🏠

Roommates

Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective September 5, 2026

Roommates is a shared household app — chores, shopping, expenses, events, and notes, visible to the people you live with. This policy covers what the app collects, why, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it.

At a glance

Everything Roommates collects, and who can see it.

What	Why	Who sees it
Name & email	Identifies your account and shows roommates who did what	You and members of your house
Household content	Chores, lists, expenses, events, and notes are the app	Members of that house
Push token	Delivers the notifications you turn on	Only us (stored with your account) and Apple's push service
Crash reports	Tells us what broke	Only us — tagged with your account ID, so a crash you tell us about can be found
Location (optional)	Finds grocery stores near you during a shopping trip	Sent to Apple's geocoder and Kroger's store lookup. Your coordinates are never stored; the store you pick is saved for your house
Payment handle (optional)	Lets roommates settle up in Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App	Members of your house
Calendar (optional)	Mirrors calendars you pick into shared Events	Members of your house
Calendar link (optional)	Subscribes an outside calendar app to your house's events	Anyone holding the link, and the calendar service you paste it into

1. What we collect

When you make an account

Your name and email address, from signing up with an email and password, with Google, or with Sign in with Apple. If you use Apple's private email relay, the relayed address is what we store — we never see your real one.

When you use the app

The household content you create: chores, shopping items, expenses, events, and notes, along with who created, was assigned, or completed each one. A push token for your device, so notifications can reach it, stored alongside your account. Crash and diagnostic reports, tagged with your account ID so that a crash you write to us about can be traced to the report it produced.

Only if you turn it on

• Location. The store picker in a shopping trip has a "use my location" button. Tapping it sends your coordinates from your device to two places: Apple's geocoding service, which turns the point into a place name, and Kroger's public store lookup, which finds nearby stores and their aisle numbers. We never receive or store your coordinates, and your roommates never see them. The store you end up choosing is saved for your house, so the next trip can skip the picker — your roommates see that store, never your location. Typing a ZIP code or town name does the same job without it; a typed town name is sent to Apple's geocoder to locate it.
• Payment handles. If you add a Venmo, PayPal, or Cash App handle so roommates can settle up, it is stored in your house's shared record and every member can see it. We never see or move money — the handle is only used to build a link that opens the other app with the amount filled in.
• Calendars. If you connect Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, the app copies events from the calendars you select into your house's shared Events, one way. Roommates never writes to your personal calendars, and you can disconnect at any time.
• The shared calendar link. Your house can generate a subscription link so an outside calendar app can follow its events. It carries a long random token instead of a password, which means anyone holding the link can read the house's app-created events without signing in, and any calendar service you paste it into will fetch and cache them on its own servers. Events mirrored in from a personal calendar are never exported. Resetting the link in the app immediately revokes every existing subscriber.

2. How we use it

Your information is used to operate the app and nothing else:

• To run the shared features you and your roommates use.
• To send the notifications you've opted into, and only those — every category of notification has its own switch.
• To verify that requests come from the genuine app rather than a forged client (Firebase App Check).
• To find and fix crashes.

We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, or any automated decision-making, and we do not sell it.

3. Who we share it with

Household content is visible to the members of the house it belongs to. That is the point of the app, and it is the only place we show your content to other people. The one exception you control yourself is the shared calendar link described above: if your house generates one and someone shares it, whoever holds it can read the house's app-created events.

Beyond that, we share data only with the service providers that operate the app on our behalf:

• Google Firebase — Cloud Firestore, Authentication, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, Cloud Functions, App Check, and Hosting. This is where accounts and household content are stored, how notifications are sent, and what serves the pages you're reading.
• Google Sign-In — only if you choose to sign in with Google, to confirm it's you.
• Apple Push Notification service — delivers notifications to your device.
• Apple MapKit — turns a coordinate or a typed town name into a searchable point when you look for a store. These lookups are made by your device and carry no account identity.
• Kroger — receives store searches and item names during a shopping trip so it can return store locations and aisle numbers. These lookups are made by your device and never include your name, email, or account.

Each of these providers is contractually required to protect your data to a standard equal to or better than this policy, and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes. We do not share your personal information with third parties for their own marketing.

Google Calendar data

If you connect Google Calendar, Roommates asks Google for read-only access to your calendars. With that permission the app reads the list of calendars you own and the events on them — title, start and end time, and whether an event is all-day — for a window running from a week ago to sixty days ahead. Nothing else about your Google account is read, and the app never creates, edits, or deletes anything in Google Calendar.

Those events are copied into your house's shared Events, where the members of your house can see them. The copies are stored with Google Firebase alongside the rest of your house's content and refreshed from your device while you stay connected. Disconnecting Google Calendar in the app, or deleting your account, removes every event that was copied from your calendars; revoking the app's access at myaccount.google.com/permissions stops it reading anything further.

Google Calendar data is used only to show your schedule to your roommates. It is not used for advertising, is not sold, is not shared with anyone outside your house, and is not read by a person except to fix a problem you have asked us about. Roommates' use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

4. Storage and retention

Your account and household content are stored with Google Firebase and kept for as long as your account exists. Crash reports are retained by Firebase Crashlytics for up to 90 days.

Some things never leave your phone at all: nicknames you give roommates, per-tab colors, member colors, appearance settings, and which cards you show on the Overview. These live only in your device's local storage and are deleted when you delete the app.

5. Your choices and rights

• Notifications. Every category has its own switch in the app, plus quiet hours, and you can revoke permission entirely in iOS Settings.
• Location and calendars. Both are optional, both are off until you turn them on, and both can be revoked in iOS Settings or disconnected in the app.
• Leaving a house. You can leave a household at any time, which ends your access to its shared content.
• Deleting your account. Available in House settings under Account, and — if you haven't joined a house yet — on the house-picker and waiting-for-approval screens. Delete Account permanently removes your profile, your notification settings, your device's push token, and any events mirrored in from your personal calendars, and removes you from every house. If you own a house that still has roommates in it, ownership passes to the roommate who has been there longest, so deletion is never blocked. A house where you were the only member is closed. Content you already contributed — an expense others settled against, a completed chore — stays with that house as part of its shared record.
• Access and correction. You can view and edit your profile in the app. For anything else, write to us using the address below and we'll respond within 30 days.

6. Children

Roommates is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

7. Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update the effective date above. For changes that meaningfully affect how your information is handled, we'll also say so in the app before they take effect.

Everything above describes how Roommates works today, not a promise about every version of it forever. If we ever use your information in a materially different way — sharing it with third parties for their own purposes, for instance — we will tell you in the app before it starts, give you a straightforward way to decline that doesn't cost you your account, and honour whatever additional choices the law where you live gives you. Information collected under an earlier version of this policy stays under that version's terms unless you agree otherwise.

8. Contact