Privacy policy
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 |
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 version, app version, language | To reproduce bugs and to know which devices to support |
identifierForVendor, Apple's per-vendor device identifier |
To recognise the same device across launches. It resets when you delete our apps |
| 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 | To keep your game where you left it |
| 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: which product, when, and Apple's transaction identifier | To give you what you bought and to restore it later |
| 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 gives 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.
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 |
| 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, purchases, and notification delivery. Apple 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 played several days running and not yet today.
- 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 iOS 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 |
| 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.
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 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 notification token, your coin and gem balances and their history, and the recorded inputs of your runs.
- Anonymised: your profile. Your display name and avatar are replaced with "Former climber", and your country is cleared.
- 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, and the identifier the game used for statistics. 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 the
Files app. It contains your account, your profile, your progress, your wallet and its history,
your purchases, 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