Privacy Policy

This policy describes what the Bubble Translate app for macOS (the “App”) and its translation service do with data, and — just as important — what they don’t do. The App is operated by Aleksei Artemev. Contact: bt@appto.you.

The short version

• There are no accounts, no ads, and no tracking. The only analytics is anonymous and privacy-first, and it never sees what you translate.
• The text you translate is processed to produce the translation and is not stored on our servers.
• Your history and word base stay on your Mac and in your own iCloud.
• We never sell data. There is nothing to sell.

Text you translate

When you request a translation (a bubble, a replace-in-place, a typed query, or a flashcard enrichment), the selected text is sent over an encrypted connection (TLS) to our server, forwarded to a machine-translation engine run by an AI provider, and the result is returned to you. The text is processed transiently to answer your request: we do not store it on our servers, build profiles from it, or use it for advertising. AI providers process it as our processors under their API terms.

Practical advice that applies to any online translator: don’t translate secrets — passwords, keys, or text you are not allowed to transmit.

Data stored on your device and in your iCloud

Your translation history and your word base (the words you save to learn) are stored locally on your Mac. If iCloud is enabled, macOS syncs them through your personal iCloud account so your Macs stay in step. This data lives in your Apple ecosystem — we have no access to it and no copy of it.

What our server does record

To run daily quotas and keep the service healthy, the server keeps:

• An anonymous identifier generated for your app installation (a random ID, not your name or email), with daily request counters, the app version, and your subscription status (Free or Pro) confirmed through Apple/RevenueCat.
• Your IP address, used for daily rate limits and abuse prevention, and appearing in standard hosting logs.
• Aggregate statistics — counts of requests and tokens per day. These contain no translated text.
• Technical error records (status codes and error messages from providers) kept in a short rolling buffer for debugging. They may include the anonymous ID, never the text you translated.

Our infrastructure stores this data in the European Union (Frankfurt).

Anonymous analytics

To learn which features people actually use and where the App fails, we collect anonymous usage events through TelemetryDeck, a privacy-first analytics service hosted in the European Union. An event says what happened — a translation finished, a window was opened, the upgrade screen was shown, a shortcut was blocked — along with technical context such as the App version, macOS version, Mac model, and interface language.

Events never contain the text you translate, the words in your base, or anything else you type; the language codes of a translation are the closest they get. They are grouped by a random identifier created on your Mac for this purpose only, which the App hashes before sending. It is not your name, email, Apple ID, or a hardware identifier, it is not linked to your identity, and it is not used to follow you across other apps or websites. TelemetryDeck never stores IP addresses.

Purchases

Payments are processed entirely by Apple; we never receive your card details, name, or Apple ID email. To unlock Pro across the app we use RevenueCat, which matches your anonymous identifier to a subscription status. That status — active or not, and which plan — is all we see.

Service providers

Data is shared only with processors needed to run the service:

• AI translation providers — receive the text of each request to produce the translation;
• Vercel — hosting of our server;
• Upstash — storage for quotas and aggregate counters (EU region);
• RevenueCat — subscription status;
• TelemetryDeck — anonymous usage analytics (EU hosting);
• Apple— App Store distribution, payments, and iCloud sync under Apple’s own terms.

We do not sell or rent data to anyone, and there are no third-party ad or tracking networks.

Retention

Translated text: not stored. Quota counters: reset daily. The anonymous identifier and its aggregate counters are kept while the service operates so quotas and Pro status keep working. Error records are overwritten by newer ones in a fixed-size buffer. Anonymous analytics events are kept by TelemetryDeck for as long as we analyse the App.

Your rights

Depending on where you live (including under the GDPR), you may have rights to access, correct, or delete data associated with you. Because the server only holds an anonymous identifier, email us at bt@appto.you from the app (Settings → About) or include your anonymous ID, and we will delete the counters associated with it. Data on your device and in your iCloud you can delete yourself at any time.

Children

The App is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent age in your jurisdiction), and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes to this policy

If the App starts handling data differently, this page will change first, with the date above updated. Material changes will also be noted in the App or in release notes.

See also the Terms of Use.