apple on the account card, and not before. Until then no account of any kind exists for you, no request is made, and the whole campaign — every level, every crest, every setting — works exactly as it does with one. Nothing in the game is behind the sign-in except the leaderboard and the backup.

What the sign-in itself creates

The game trades the credential your provider hands back for a session on Google Firebase Authentication, in a project I control. Firebase then holds an account record for you: a user id it generated, which provider you used, and whatever that provider passed along with the credential — typically the email address on your Google or Apple account and the display name on it. I can see that record in the Firebase console. The game itself never receives the email address; what it keeps is a small file in its own storage holding a refresh token, so you are not asked to sign in again every launch, together with which provider you used and the display name to print on the account card. Signing out deletes that file.

If you use Sign in with Apple you can choose Hide My Email in Apple's own sheet, and then the address Firebase records is Apple's relay address rather than your real one.

What is backed up

Your campaign is copied to Cloud Firestore, to a document only you can read or write, at /saves/<your user id>:

That is the whole payload. It carries no settings, no tap log and no run in progress. The upload happens after a level is graded and on the way to the background, coalesced so a burst of cleared levels costs one write.

The copy on your phone stays authoritative. A failed sync costs nothing, an offline session is a normal session, and the merge when you sign in on a second device only ever adds: every number resolves to the larger of the two and every level keeps the better of its two grades. Signing in on a phone you have already played cannot cost you a level.

What is published

Once you are signed in and have earned at least one S, one row is written for you at /players/<your user id> and it is visible to every other signed-in player:

Nothing else goes up. No row exists until you have perfected a level, and a session that did not improve your standing writes nothing at all. The board is only readable by signed-in players; a player who never signs in neither publishes a row nor sees anyone else's.

Your name on the board

The name comes from your provider, and today the game has no field to change it. If the display name on your Google or Apple account is your real name, that is the name other players will see. If you would rather not publish it, either change the display name on the account you sign in with, or play signed out — the whole campaign works without an account.

When a provider hands back no name at all, the board shows a generated stand-in such as “Player 8F2C” instead, so a row is never blank. Sign in with Apple can also be set to hide your name, in which case that stand-in is what other players see.

Reporting a name, and hiding one

Tap any name on the board, or the button at the end of its row, and the card that opens offers two separate things.

Report it. A report tells me who reported it, whose row it was, the name as it was showing at the time, and which of three things is wrong with it — an offensive name, someone pretending to be another person, or spam. Nothing else: there is no free-text box, so a report cannot itself carry anything that needs moderating. It is written to /reports/<your user id>_<their user id>, which means a second report about the same name replaces the first rather than piling up. Only I can read reports. No player can, including the one who filed it — the database rules allow the write and refuse every read, which is the only collection in this game where that is true. A name that breaks the rules on the terms page comes off the board, and the account behind it may be closed.

Hide it. The same card takes that player's row off your board. This one never leaves your device: it is not sent to me, it is not sent to them, and it changes nothing about their standing or anyone else's position. You can undo it from their row, or clear every hidden name at once in Settings ▸ Hidden players. Deleting the app forgets the list along with everything else.

I do not moderate names before they appear, because I never chose them — they arrive from Google and Apple as they are. What I undertake is to read reports and act on them.

How to delete it

Settings → your account → Delete my account data means gone, not "no longer shown": it deletes your saved campaign and your board row from the server and deletes the account itself, so the user id is not left behind. On iOS the Apple sheet appears once more first, so that Apple's own authorisation for the game can be revoked at the same time; dismissing it does not stop the deletion.

Signing out, by contrast, only ends the session on this device and leaves what you published in place.

The campaign on your phone is untouched by either — to remove that as well, delete the app. If something goes wrong and a row appears to be stuck, email me and I will remove it by hand.

Remove Ads

Quintap sells exactly one thing: Remove Ads, a single non-subscription purchase that turns the banner and the rewarded offer off permanently. Nothing in the game is behind it — every level, grade, crest, the daily puzzle and the leaderboard all work whether or not you buy it. Nothing else is for sale, and there is no currency, no energy and no loot box anywhere in the app.

It is bought through Apple's App Store (StoreKit) on iOS. Apple handles the payment and knows what you bought; I never see your card, your address or your Apple ID. The game keeps a yes/no flag on your device saying the purchase was made — that is the whole of what it stores — and Restore Purchases in Settings asks Apple to confirm it again on a new phone. I hold no record of who bought it.

Refunds are Apple's to give, under Apple's terms, not mine.

No analytics SDK

There is no analytics SDK. The game notes what happened during a session in memory so the code can reason about the run; that note is capped, never written to disk, never sent anywhere, and it disappears when you close the app.

Game Center

If you are signed in to Game Center, the game posts two numbers to it: how many levels you have perfected, and your longest daily-puzzle streak. It also reports the achievements you earn. Apple shows those under your Game Center name, to whoever your own Game Center settings allow — that is between you and Apple, and the game has no access to your Game Center friends or profile beyond the fact that you are signed in. Turn it off in Settings ▸ Game Center.

Game Center is separate from the world leaderboard described above. They count the same thing — levels perfected — but one is Apple's and needs no account of mine, and the other is mine and needs no Apple ID.

iCloud

With iCloud Drive on, the game keeps a small copy of your campaign — which levels you have cleared and at what grade — in your own iCloud key-value store. It is a few kilobytes, it belongs to your Apple ID, and I cannot read it: it is not a database of mine and it never passes through any server of mine. A new iPhone signed in to the same Apple ID finds it and merges it in, and the merge only ever adds — it cannot cost you a level. Turn it off for Quintap in Settings ▸ [your name] ▸ iCloud.

If you write to me for support, I process what you send — your email address, device and app details, screenshots, and your message — to answer you and to look into problems. I keep support emails for 12 months unless I have a legal or security reason to keep them longer.