In short
The app has no accounts, no analytics and no tracking of any kind. It does not send your child's drawings, photos, name, age or progress anywhere. Everything it teaches works with the phone in flight mode.
There are adverts, and they are the one part of the app that reaches the internet. They are optional, never interrupt a drawing, and are covered in full further down this page.
If you take only one thing from this page: nothing your child makes in AnkoKids leaves the phone unless you personally choose to share it.
What we collect
Nothing. There is no server that belongs to this app, no database of users, and no identifier assigned to anyone. We could not tell you how many drawings your child has finished, because we have no way of knowing.
Specifically, the app does not collect:
- Names, email addresses, phone numbers or any other contact detail.
- Your child's age. The age band you pick is a difficulty setting, stored on the phone.
- Location, in any form, precise or approximate.
- Advertising identifiers, device identifiers or an installation identifier.
- Usage statistics, crash reports, session lengths or analytics events.
- Photographs, drawings, or anything else your child creates.
What stays on the device
The app saves a small amount of information so it can pick up where your child left off. All of it lives in the app's own private storage, which other apps cannot read, and all of it is removed when the app is uninstalled.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Chosen language, age band and sound settings | So the app opens the way you left it. |
| Which drawings are finished, and the stars earned | To show progress and to suggest what to try next. |
| Finished pictures, as image files | So they appear in the gallery and can be looked at again. |
| Photos converted into drawings, and the drawings made from them | So a lesson your child made stays available. |
You can erase the progress and stickers at any time from the parent area. Uninstalling the app removes everything else.
Photos and the camera
The Photo to Drawing feature asks for a picture, either from the camera or from your gallery. That picture is turned into a sketch and into a set of traceable lines entirely on the phone, using code that runs inside the app. Working out which part of the picture is the subject, and setting the background aside, also happens on the phone. No image is uploaded, no image is analysed by any outside service, and no external service is contacted at any point.
The photo you choose, the sketch and the resulting drawing are saved in the app's private storage so the lesson still works tomorrow. Deleting the drawing, by holding it in the My Photos category, deletes the photo with it.
The app only ever sees the single picture you choose. It does not scan your gallery, and on modern Android versions it uses the system photo picker, which grants access to that one image and nothing else.
Adverts
The app shows one kind of advert: a short rewarded video, supplied by Google AdMob. It is the only feature that contacts a server, and it is the only place where information leaves the device.
How they are shown
- An advert never starts by itself. Somebody has to tap a button that says what it is and what watching gives them.
- No advert appears during a drawing, during a lesson, or on top of anything a child is touching.
- Six categories — 259 of the 675 drawings — are open from the first day and never require anything. The remaining seventeen open one at a time when a grown-up chooses to watch one short video, and stay open permanently afterwards.
- A child cannot start a video alone. The parent gate stands in front of it, so the decision is always an adult's.
- Everything the app needs to work — drawing, free drawing, turning a photo into a drawing, the gallery and the sticker book — is available without watching anything.
- A parent can switch adverts off entirely, in which case the closed categories simply stay closed.
How often
Nobody sees more than three videos in a day. That ceiling applies to every route into an advert, whether the app offered it or somebody asked to open a category, and it resets at midnight.
Beyond that ceiling there is a deliberate gap on anything the app raises by itself: nothing in the first few minutes of a session, at least six minutes between two adverts, and several real actions in between. An unlock a grown-up has just asked for is not made to wait, because that would be its own kind of rudeness — it is limited only by the three-a-day ceiling.
What Google receives
Every request the app makes is tagged for child age treatment and capped at a G content rating. That tagging tells Google to disable interest-based advertising and remarketing for this app, and it stops the advertising identifier being transmitted. Adverts are chosen by context, not by anything about your child.
To serve an advert at all, Google receives the ordinary technical information any web request carries, such as the device type, coarse region and the fact that this app requested an advert. We never see it, and we cannot connect it to a person. Google's handling of that information is covered by the Google privacy policy.
If you switch adverts off in the parent area, the app stops contacting Google entirely and works fully offline.
Permissions
| Permission | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Camera | Only when you tap Take a photo. Requested at that moment, never in the background, and declining it simply means that one button does not work. |
| Photo picker | Only when you tap Choose a photo. Access is limited to the picture you select. |
| Internet | Used only to fetch an advert when one is requested. Switch adverts off in the parent area and the app never uses the network at all. |
Children
This app is made for children aged roughly four to nine, and is designed to comply with the Google Play Families policy, the United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and the General Data Protection Regulation as it applies to children.
We collect no personal information from anybody, so there is nothing for us to disclose or to delete on request. Advertising is present but is tagged child-directed, which turns off behavioural targeting and remarketing, and it can be switched off. There is no in-app messaging, no social feature, and no way for a child to browse the internet from inside the app.
Settings sit behind a parent gate that asks for a press-and-hold or a simple arithmetic answer, so that a young child cannot change them or reach outward-facing options by accident.
Third parties
No analytics provider and no crash reporting service is built into the app.
One advertising network is included, Google AdMob, configured for child-directed treatment as described above. It is a Google Play Families self-certified advertising SDK.
Two ordinary parts of the phone are also used, and both stay on the device:
- Text to speech. The app asks Android's built-in speech engine to read hints aloud. What that engine does is governed by your device maker's own policy, and on most phones it runs offline once voice data is installed.
- The share sheet. If you choose to share a drawing, Android hands it to whichever app you pick. From that point the receiving app's own policy applies.
If a paid version is offered in future, Google Play will handle the purchase. We would never see your payment details.
Your rights
Data protection law gives you the right to see, correct, export and erase personal data held about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to show, correct, export or erase.
The data on your phone is yours and under your control. Clear it from the parent area, from Android's app storage settings, or by uninstalling.
Changes to this policy
If the app ever changes in a way that affects privacy, this page will be updated before that version is released, and the date at the top will change. Should a future version ever collect anything at all, it would be explained here plainly and would require your consent first.
Contact
Questions about this policy can be sent through the contact link on the app's Google Play listing, or to the developer, Plycoder, at the address published there.
Applies to AnkoKids - Drawing Tutor, package app.plycoder.ankokids, version 1.0.0 and later.