Ardaas for iPhone and Android

Privacy Policy

Last updated 21 October 2026

Ardaas collects no personal data. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking of any kind. Your benti is never uploaded anywhere.

What the app stores, and where

Everything you create in Ardaas — the label you give a saved Ardaas, the benti you write, its Gurmukhi and transliteration, and the occasion you choose — is stored locally on your phone, along with your reading preferences (which layers are shown, and the text size). None of it is sent to any server run by the app or its developer, and there is no account or sync service. The data leaves your device only through your own encrypted device backups, which you control:

iPhone: your iCloud or computer backup, controlled in iOS. The app does not use iCloud sync.
Android: Android's own backup to your Google account, and the transfer when you move to a new phone, both controlled in Android settings. Backups are encrypted, and end-to-end encrypted when your phone has a screen lock (Android 9 and later). Only your saved Ardaas and reading preferences are included — never the translation model. The developer cannot see these backups.

Deleting the app deletes all of it from your phone. A copy in your own backup stays there until you remove it in your device or account settings.

The one network request the app makes

Ardaas can translate an English benti into Gurmukhi. That translation runs on your phone, using a model the app downloads the first time you ask for a translation, and only after you agree to the download. The download is the only network request Ardaas makes, and it goes to Hugging Face:

huggingface.co/naklitechie/indictrans2-en-indic-dist-200M-ONNX-int8

Pinned to a fixed revision and checked against known SHA-256 hashes before use.

This request downloads model files to your phone. It sends none of your content. Your benti, your labels and your saved Ardaas are never part of it, and translation itself happens entirely offline once the model is present.

As with any internet request, the server receiving it can see your IP address and the standard information your device sends when fetching a file. That data is handled by Hugging Face under their privacy policy, not by this app. If you never use the translation feature, the app makes no network requests at all.

On Android, the app asks for two permissions, both granted at install and both used only for this download: Internet, to fetch the model files, and network state, to check whether the connection is mobile data or otherwise metered, so the download does not use it unless you allow that. The app asks for no location, camera, microphone, contacts, photos, storage or notification permissions.

What the app does not do

No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or usage measurement
No advertising and no advertising identifiers
No third-party SDKs that collect data
No accounts, sign-in, email collection or contact access
No location, camera, microphone, photo or contacts access
No selling or sharing of data, because none is gathered to sell or share

Children

Ardaas is suitable for all ages and collects no data from anyone, children included.

Changes to this policy

If the app ever changes in a way that affects this policy, the policy will be updated here and the date at the top will change. The app's full history is public, so any such change is auditable in the source repository.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be raised at github.com/sarbloc/ardaas-app/issues.