Privacy Policy

Last updated September 29, 2026

Checkered Chat collects nothing, sends nothing, and stores nothing about you. This is not a promise about careful handling. There is no data, and there is no networking code in the app to send it with.

What leaves your device

Nothing. There are no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, no accounts and no server. Turn on airplane mode and the app behaves identically, because it never had anything to say to the network in the first place.

The only outward links are the ones in About — this page, support and terms — which open in your browser when you tap them. Tapping one leaves the app; nothing about you goes with it.

The camera

Checkered Chat asks for camera access because scanning a code is half the app. Frames are examined on the device, looking only for QR codes. Nothing is recorded, photographed, saved or transmitted.

Your photos

Importing a picture of a code uses the system picker, which hands the app the one picture you chose and nothing else — the app has no access to your library and never asks for it.

Saving a code to your photos asks for add-only permission the first time, which lets the app put a picture in and gives it no ability to read anything already there.

On your watch

If you send a code to an Apple Watch, the watch can tell you it arrived. That notification says “A code arrived” and nothing else — never the message, never a preview, not even the first note of a decoy. A lock screen is the most public surface you own, and a message you had to make a code for does not belong on it. Reading it still means opening the app.

What is written to disk

Only settings, never messages. Whether you have seen the introduction. The printer alignment nudges you save on the sticker sheet screen, kept per sheet of stock so you do not have to find them twice. Whether you have bought the unlock, and how many of the three free codes you have used. And the mode and options you last chose in the Messages app, so it opens where you left it.

The look you last chose, too: module shape, the two colors, whether there is a center mark, how fast an animated set plays, and the size you are printing at. A house color you use every day should not have to be picked every day. What you wrote is not among them — not the message, not either half of a decoy, not a lock’s question. The app remembers that you like round modules in navy. It does not remember a word you put in one.

The last three are shared between the app and its Messages extension, because they are two separate programs that have to agree — otherwise the three free codes would be three in each, and buying the unlock in one would not unlock the other. Nothing you write or scan is among them. The Messages extension remembers that you last chose Decoy; it does not remember a single word of what you wrote.

Messages are never written down. What you write exists while you are writing it. What you scan exists while you are reading it, and is gone when you close it — there is no history, no inbox and no way to ask the app what it saw yesterday, because it did not keep it.

Your purchase is recorded by the App Store, as every purchase is. The app asks Apple what you own; it does not keep a record of its own and has no receipt server to check with.

Children

Checkered Chat collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. There is no mechanism by which it could, so there is nothing collected from a child either — no accounts, no sign-up, no directory, and no way for a stranger to reach anyone through the app. A code arrives because somebody handed it over.

The App Store listing is rated 4+, which is what Apple's age questionnaire produces for it: there is no objectionable content in the app, and nothing in it but what its user wrote.

Changes

If any of this ever stops being true, this page changes first and the app's version notes will say so plainly. The date at the top is when this page last changed.

Who to ask

Checkered Chat is made by HoneyWired LLC in Chicago, Illinois. Questions about this policy, or about anything above, go to support@honeywired.com. There is no data of yours for us to show you, correct or delete — that is the whole of this page — but the address is a real one and it is read.

Questions about any of this go to support@honeywired.com.