AlarmVault — Privacy Policy

Applies to: AlarmVault for Android (package com.sgot.alarmvault)

Effective date: 10 October 2026 · Applies to app version: 1.7

In short

AlarmVault keeps your alarms, your Secure Box files and notes, and your Apps Box list on your device. It has no account, no sign-in and no server behind it, and it never sends any of those anywhere.

From version 1.7 the app shows ads unless you have Premium. They come from Google AdMob, which receives information about your device in order to show and measure them — see Advertising below. Ads appear only before the Secure Box or Apps Box lock screen, and as rewarded ads that you start yourself; never inside your vaults. Premium is sold through Google Play, which handles the payment.

Apart from that, AlarmVault sends approximate location for the optional weather section, and only if you allow it. If you use Send feedback, your own email app opens with a draft that you write and send yourself.

Introduction

AlarmVault is an Android app that combines an alarm clock with Secure Box, a private area for files and notes that are encrypted on the device, and Apps Box, a separate protected area with its own lock.

This policy describes how the app handles information as it works today. The app’s own features run entirely on your device: there is no account to create, nothing to sign in to, and no service operated by the developer. Ads are provided by Google AdMob and the Premium subscription by Google Play, as described below.

Information and data the app handles

The app handles only what you give it or what it needs in order to work:

• Alarm settings — for each alarm you create: its time, whether it is on, its name, which days of the week it repeats on, vibration, the snooze length, and the ringtone or audio file you choose. A chosen audio file is stored as a reference to that file, not as a copy of it.
• Items you add to Secure Box — videos, photos, audio, PDFs and other files.
• Notes you write in Secure Box — their title and body.
• Security material — a salted verifier for your PIN, password or pattern and for your Recovery Key. Neither the credential nor the Recovery Key itself is stored.
• Apps Box — the package names of the apps you have imported.
• Weather — if you allow it, an approximate location used only to look up the weather for the Home screen and the forecast behind it, plus that answer cached for about an hour. It is one request either way: the forecast is read from the same reply, not asked for separately. No location history is kept.
• Premium and ads — whether you have Premium, when Premium earned by watching ads ends, how many ads you have watched towards the next reward, when the last ad before a vault was shown (so that another is not shown within three minutes), and whether the one-time Premium screen has been shown.

To let you choose apps in Apps Box, the app asks Android for the list of installed apps that have a launcher icon. That list is read on the device to display it, and only the package names you import are saved.

The app does not ask for your name, email address, phone number or contacts, and it has no profile or account attached to you. Approximate location is used only for the optional weather section described below, and only with your permission. Google AdMob and Google Play process information under Google’s own privacy policy, as described under Advertising and AlarmVault Premium.

How data is stored

Everything is kept in the app’s own private storage area on the device:

• Encrypted Secure Box files, in the app’s private files directory.
• A local database holding alarm settings, note contents in encrypted form, and metadata for Secure Box items.
• Local preference files holding the security verifiers and the Apps Box list.
• A local preference file recording which shortcuts you put on the AlarmVault Home screen and which of the starter ones you removed, so your layout survives a restart.
• A local count of how many times you have opened each app from AlarmVault, used only to put the ones you open most at the top of the app drawer. It is not the phone-wide usage statistics, it covers only taps inside AlarmVault, and it never leaves the device.
• A local preference file recording whether Secure Box keeps its contents blurred until you touch them.
• A local preference file holding the last weather reading — a temperature and a condition word — and a cached copy of the weather service’s reply, which is what the hourly and ten-day forecast is read from. Both are kept for about an hour. Your coordinates are not stored in either.
• A local preference file holding the Premium and ads details listed above. It holds no payment details: Google Play keeps those.

Android keeps this private storage isolated from other apps. Nothing is written to shared or public storage unless you explicitly export it.

Secure Box and encryption

Files added to Secure Box are encrypted with AES-256 in GCM mode. The encryption key is generated inside the Android Keystore and is not exportable, so it cannot be read out of the device. Note titles and bodies are encrypted the same way.

Each encrypted file carries an authentication tag that is verified on every read, so a corrupted or altered file is rejected instead of being shown in part.

Some information is kept unencrypted as ordinary metadata in the app’s private local database: an item’s file name, file type, size, the date it was imported, and a checksum used to recognise a duplicate import.

To play a video or a sound file, or to open a PDF, the app writes a temporary decrypted copy into its own private cache. The same happens briefly for each video shown in the Secure Box list, so a picture from the video can be used in place of a filename; that copy is deleted as soon as the picture has been taken. A viewer copy is deleted when you close the viewer, and anything left behind by an unexpected shutdown is cleared the next time the app starts. Photos are decrypted in memory and are not written to disk in readable form.

Opening a ZIP, RAR or 7z file in Secure Box works the same way, because those formats have to be read back and forth rather than straight through: the archive is decrypted into that same private cache, its contents are encrypted into Secure Box one at a time as they come out, and the temporary copy is deleted when the work finishes, including when it fails part way. Compressing files into a new ZIP does the same in reverse. That cache belongs to AlarmVault alone; no other app on the phone can read it, and nothing is written anywhere you have not asked for.

This is local at-rest encryption. It is deliberately not described as end-to-end encryption, because there is no remote party involved.

Authentication and security

• Secure Box is protected by a PIN, password or pattern that you choose. It is never stored. Only a salted PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 verifier is saved, and unlocking compares against that verifier.
• Repeated incorrect attempts trigger a delay that grows with each further failure.
• Biometric unlock is optional and uses Android’s own biometric prompt. The app never receives your fingerprint or face data; Android only reports whether authentication succeeded.
• A Recovery Key can be issued and is shown once, for you to write down. Only a verifier for it is stored, so after that screen is dismissed the key itself exists nowhere on the device. It can be used to reset the Secure Box credential. If both the credential and the Recovery Key are lost, the contents cannot be recovered by anyone, including the developer.
• Secure Box screens and the Apps Box lock screens block screenshots, screen recording and the recents preview while they are open. The alarm screens are not restricted this way.
• Apps Box re-locks whenever the app leaves the foreground. Secure Box does the same by default, and you can switch that off in Security settings.
• The ad shown before a vault comes before its lock screen and does not change it. The PIN, password, pattern or biometric check is never skipped, and the vault is still locked while the ad is on screen.

Alarms, notifications and device permissions

The app requests the following Android permissions, each used only for the alarm or for unlocking:

• Post notifications — to show the alarm and its foreground service.
• Schedule and use exact alarms — so the alarm rings at the time you set rather than approximately.
• Use full-screen intent — so the alarm screen can appear when the alarm fires.
• Vibrate — when vibration is switched on.
• Wake lock and foreground service (media playback) — to keep the alarm ringing reliably.
• Receive boot completed — to restore your alarm after a restart, an app update, or a time or time-zone change.
• Use biometric — for optional biometric unlock.

The app holds no device administration or device management privileges, and asks for none.

Two further permissions exist only for the optional weather section on the Home screen:

• Internet — to ask a public weather service for the current conditions and the forecast.
• Approximate location — to know roughly where to ask about. Only the coarse permission is requested, never precise location and never background location, so the app cannot read your position while it is closed.

The app does not request the contacts, microphone or camera permissions.

Two further permissions are added automatically by the Android libraries the app is built on, rather than requested by AlarmVault itself. They appear in the Google Play permission list, so they are named here too:

• View network connections — added by the media library that powers the Secure Box video player. It lets that library check whether a connection exists. AlarmVault plays only files already on your device and never streams anything. From version 1.7 AlarmVault also asks for it itself, as described next.
• Use fingerprint — the older form of the biometric permission, added by the AndroidX biometric library so that optional biometric unlock also works on Android 9 and earlier. It covers the same unlock as Use biometric above, and no fingerprint data ever reaches the app.

From version 1.7, three permissions exist for ads and Premium:

• View network connections — to check whether there is a working internet connection before a vault opens. Without one, no ad is attempted and the lock screen opens at once.
• Advertising ID — added by the Google Mobile Ads SDK, so that ads can use the advertising ID Android provides. You can reset or delete that ID at any time in Android’s own settings.
• Google Play billing — added by the Google Play Billing Library, so that the Premium subscription can be bought through Google Play.

The Google Mobile Ads SDK also adds Android’s own ad services permissions (ad ID, attribution and topics), which belong to Android’s newer privacy-preserving ad features. Where a phone has those features, they can be switched off in Android’s ad privacy settings.

When you pick an audio file for the alarm, the app keeps read access to that file so it can still play it hours later. It stores a reference to the file, not a copy of it.

Apps Box

Apps Box is a separate protected area with its own lock, independent of Secure Box. It has its own PIN, password or pattern verifier and its own Recovery Key, stored the same way as Secure Box’s.

Apps Box reads the list of installed apps that have a launcher icon so that you can select from it, and saves the package names of the apps you import. That list is held only on this device. Removing an app from Apps Box deletes its package name from that list.

What hiding actually means

You can choose AlarmVault as your device’s Home app from Android’s own Home settings. AlarmVault then shows its own home screen and app drawer, and leaves your protected apps out of that drawer.

That is the entire extent of it. The apps stay installed, keep running normally, and remain visible in Android Settings, in search, and in any other launcher you switch to. This is hiding from AlarmVault’s own home screen — not Android system-level hiding — and the app does not describe it as anything more.

One more thing happens when you open a protected app from inside Apps Box: it is started in a way that keeps it out of the Recents list, so its name and a picture of it are not left on the recent apps screen for the next person who presses that key. The app itself is untouched and is still reachable everywhere else described above.

Selecting the Home app is always done in Android’s own interface. AlarmVault cannot set or change the Home app itself, and never attempts to. You can switch your previous home screen back at any time from the same Android settings, and your protected apps appear there again.

AlarmVault does not uninstall another app, does not disable it, does not delete or encrypt its data, does not read its contents, and does not alter its notifications or settings. Protecting an app records your choice and leaves it out of one app drawer; nothing else about the device changes.

AlarmVault holds no device administration or device management privileges, and asks for none.

To list the apps you can choose from, and to draw its own app drawer, AlarmVault asks Android which apps have a launcher icon. It uses Android’s narrow <queries> mechanism for this and does not request the broad “query all packages” permission.

What the Home screen reads about your apps

When AlarmVault is your Home app it has to know what to draw, so it asks Android for the apps that have a launcher icon — their names, their icons and their package names. Where a work profile is set up, that list covers the work profile too, so work apps appear and open normally.

For the fixed row at the bottom of the Home screen, AlarmVault also asks Android which apps you have set as your default phone, messaging, browser and camera apps, so the row matches your device instead of assuming a particular brand.

AlarmVault also asks Android which app is currently your home screen, and reads that app’s name so Apps Box can show it to you. That screen states plainly whether AlarmVault is your home app or another one is, and naming it is what lets you check the answer rather than take it on trust.

To be clear about what that does and does not mean: AlarmVault learns only which app fills each of those roles. It does not read your messages, your calls or your call history, your contacts, your photos or any account information, and it holds no permission that would let it.

All of this is read on the device, used to draw the screen, and never sent anywhere. Only the package names you choose to protect in Apps Box, and the shortcuts you remove from Home, are written down at all.

Searching in the app drawer

The app drawer has a search box. What you type is matched, on the device, against the names of the apps already listed there. Nothing is sent anywhere while you type, and no suggestions are fetched from any search service.

When nothing on your phone matches what you typed, the drawer offers to hand those words to an app that can search for them — Google, YouTube, Maps, the Play Store or Contacts. The words leave AlarmVault only if you tap one of those, and then they go to the app you chose; AlarmVault sends nothing itself and keeps no record of what you searched for. A hand-off is offered only for an app you actually have, and never for one you have protected in Apps Box.

Advertising

From version 1.7, AlarmVault shows ads from Google AdMob, a service of Google. With Premium, the ad before a vault is not shown.

Where ads appear, and nowhere else:

• One full-screen ad before the Secure Box or Apps Box lock screen, when you are online and do not have Premium. The vault is still locked while the ad is on screen; the ad comes first and the normal lock screen follows. After an ad, opening a vault again within three minutes shows no second one. Without an internet connection no ad is attempted and the lock screen opens at once.
• Rewarded ads on the Premium screen, which play only when you tap the button that names the reward — for example “Watch ad 2 of 3 for 1 day”.

Ads are never shown inside Secure Box or Apps Box, on the alarm or its ringing screen, or on the AlarmVault Home screen. The ad code has no access to your Secure Box files, your notes, your alarms or your Apps Box list.

What Google receives. To choose, show and measure ads and to prevent fraud, the Google Mobile Ads SDK collects information from your device and sends it to Google. This includes your IP address, from which an approximate location can be worked out; the advertising ID or app set ID; the device model and Android version; information about the app; your interactions with the ads, such as whether an ad was shown or tapped; and diagnostic information about the SDK itself. AlarmVault does not receive this information, and it sends Google nothing about your vaults, alarms or apps. Google handles the information under its own privacy policy, https://policies.google.com/privacy, and explains how it uses information from apps that show its ads at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Your choices. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Google’s consent message appears when the app starts, and personalised ads are shown only if you agree. In US states with their own privacy laws, the same kind of message lets you opt out of the sale or sharing of your information for advertising. Wherever either applies, an Ad privacy choices row appears on the alarm screen so that you can change your answer at any time. Everywhere, you can reset or delete your advertising ID in Android’s settings.

AlarmVault Premium

Premium switches off the ad before Secure Box and Apps Box. Nothing else in the app depends on it: every feature works the same with or without Premium. There are three ways to get it:

• A subscription, monthly or yearly, bought through Google Play. Google Play takes the payment and keeps your payment details; AlarmVault never sees them. The app learns only whether the subscription is active, and confirms the purchase to Google Play from your phone. It has no server of its own, so nothing about the purchase is sent anywhere else. You can cancel at any time in Google Play → Subscriptions, and Google’s own terms and privacy policy apply to the payment.
• Watching rewarded ads — three ads earn one day of Premium and fifteen ads earn seven days. This time is counted on the phone and kept in the local preference file described above.
• A Google Play promo code from the developer, which gives Premium for good. It is redeemed in Google Play and handled exactly like a purchase: the app learns only that your account owns it.

Data sharing

AlarmVault does not send your data to the developer. It contains no analytics and no crash-reporting service of its own, and the developer does not sell your data.

The only other parties that receive information from the app are the ones this policy describes: Google, through the ads and, when you buy Premium, through Google Play; and MET Norway, for the optional weather. None of them receives anything from your Secure Box, your notes, your alarms or your Apps Box list.

Data leaves the app only when you move it yourself. Exporting an item from Secure Box writes a decrypted copy to the location you choose. Once exported, that copy is outside the app’s protection and is subject to whatever else can read that location.

The alarm screen also has a Send feedback option. It opens your own email app with a message addressed to the developer and pre-filled with the app version, your Android version and your phone model, so you do not have to go looking for them. Nothing is sent automatically: the draft is yours to read, edit or discard, and the app neither sees nor keeps a copy of what you send.

Internet and network use

AlarmVault itself makes one kind of network request: the optional weather section on the AlarmVault Home screen, described here. The ad and billing libraries described under Advertising and AlarmVault Premium connect to Google on their own.

If you have granted approximate location, the Home screen sends an approximate position — rounded to about a kilometre — to MET Norway (api.met.no) to obtain the current temperature and conditions. That is a free public weather service operated by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute; no account, API key or sign-in is involved.

What is sent: the rounded coordinates, together with the name of the app and the developer’s contact address, which MET Norway require so they can get in touch about a misbehaving caller. Nothing identifies you: no account, no device or advertising identifier, and nothing about your alarms, Secure Box, notes or Apps Box list ever leaves the device.

Precise location is never requested, and background location is never requested, so the app cannot read your position while it is closed. Location is only read while the Home screen is open. The reading is cached for about an hour so the request is not repeated often, and a failed lookup waits about twenty minutes before trying again. If you refuse the permission, or the lookup fails, the Home screen shows the weather as unavailable and works normally.

Weather data is provided by MET Norway under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which is why the Home screen credits them beneath the reading.

Apart from the weather request and the Google services above, the app contains no other networking, server or cloud code. There is no account, no analytics or crash-reporting service of its own, and no cloud service or hosted database operated for the app.

Third-party code included in the app

The app is built on Google’s own Android and Jetpack libraries. From version 1.7 it also includes three Google libraries that do connect to Google:

• Google Mobile Ads SDK (AdMob), which requests and shows ads, as described under Advertising.
• Google User Messaging Platform, which shows Google’s consent message where the law requires one, and keeps your answer on the device.
• Google Play Billing Library, which talks to the Google Play app on your phone to sell the Premium subscription, and sends Google diagnostic information about how the library itself is working.

Three further open-source libraries are used purely to read and write archive files on the device. None of them sends anything anywhere; they are file-format code and have no network access of their own.

• Apache Commons Compress and XZ for Java, under the Apache License 2.0, used to open 7z files.
• junrar, under the UnRAR licence, used to open RAR files. As that licence requires, it is stated here and in the in-app guide that this code may not be used to develop a RAR (WinRAR) compatible archiver. It can only read RAR files; no app can create them, which is why compressing files in Secure Box offers ZIP and 7z but never RAR.

ZIP files are handled by the archive code built into Android itself, with no additional library.

Data retention and deletion

Your data stays on the device until you remove it:

• Deleting an item from Secure Box deletes its encrypted file and its database record.
• Deleting a note removes it from the database.
• Removing an app from Apps Box removes its package name from the saved list.
• Temporary decrypted copies made for the video, audio and PDF viewers, for video pictures in the list, and for extracting or creating an archive, are deleted as soon as they have served their purpose, and any left behind are cleared the next time the app starts.
• Deleting an extracted folder is just deleting the items in it; the folder is only the name they share and disappears once the last one is gone.
• Adding a shortcut back to Home removes it from the list of shortcuts you had removed.
• The cached weather reading is replaced about an hour after it was fetched.
• Premium earned by watching ads simply runs out when its time is up.

Information that Google collects through the ads, or through Google Play when you buy Premium, is kept under Google’s own retention rules. AlarmVault never holds it, so it cannot see or delete it.

Uninstalling the app removes its private storage, including the encrypted Secure Box files, the local database and the preference files. Because the encryption key lives in the Android Keystore and cannot be exported, encrypted files copied off the device beforehand cannot be decrypted afterwards. Copies you exported yourself are unaffected by uninstalling.

Backups and device transfer

Android’s backup feature is switched off for this app. In addition, the encrypted vault directory, the local database and the security preferences are explicitly excluded from cloud backup and from device-to-device transfer, so Secure Box contents are not copied to another device by those features.

Children’s privacy

AlarmVault is intended for adults and is listed on Google Play for users aged 18 and over. The app has no account system, does not ask for age or identity, and does not knowingly collect personal information from children. Its ads are not directed at children. Apart from the advertising and Google Play services described above, the only thing the app sends off the device is an approximate location for the optional weather section, and only if you allow it. The feedback option sends nothing on its own; it opens an email for you to write and send.

Active development

AlarmVault is actively under development. As new features are introduced or existing functionality changes, this Privacy Policy may be reviewed and updated to accurately reflect the app’s current features, permissions, data handling practices, and security behaviour. Users should refer to the latest version of this Privacy Policy for the current information.

The copy shown inside the app always ships with that version of the app, so updating the app also updates the policy you see there. This hosted copy is updated alongside each release.

Changes to this privacy policy

This policy describes the app as it currently works. As the app changes, this text will be updated so that it continues to match the app’s actual behaviour.

Contact

For privacy questions, support or feedback about AlarmVault, write to:

alarmvaultfeedback@gmail.com

This is also the contact address AlarmVault identifies itself with when it asks MET Norway for the weather, which that service requires.