Legal
Roommates is a shared household app for 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 |
We don't sell your data, we don't advertise, and we don't track you across other apps or websites. Roommates contains no analytics or advertising SDKs.
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, and we never see your real one.
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.
Your information is used to operate the app and nothing else:
We do not use your information for advertising, profiling, or any automated decision-making, and we do not sell it.
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:
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.
This section describes, specifically, how Roommates handles data obtained through Google APIs. It applies only if you choose to connect Google Calendar; the app is fully usable without ever doing so.
What we ask for. One read-only permission,
calendar.readonly. We use it to do exactly two things: list the
calendars on your account, so the app can ask which ones you want to share,
and read events from the calendars you switch on.
What we do with it. Events from the calendars you select are copied into your household's shared Events tab so your roommates can see your schedule. That is the only thing this data is used for. Events from calendars you leave switched off are never read into the house. Roommates never writes to, edits, or deletes anything in your Google Calendar.
Where it goes. Mirrored events are stored in your household's record in Google Firebase, visible to the members of your house and to nobody else. Your Google access token is kept on your own device.
Turning it off. Disconnecting Google Calendar in the app removes your mirrored events from the household. You can also revoke access at any time from your Google account permissions page.
Roommates' use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We do not sell Google user data, use it for advertising, transfer it to data brokers or information resellers, or use it to train generalized artificial intelligence or machine-learning models. No human reads your calendar data except where you have given explicit consent, where it is necessary for security purposes, or where the law requires it.
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.
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.
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, such as sharing it with third parties for their own purposes, 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.
Questions about privacy, or a request about your data? Write to roommatesappios@gmail.com and we'll get back to you within 30 days.