Fold Light — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 14 September 2026

You are not being tracked. Fold Light was made by one foldable enthusiast for other foldable enthusiasts — not by a company with a data department.

Fold Light has no accounts, no servers, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind. Everything it remembers — your alarms and your settings — lives in the app's private storage on your own phone.

There is exactly one exception, and it is switched off until you switch it on: if you enable the weather widget, the app sends your approximate coordinates to a public weather service so it can print a temperature on the clock face. That is the only time Fold Light connects to the internet at all.

Who is responsible

Fold Light is made and published by Frenchsoft, an independent one-person software developer based in the Netherlands. Frenchsoft is the data controller for the limited processing described below.

For anything to do with privacy, write to frenchsoft75@gmail.com. This policy covers the Android app Fold Light, package com.foldlight.bedside, distributed through Google Play.

What Fold Light does not collect

Fold Light does not collect, transmit or retain any of the following. There is no code in the app that could:

No name, email address, phone number or any other contact detail.
No account — there is nothing to sign into.
No advertising ID, device ID, IMEI, MAC address or installation identifier.
No analytics, usage statistics, session tracking or feature telemetry.
No crash reports. If Fold Light crashes, nothing is sent to the developer.
No contacts, photos, files, microphone, camera, SMS, call logs or health data.
No precise (GPS) location. The app never starts a location fix.
No advertising of any kind, and therefore no ad network, no profiling and no cross-app tracking.

Fold Light contains no analytics or crash-reporting SDKs — no Firebase, no Crashlytics, no Google Analytics, no Sentry, no ad library, and no Google Play Services dependency. Its only third-party code is Google's own AndroidX and Kotlin libraries, which draw the interface and store settings locally and do not communicate with anyone.

What is stored on your phone

Fold Light writes a single settings file to the app's private storage, which no other app on the phone can read. It contains:

Your alarms — the time, which days each one repeats, the name you gave it, whether it is switched on, whether it vibrates, and which ringtone you picked.
Your display preferences — night tint, brightness levels, 12- or 24-hour clock, burn-in protection, and which cover-screen behaviour you chose.
Your wake-up light preferences — whether the sunrise is on, how many minutes before the alarm it starts, snooze length, and whether picking the phone up stops the light.
Which hub widgets you turned on — date, weather, calendar, battery.
Weather coordinates you typed in yourself, if you chose to enter a location manually instead of granting the location permission.
Two "already seen this" flags — whether the first-run guide has been shown, and whether the one-time offer to import an existing alarm has been made.

That is the complete list. None of it is sent anywhere by the app.

Things held only in memory, never written down

Calendar events. If the calendar widget is on, the app reads the next few appointments to draw them on the clock face. They are held in memory, refreshed every fifteen minutes, and gone the moment the app closes. They are never saved to disk and never transmitted.
The current weather. Cached in memory for at most thirty minutes, then discarded.
Motion sensor readings. The accelerometer is sampled to work out whether the phone is folded and standing on a nightstand. The readings are used and thrown away immediately; nothing is stored or sent.
Battery level, for the battery widget. Read live from Android, never stored.

The weather widget — the one network connection

The weather widget is off by default. While it is off, Fold Light makes no network requests whatsoever; the app is fully functional with no internet connection at all.

If you turn it on, the app makes one HTTPS request to Open-Meteo (api.open-meteo.com), a free public weather API, at most once every thirty minutes. The request contains:

A latitude and longitude, to four decimal places.
Nothing else. No identifier, no device details, no account and no API key. One person's requests are indistinguishable from another's.

The coordinates come from one of two places: the last approximate location Android already had on file — the app never asks the phone to take a fresh fix — or coordinates you typed in yourself. If you decline the location permission and do not type a location, the widget simply shows nothing and no request is made.

As with any internet request, Open-Meteo receives your IP address as an unavoidable part of the connection. Frenchsoft has no relationship with Open-Meteo, no account there, and no ability to see or retrieve those requests. Open-Meteo's handling of them is governed by their own terms at open-meteo.com/en/terms.

Frenchsoft never receives your location. It is not logged, not stored, and not visible to the developer at any point.

The calendar widget

Also off by default. When switched on, the app asks Android for your next three appointments in the coming 36 hours and shows the title and time on the clock face. This happens entirely on your phone. Appointment titles are never written to storage, never included in a notification, never logged and never transmitted. Turning the widget off, or revoking the calendar permission in Android's settings, stops it immediately.

Android backup

Fold Light takes part in Android's standard backup, which is a feature of the operating system rather than of the app. This means your alarms and settings may be copied into your own Google account backup, and restored when you set up a new phone or transfer to one. Google states that these backups are encrypted with your device's PIN, pattern or password, and that Google cannot read them.

Frenchsoft has no access to these backups and no way to request them. If you would rather your alarms were not backed up, you can turn Android backup off for Fold Light in the phone's own settings, under Google → Backup.

How long anything is kept

Alarms and settings stay on your phone until you change them, clear the app's data, or uninstall Fold Light. Uninstalling removes them completely.
Calendar events and weather exist only while the app is running, and for at most thirty minutes in the case of weather.
Frenchsoft retains nothing, because Frenchsoft receives nothing. There is no server, no database and no log file anywhere outside your phone.

To delete everything Fold Light holds about you: uninstall the app, or use Android's "Clear storage" for it. That is the whole procedure — there is nothing held elsewhere that could survive it.

Permissions, and what each one is for

This is every permission Fold Light declares, including the one added automatically by a Google library.

USE_EXACT_ALARM: Lets the alarm go off at the exact minute you set, rather than whenever Android finds it convenient. Android grants this automatically to apps whose main purpose is being an alarm clock.
SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM: The same thing, as a fallback on phones that do not honour the permission above. On those, Android may ask you to allow "Alarms & reminders".
RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED: Lets the app put your alarms back in place after you restart the phone, so a reboot at midnight cannot quietly cancel tomorrow's alarm.
USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT: Lets the wake-up light take over the whole screen above your lock screen, instead of appearing as a small notification you would have to unlock the phone to see.
POST_NOTIFICATIONS: Shows the ringing alarm and the running bedside hub as notifications, so you can see and stop them. Nothing is ever pushed to you from outside — there is no server that could send anything.
TURN_SCREEN_ON: Wakes the screen when the sunrise starts and when the alarm rings.
WAKE_LOCK: Keeps the phone awake for the few minutes an alarm is actually ringing, so it cannot fall asleep halfway through.
VIBRATE: Vibrates for alarms you have set to vibrate.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE: The general permission needed to run the two background jobs below.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK: Lets the alarm tone keep playing in the background, so that leaving the app — or Android reclaiming memory — cannot silently kill an alarm that is ringing.
FOREGROUND_SERVICE_SPECIAL_USE: Two jobs: brightening the panel during the sunrise ramp on a phone that would otherwise stay dozing, and, if you enable it, the low-power watcher that notices the phone has been folded and parked on a nightstand so the bedside clock can start itself.
READ_CALENDAR optional: Only for the calendar widget, which is off by default. Reads your next few appointments to show them on the clock. They never leave the phone. Decline it and everything else works exactly as before.
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION optional: Only for the weather widget, which is off by default. Reads the approximate location Android already knows — it never starts a GPS fix — and uses it to look up the weather. You can decline this and type a location in by hand instead.
INTERNET: Used solely for the weather lookup described above. With the weather widget off, the app opens no connections at all. There is no update check, no licence check and no phoning home.
com.foldlight.bedside.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION: Added automatically by one of Google's AndroidX libraries. It is an internal marker that lets the app talk to itself safely, and grants access to nothing. Android never shows it to you.

Purchases and Google Play

Fold Light is a one-time purchase. There are no subscriptions, no in-app purchases and no ads.

The purchase is handled entirely by Google Play. Your payment details, billing address and Google account are given to Google, not to Frenchsoft — Frenchsoft never sees, receives or stores a card number, a payment method or your Google account identity. Google shows the developer only aggregate, anonymised sales figures and country-level statistics in the Play Console, which cannot identify an individual buyer.

Fold Light contains no billing or licence-verification code of its own. It does not store purchase tokens, order numbers or account identifiers anywhere, and it does not check your entitlement over the network. Google's handling of your purchase is covered by the Google Privacy Policy. Refunds are handled by Google Play under their refund policy.

Third-party services

There are two, and only one of them is optional:

Google Play — distributes the app and processes the purchase, as described above. Unavoidable if you install from Play.
Open-Meteo — receives a pair of coordinates and your IP address, only while the weather widget is on. Optional, and off by default.

No data is sold, rented, shared for advertising, or transferred to anyone else, under any circumstances. There is no mechanism in the app by which that could happen.

Children

Fold Light is a general-audience app. It is not directed at children, is not designed for or marketed to them, and does not knowingly collect anything from anyone of any age — since it collects nothing, there is nothing that could be collected from a child. It contains no ads, no in-app purchases, no social features, no user-generated content, and no external links other than the ones in this policy.

Your rights under the GDPR

If you are in the European Economic Area or the UK, the GDPR gives you the right to access, correct, delete, restrict and port your personal data, and to object to its processing.

In practice there is very little for these rights to apply to. Frenchsoft holds no personal data about you at all: there is no account, no server and no database, and no information ever reaches the developer. Everything the app knows is on your own phone and under your direct control — you can see it in the app, change it in the app, and erase all of it by uninstalling.

The single processing operation that touches personal data is the weather lookup, in which approximate coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo. Its legal basis is your consent, given by switching the weather widget on and granting the location permission. You can withdraw that consent at any time by switching the widget off or revoking the permission in Android's settings, with no effect on the rest of the app. The coordinates are used to answer one request and are not retained by Frenchsoft in any form.

You can still write to frenchsoft75@gmail.com with any request, and you will get an honest answer — which will usually be that there is nothing held to give you. If you believe your data has been mishandled, you have the right to complain to a supervisory authority; in the Netherlands this is the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl).

Your rights in California

Under the CCPA and CPRA, California residents have the right to know what personal information is collected and to whom it is disclosed, the right to delete it, the right to correct it, the right to opt out of its sale or sharing, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these.

Frenchsoft collects no personal information through Fold Light, so there is none to disclose, delete or correct. Frenchsoft has never sold or shared personal information, and does not do so. There is no "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link because there is nothing to opt out of. No sensitive personal information is collected, and no profiling or automated decision-making takes place.

Security

Because nothing is transmitted to or held by Frenchsoft, there is no server that could be breached and no database that could leak. The security of your alarms and settings rests on Android's own app sandbox, which prevents other apps from reading Fold Light's private storage, and on your device's lock screen and encryption.

The weather request is made over HTTPS, so the coordinates are encrypted in transit.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the new version is published at this address and the "Last updated" date at the top changes with it. A change that would meaningfully affect your privacy — new data being collected, a new third-party service, or anything leaving your device that did not before — will also be described in the app's release notes on Google Play and, where the law requires your consent, asked for in the app before it takes effect. This policy is never changed retroactively to cover something that has already happened.

Contact

Questions, corrections and privacy requests: frenchsoft75@gmail.com.