Effective 12 September 2026 · Version 1.0.0
Minimal Compass has no accounts, no sign-in, and no advertising. It never uploads your heading, the position your phone computes, or anything your camera sees. What it does send is a small, anonymous set of usage counters and crash reports, and this page explains exactly what those contain.
The short version. Sensor readings, the location fix used for true north, and camera frames are processed on your phone and are never transmitted or stored. Anonymous usage counts and crash diagnostics are sent to Google Firebase, which attaches a random app-instance ID and derives an approximate city-level location from your IP address. No advertising identifier is collected, no profile is built, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone else.
Minimal Compass is published by an individual developer, Sarvin Shrivastava, based in Nagpur, India. For anything on this page, write to sarvin5124@gmail.com.
The heading and the bubble level come from your phone's accelerometer and magnetometer. Android grants access to these sensors without asking for a permission. The readings are used to draw the screen and are discarded immediately. They are never written to storage and never leave the device.
Magnetic north and true north differ by an angle called magnetic
declination, which depends on where you are standing. True north is on by
default, so if you grant the location permission the app asks Google Play
services for a single coarse position fix once per launch, uses it to compute
that one correction angle, and keeps only the angle. Decline the permission,
or switch the reading back to MAG, and no fix is requested.
ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION, not
the precise variant. Declination changes by roughly a degree over tens of
kilometres, so a city-block fix is as good as a precise one here.The AR overlay draws cardinal directions over the live camera view. The camera runs only while that view is open, and closing it releases the camera immediately.
The app uses two Google Firebase services. Google acts as a data processor for both; their handling is covered by the Firebase privacy documentation.
These exist to answer one question: which parts of the app earn their place. They are deliberately coarse. There are no button taps, no funnels, no session replay, and no name, email address or account of any kind. Automatic screen-view logging is switched off. The events this app sends itself are:
| Event | What it records |
|---|---|
compass_session |
How many seconds the app was in the foreground, and how many seconds passed before the heading settled. |
accuracy_state |
One word describing magnetometer confidence for the session — for
example HIGH or UNRELIABLE. |
ar_opened |
That the AR view was opened, and whether it opened automatically or by a tap. |
level_opened |
That the bubble level page was viewed. |
daylight_toggled |
That high-contrast daylight mode was switched on or off. |
location_outcome |
Whether the location permission was granted or denied. |
declination_outcome |
Whether a true-north correction was successfully obtained. |
Every value above is a number or a fixed word. None of them contains a heading, a coordinate, a place name, a timestamp of where you were, or anything that describes you.
Two things Firebase adds that the table above does not show. Both are disclosed on this app's Data safety listing on Google Play, and both come from Firebase rather than from anything this app chooses to send.
The advertising identifier is removed. Firebase normally collects Android's advertising ID and sets ad-personalisation signals. Both are switched off in this app, and the advertising ID permission is stripped out of the app package entirely, so it cannot be collected even in principle. Minimal Compass contains no advertising and no advertising SDKs.
When the app crashes or detects that the sensors have gone silent, a diagnostic report is sent so the fault can be found and fixed. A report contains, among other standard diagnostics, the stack trace, your device model, its Android version and free memory, the app version, a Crashlytics installation identifier that ties reports from the same install together, and one extra field recording whether the magnetometer was healthy at the moment of failure. It contains no personal data, no location and no camera data.
Analytics events are retained by Google for the period set on the Firebase project and are then deleted automatically. Crash reports are retained for Firebase's standard crash-reporting period. Neither is exported anywhere else or combined with any other source.
Minimal Compass is suitable for users of all ages and contains no user accounts, no user-generated content, no purchases, no advertising, and no social features. It is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included.
Google processes Firebase data on servers that may be located outside your country, including in the United States, under Google's own safeguards for international transfers.
If this policy changes materially, the effective date at the top of the page changes with it and the revised policy is published here before the app release it describes. Material reductions in privacy will also be noted in the app's release notes on Google Play.
Questions, corrections and privacy requests: sarvin5124@gmail.com.