What changed from version 2: SKYWARD is now on Android as well as iPhone, so Google appears where only Apple did; we record a few more facts about your device (section 1); the list of reminders includes the daily gift (section 5); and deleting your account now also covers the daily streak, gifts, invitations and endless progress (section 7). Version 2 is kept at skyward.unichat.dev/privacy/v2.
This policy explains what SKYWARD collects, why, who it goes to, and how to make it stop. It covers the game and the services behind it. It is written to be read. If anything in it is unclear, write to privacy@unichat.dev and we will fix the wording.
The controller of your personal data is Ilhan Akbudak, trading as UniChat Games ("UniChat Games", "we", "us").
The short version
- We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
- We do not show ads today. If we ever do, they will be ads you choose to watch for a reward, and we will update this policy and tell you before it happens.
- You never have to give us your name, your email or anything else about you to play.
- You can delete your account and everything on it from inside the game, in two taps, and it is actually deleted. Deleting does not lock you out of the game, you can start again from scratch.
- You can ask the game for a copy of everything we hold about you, from the same screen, and get it as a file straight away.
1. What we collect
Things you choose to give us
| What | When |
|---|---|
| A display name, if you set one | When you pick one for the leaderboard |
| Your message and email address | When you write to support |
| Your Apple account identifier and, if you allow it, a name and relay email | Only if you use Sign in with Apple |
| Your Google account identifier and email address, and your name and profile picture if Google shares them | Only if you use Sign in with Google |
| A friend's player code, and gifts of gems you send | When you enter a code someone gave you, or send a gift |
Things collected automatically as you play
| What | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| An account identifier we generate | To hold your progress. It is not linked to your identity |
| Device model, operating system and version, app version | To reproduce bugs and to know which devices to support |
| Your device's memory size, graphics chip, screen size and pixel density | To choose which devices to support and how detailed the game should look on each |
| Your device's language, region format and time zone, from its own settings | To decide which languages to translate into, to show reminders and the daily gift at sensible local times, and to understand which markets play |
| Which store installed the app (App Store, Google Play, or neither) | To tell official installs from others when something goes wrong |
| Whether you have allowed notifications | To know how many players a reminder can reach. We never see the reminders themselves |
A device identifier: on iPhone, Apple's identifierForVendor; on Android, an identifier derived from the device's Android ID for our app |
To recognise the same device across launches. On iPhone it resets when you delete our apps; on Android it resets on a factory reset. It is not an advertising identifier and we collect none |
| A new-player marker for your device: on iPhone, a random code the game stores in your phone's Keychain; on Android, the Android ID above. We keep only a one-way hash of it, with the date your device's new-player free lives began | So the new-player free lives are given once per device, not again after reinstalling the game or deleting an account. The Keychain code stays on your iPhone when you delete the app and is removed when you erase the phone |
| Session and gameplay events: launches, levels started and finished, floors reached, how and where a run ended, which screens you opened and for how long, purchases | To see where the game is too hard, too slow or broken |
| Whether a session ended or the app was closed by your phone | To tell a player who stopped playing apart from a crash we have not found |
| Whether you have ever made a purchase, not what you bought, on this record | To understand whether the game earns its keep without linking spending to you |
| Crash reports: the error, where it happened, how long the app had been running | To fix crashes |
| Your progress: levels cleared, best results, coins, gems, lives, boosters, armour | To keep your game where you left it |
| Your daily gift streak: how many days in a row you have claimed it, your best streak, and when you last used a streak save | To pay the right day's gift and keep your streak on every device |
| Gifts and invitations: gifts of gems you sent or received and whether they were accepted, and which player invited you | To deliver gifts, return unaccepted ones, and pay invitation rewards |
| Leaderboard entries: your score, level and country | To rank you |
| The inputs of a run you post to a leaderboard | To re-play the run on our servers and confirm the score is real. It is a stream of button presses, not a recording of you or your screen |
| Purchase records from Apple or Google: which product, when, the store's transaction or order identifier, and (Apple only) the price and currency you paid | To give you what you bought, to restore it later, and for tax and accounting |
| Your country and language, read from your device's own region and language settings | For country flags on the leaderboard, to know which markets to support, and for tax and legal compliance. We do not look up your location from your IP address. If your phone says it is in Germany, that is what we record, wherever you actually are |
| (no push token) | Reminders are scheduled on your device and never leave it, see section 5 |
Things Apple and Google give us
- Game Center: a player identifier for your Apple Account, which we store as a one-way hash, and your Game Center alias, which we offer as a default display name. We do not receive your Apple ID, your email or your real name.
- Sign in with Apple: the identifier Apple issues for our app, and, only if you allow it, your name and a private relay email address.
- The App Store: confirmation that a purchase happened. We never receive your card, your billing address or your Apple ID.
- Sign in with Google: the identifier Google issues for our app, your email address, and, if Google shares them, your name and profile picture.
- Google Play: confirmation that a purchase happened, with Google's order identifier and purchase token. We never receive your card, your billing address or your Google password.
We do not collect your contacts, your photos, your microphone, your camera, your precise location, your health data, or anything from other apps.
2. Why we use it, and our legal basis
| Purpose | Basis (GDPR Article 6) |
|---|---|
| Running the game, keeping your progress, restoring purchases | Performance of a contract |
| Verifying leaderboard scores and stopping cheating | Legitimate interests, a leaderboard nobody trusts is worth nothing |
| Deciding which devices, languages and markets to support, from device facts | Legitimate interests |
| Giving the new-player free lives once per device (the hashed marker) | Legitimate interests, preventing abuse of a free offer |
| Fixing crashes and making the game better | Legitimate interests |
| Answering support messages | Performance of a contract, and legitimate interests |
| Sending you reminders about the game | Consent, you ask for these, and you can withdraw at any time |
| Meeting tax, accounting and legal obligations | Legal obligation |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights, and we use the least data that answers the question, which is why our analytics are keyed to an account identifier we generated rather than to anything about you.
3. Who we share it with
We share personal data only with:
- Supabase, our hosting, database and authentication provider, acting as our processor under a data processing agreement. Your account, progress, leaderboard entries and analytics events are stored on their infrastructure.
- Apple, for Game Center, Sign in with Apple and purchases on iPhone. Apple processes that data under its own privacy policy.
- Google, for Sign in with Google and purchases on Android. Google processes that data under its own privacy policy.
- Professional advisers, and authorities, where we are legally required to, or to establish or defend legal claims.
- A buyer, if the game or the company is sold. You will be told before your data moves.
We do not sell personal data. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not use it to build advertising profiles.
4. Advertising
SKYWARD shows no advertising at all at the time of this version.
If we add advertising, it will be rewarded video you choose to watch, never an interstitial in front of a run, and we will publish a new version of this policy naming the advertising partner and what it receives, and show it to you in the game, before the first ad appears.
5. Notifications
Every notification SKYWARD sends is scheduled on your device. There is no push server, we hold no notification token, and nothing about when or why you are reminded leaves your phone. The game already knows when your lives refill and when you last played; it does not need to tell us in order to remind you.
What it sends, and nothing else:
- Your lives are back, when the life bar has refilled.
- Your unlimited lives are nearly up, half an hour before a timed grant you bought expires.
- Your streak is still alive, in the evening, if you have a daily gift streak of two days or more and have not claimed today's gift.
- Your daily gift is ready, when the next day's gift can be claimed, if you claimed today's.
- You were close, after a level you nearly finished.
- Come back, at one day, three days, a week and a month since you last played. Then it stops.
The rules those obey: at most one a day, at most five waiting at once, never between 22:00 and 09:00 your local time, and every pending reminder is cancelled the moment you open the game, so coming back on your own means you never receive one.
We ask for permission at the earliest sensible moment, after your second visit, or right after you finish a level, and never on your first launch. You can turn them off in Settings → Notifications, or in your phone's settings, and neither costs you anything else in the game.
6. How long we keep it
These are enforced by a scheduled job that runs every day, not by us remembering.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Your account, progress and profile | Until you delete your account |
| Device records (the facts in section 1 about each device you play on) | Until you delete your account |
| The hashed new-player marker and its date | 24 months after the device was last seen, including after you delete your account (section 7) |
| An automatic account nobody ever signed in to (no Apple, Google or Game Center) | Deleted automatically once unused for 12 months, or 30 days if nothing was ever played on it. Never an account with a purchase on it. Nobody can sign back in to such an account once the app is deleted, so keeping it would help nobody |
| Leaderboard entries | Until you delete your account, or until the board is retired |
| Run inputs used to verify a score | 90 days, then deleted |
| Analytics events | 24 months, then deleted |
| Crash reports | 12 months, then deleted |
| Purchase records | As long as tax and accounting law requires, usually 7-10 years |
| Support messages | 24 months after the conversation ends |
7. Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
- give you a copy of what we hold about you;
- correct anything wrong;
- delete your account and its data;
- restrict or object to processing based on our legitimate interests;
- take your data elsewhere in a portable format;
- withdraw consent for notifications, at any time, without affecting anything else.
Signing in to an account you already have (for example after reinstalling the game) moves what the automatic account on that phone held into it (progress, items, purchases, gifts, leaderboard runs, and coins and gems, except rewards that account had already received for the same levels) and then deletes the automatic account. Nothing is kept on it.
Deletion is built into the game. Open Settings → Delete my account and confirm. What happens then, precisely:
- You can never sign in to that account again. It is permanently closed, on our side, not hidden on yours.
- You can, however, start a completely new game. Deleting releases your Game Center and Sign in with Apple and Sign in with Google identifiers, so the next time you play you get a new, empty account rather than being locked out. In version 1 of this policy that was not true, and deleting your account meant you could not play again on that Apple Account. That was a defect and it is fixed.
- Deleted outright: your cloud-saved progress, your device records, your coin and gem balances and their history, your daily gift streak, your level clears and endless progress, your weekly rewards, your gifts and invitations, and the recorded inputs of your runs. Gifts somebody sent you that you had not yet accepted are returned to them.
- Anonymised: your profile. Your display name is removed (your past entries show as an unnamed "Climber") and the name becomes free for someone else, your avatar is reset, your player code is released, and your country, language and time zone are cleared.
- Kept, without anything identifying you: the hashed new-player marker of each device you used and the date its free lives began. It holds no account identifier and no name. It is kept so that deleting an account is not a way to claim the new-player free lives again, and it is deleted 24 months after the device was last seen.
- Kept, without anything identifying you: the leaderboard entries you posted and the scores behind them. They are part of other players' rankings, and removing them would rewrite positions other people earned. They no longer carry your name.
- Kept for as long as tax law requires: purchase records, with your account identifier removed from them.
- Analytics events: kept as anonymous statistics, with the identifier that linked them to your device replaced by a random one that points at nothing. Counts we have already published do not change; nothing in them leads back to you. They are then deleted on the schedule in the table above.
- Everything on your phone is erased too: your progress, your saved replays, your settings, every reminder the game had scheduled, any statistics not yet sent (they are discarded, not sent), and the identifier the game used for statistics. The next time you open SKYWARD it starts exactly as a new download does, and asks you to accept these documents again. The only thing kept on the phone is the new-player marker described above. This happens even if you were never signed in.
We keep a record that a deletion happened, the date and how many rows were affected, and nothing about who you were. We are required to be able to show that we honoured your request.
If you want the leaderboard rows gone as well, ask us at privacy@unichat.dev and we will remove them. We do not do it by default because it takes something away from other players, not because it is difficult.
Getting a copy is built into the game too. Open Settings → Profile → Get a copy of my data
and the game saves a file called skyward-my-data.json, which you can open or share from your
phone. It contains your account, your profile, your devices, your progress, your wallet and its
history, your purchases, your level clears, your daily gift streak, your endless progress and
weekly rewards, your gifts, whether you were invited and how many friends you invited, your
leaderboard entries and your runs. For analytics it gives you a summary (how
many events of each kind, and over what period) rather than the raw rows, because those are
keyed to your device rather than to your account and there are tens of thousands of them. If you
want the raw rows, ask us and we will send them.
For anything else, write to privacy@unichat.dev. We answer within 30 days and we do not charge for it.
If you are in the EEA or the UK, you may also complain to your local data protection authority. We would rather you told us first.
If you are in the United States, see the US state privacy notice for the rights your state gives you and how to use them.
8. Children
SKYWARD is for players aged 13 and over. It is not directed to children, we do not knowingly collect data from anybody under 13, and if we learn that we have, we delete it.
If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has been playing, write to privacy@unichat.dev and we will delete the account.
9. Security
Data in transit is encrypted with TLS. Access to production data is limited to the people who need it and is protected by multi-factor authentication. Our database enforces per-user access rules at the row level, so one player's session cannot read another player's data even if the app asked it to. Leaderboard scores are verified server-side rather than trusted from the device.
No system is perfect. If we suffer a breach that puts you at risk, we will tell you and the relevant authority within the time the law requires.
10. Where your data is
We use infrastructure that may store or process data in the European Union and the United States. Where data leaves the EEA or the UK, we rely on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, or on an adequacy decision, and we keep a copy on file you may request.
11. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, new data, a new recipient, a new purpose, we will publish the new version, raise its version number, and ask you to accept it in the game before you carry on playing. The date and version at the top of this page always say which one you are reading.
12. Contact
Ilhan Akbudak, trading as UniChat Games privacy@unichat.dev