Privacy Policy

Overview

Cosmoss is an astronomy app that calculates what’s visible in your sky using on-device astronomical formulas. Cosmoss has no user accounts — you never create a username, password, or profile to use the app.

This policy is written to meet the disclosure requirements of the Apple App Store (App Privacy details), Google Play (Data safety section), and Google AdMob’s publisher policies, as well as applicable privacy laws including the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA), and COPPA.

Information we collect

Because Cosmoss has no accounts, there is no name, email address, or password to collect. The categories below cover everything else the app and its third-party components handle.

Crash reporting is included in the app but requires a monitoring account to actually be active; if it is not yet configured, no crash data is transmitted anywhere.

Location data

If you grant location access, Cosmoss uses your device’s GPS coordinates solely to calculate what’s astronomically visible from where you are — sunrise and sunset, Moon phase and position, planet visibility, and tonight’s stargazing conditions. This calculation happens entirely on your device using standard astronomical formulas.

Cosmoss does not operate any server that receives, stores, or logs your GPS coordinates. There is no location history, no server-side record of where you’ve used the app, and no location data shared with analytics providers.

Location access is entirely optional. You can decline it and instead enter manual coordinates, or change how Cosmoss determines your location at any time from Settings → Location. On iOS, location access is “When In Use” only — Cosmoss never requests background location.

Notifications

Notifications (event reminders, nightly sky summaries) are scheduled directly on your device using its local operating system scheduler (Apple’s and Google’s local notification APIs). Cosmoss does not operate a push notification server, so no notification content is ever transmitted to or from any server, and we have no visibility into whether or when a notification is actually delivered or opened.

You can enable, disable, or fine-tune notification categories and quiet hours at any time from Settings → Notifications.

Advertising & Google AdMob

Cosmoss is free to use and is supported by advertising delivered through Google AdMob. AdMob may show banner ads, native ads styled to match the app, and occasional full-screen ads between screens.

What Google may collect through AdMob

• Advertising identifiers (Apple’s IDFA or Google’s Advertising ID)
• Device information (device model, OS version, language, screen size)
• Approximate, IP-based location (not your precise GPS coordinates)
• Ad interaction data (impressions, clicks, view time)

This data is collected and processed by Google, under Google’s Privacy Policy and Google’s EU User Consent Policy, not Cosmoss’s. Cosmoss does not receive, store, or have access to your advertising identifier history or ad-targeting profile — that relationship exists between your device, Google, and (where applicable) Google’s advertising partners.

Personalized vs. non-personalized ads

Where required by law (including the EEA, UK, and Switzerland), Cosmoss presents Google’s User Messaging Platform (UMP) consent form before any ad is requested, built on the IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework. You choose whether to allow personalized advertising, non-personalized advertising only, or (where applicable) to reject non-essential ads entirely. You can review or change this choice at any time from Settings → Privacy & Ads.

Tracking permissions (iOS & Android)

iOS — App Tracking Transparency

On iOS 14.5+, Apple requires apps to request permission before tracking users across other companies’ apps and websites. Cosmoss shows this system prompt (via Apple’s App Tracking Transparency framework) before requesting personalized ads. If you decline, Cosmoss continues to work identically — you’ll simply see non-personalized ads instead.

Android — Advertising ID

On Android, Google Play’s policies require disclosure of Advertising ID usage and, on supported OS versions, respect for the system-level “Delete advertising ID” setting. If you reset or delete your Advertising ID in your device’s Google settings, AdMob will no longer be able to use it for personalization.

Analytics & diagnostics

Settings → Privacy & Ads includes a toggle to enable optional, anonymous usage analytics. As of this version of Cosmoss, that toggle is reserved for future use — no analytics data is currently collected or transmitted through it. If that changes in a future release, this policy will be updated first to name the analytics provider and exactly what is measured.

Cosmoss includes crash-reporting instrumentation (Sentry) to help us find and fix bugs. When active, it may collect technical diagnostics such as device model, OS version, app version, and the sequence of in-app actions leading up to a crash. It does not collect your location, notification content, or advertising identifiers.

Separately, this website (cosmoss.space, not the app itself) uses Google Analytics to understand basic site traffic — which pages are visited, how visitors found the site, and general device/browser category. This is standard web analytics, governed by Google’s own privacy policy, and is entirely separate from anything the app itself collects.

Data storage & retention

Your preferences (interests, units, language, notification settings) and favorites are stored locally on your device using standard iOS/Android app storage. This version of Cosmoss also includes an on-device database laid as groundwork for a future observation-log feature — it isn’t yet reachable from any screen, and like everything else described here, it never leaves your device.

Because none of this data is transmitted to us, we hold no copy of it to retain, back up, or delete on your behalf. Uninstalling Cosmoss permanently deletes all locally stored app data.

Data sharing & third parties

Cosmoss shares data with exactly one category of third party:

• Google (AdMob) — for advertising, as described above, and (if enabled) Google’s crash and diagnostics infrastructure via Sentry.

Cosmoss does not sell your personal information, and does not share data with data brokers, social networks, or any advertising partner other than Google AdMob. Where U.S. state privacy laws (such as California’s CCPA/CPRA) define showing personalized ads as a form of “sharing,” you can opt out at any time via the ad-consent controls in Settings → Privacy & Ads.

Your rights & choices

Because Cosmoss has no accounts and stores no personal data on any server, most data-subject rights (access, correction, deletion, portability) are already satisfied by the fact that your data lives only on your device, under your control:

• Access & correction — view and change any preference directly in the app.
• Deletion — uninstall Cosmoss, or clear the app’s storage from your device’s system settings.
• Location mode — GPS or manual coordinates, changeable anytime in Settings → Location.
• Ad personalization — reviewable and changeable anytime in Settings → Privacy & Ads.
• Notifications — category- and quiet-hours-level control in Settings → Notifications.
• Device-level controls — you can reset or limit your advertising identifier, or revoke location/notification permissions, at any time from your device’s OS settings.

Children’s privacy

Cosmoss is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your region), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Cosmoss is not listed under Google Play’s Families program and does not serve child-directed advertising. Because Cosmoss has no accounts and collects no identifying information from any user, no child-specific data collection occurs.

International users

Cosmoss is available worldwide. Google AdMob operates global advertising infrastructure, which may process data in countries other than your own, under the safeguards described in Google’s own privacy and data-transfer documentation. Because Cosmoss itself has no servers, Cosmoss does not itself transfer your data internationally — only Google’s advertising SDK does, as described above.

Security

All Cosmoss data lives in your device’s app-sandboxed storage, protected by your device’s own operating-system security (encryption at rest, where enabled by your device). Because no personal data is transmitted to Cosmoss’s own infrastructure, there is no Cosmoss-operated server or database to secure or that could be breached. Data sent to Google AdMob is protected under Google’s own security practices.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we’ll update the date at the top of this page. Material changes — such as introducing a new data collection practice, a new analytics provider, or a new advertising partner — will be described here before they take effect, and, where required by law or app store policy, presented to you in-app for renewed consent.

Contact us

Questions about this policy, or requests related to your data, can be sent to mohamedoumaalla43@gmail.com.