Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Coachinese is made by Kevinbyte. You can reach us at support@coachinese.com.

2. What we store on your device

The app keeps your practice data locally:

• your spaced-repetition schedule (which Leitner box each card is in, and when it is next due)
• every practice take with its date and tone scores
• saved words, written characters, and your own sentences
• minutes practised per day
• your recordings, for as long as your retention setting says — see “Data retention” below
• your preferences

This never leaves your device unless you use one of the features described below. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

3. Microphone and voice recordings

The app asks for microphone permission for one reason: to record your practice takes. Tone scoring happens on your device, and recordings are not uploaded for the free tone score.

A recording leaves your device in one case: the Premium verdict on your consonants and vowels. That clip is sent to Google’s Gemini API, through a server of ours that does nothing but pass it on and return the answer. We store no copy of it. It is never used for advertising, and never used to train models.

The conversation partner does not upload audio. It sends the topic, your HSK level, and the lines already exchanged as text — nothing else. Saying a reply aloud is scored the same way any other take is: on your device.

Anything the model writes — a reply from the conversation partner, or the notes on your consonants and vowels — has a Report link under it. Tapping it sends us that text and what it was about (the conversation topic, or the word you practised) so we can review it and tighten the filters. Your own lines are never included. Reports are kept in our server logs for up to 30 days.

If you have not subscribed, no recording of yours is ever uploaded anywhere. On the free tier a take is written to your device so you can play it back against the reference, and deleted as soon as you move to the next card.

4. Advertising

The free tier shows ads served by Google AdMob. Google and its advertising partners may collect a device advertising identifier, an approximate location estimated from your IP address, the ads you were shown and what you did with them, and diagnostic and performance data about the app. What Google does with it is described in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services, and the partners are listed in the consent form itself.

Coachinese itself never asks for your location. The app has no location permission and no feature that uses one; anything collected here is collected by the ad partners under the consent you give them, and refusing it changes nothing about the app.

Some of those partners rely on legitimate interest rather than consent for parts of what they do, which means it is on unless you object. You can object to it, and change any answer you gave, through Ad privacy under You — see below.

This is tracking, in the sense the App Store means. With your permission, the advertising identifier lets Google and its partners link what you do in Coachinese with other apps and websites owned by other companies, to choose ads and to measure whether one worked. Our App Store privacy label says so under Data Used to Track You, and lists the three kinds of data it covers: identifiers, usage data and diagnostics. Declining leaves you with ads that are simply less relevant.

Ads never appear between recording and seeing your score.

You can reset or limit the advertising identifier on iOS under Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and on Android under Settings → Google → Ads. Where the law requires your consent — the EU, the UK and some US states — Google’s consent form appears before any personalised ad does, and on iOS the system asks you again through App Tracking Transparency. Declining either costs you no features; the ads are simply less relevant.

Wherever that form appeared, You → Ad privacy reopens it so you can change your answer or withdraw it entirely. Consent you cannot withdraw would not be consent. The row is only there in the regions where the form applies, because elsewhere there is nothing on record to change.

5. Purchases

Subscriptions are processed by Apple or Google. We never see your card details — we receive only a receipt confirming an active subscription.

We use RevenueCat to check that receipt and tell the app whether your subscription is active. It receives the store receipt and an anonymous identifier the app generates for this purpose. There is no account, so that identifier is not tied to your name or email.

6. Analytics and crash reporting

We use Firebase Crashlytics for crash reports and Firebase Analytics for anonymous usage counts, both from Google. Crashlytics collects a crash trace, your device model and OS version. Analytics records which screens are reached and which decks are opened, so we can see where people get stuck.

Neither ever carries anything you produced. No audio, no transcripts, no Chinese characters, no pinyin, and nothing from “Your sentences”. Events carry counts, settings values and deck identifiers that already ship inside the app. There is no account, so none of it is tied to your identity.

The ad SDK keeps its own diagnostics, separately from these, and Google states that it may use them for advertising as well as for fixing the SDK. That is why diagnostics appear under Data Used to Track You on our App Store listing while the crash reports described here do not do anything of the kind.

7. Children

The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

8. Your rights and choices

To delete everything, clear the app’s data or uninstall it. To stop recording, revoke microphone permission in your system settings. To opt out of personalised ads, use the identifier settings above. To request deletion of anything held server-side, email support@coachinese.com.

If you are in the EU or the UK you have rights under the GDPR, and if you are in California under the CCPA — including access, correction, deletion, and objecting to certain processing. Both apply to us: Coachinese is available in those places, so those laws cover you when you use it. In practice most of what they cover sits on your own device already, and deleting the app exercises it in full.

We do not sell or share personal information in the sense the CCPA gives those words.

9. Data retention

Practice data lives on your device until you delete it. Recordings are governed by the retention setting under You → Manage recordings, which offers 30 days (the default), 7 days, or not keeping them at all. Whatever it says, the free tier keeps none: a take is deleted when you leave the card it belongs to.

Audio uploaded for the Premium verdict is not stored by us at all — our server holds it only for the moment it takes to pass it on and return the answer. Google’s own handling of it is governed by the Gemini API terms.

10. Changes to this policy

We will update the date at the top of this page. For material changes, we will also tell you in the app.

11. Contact

support@coachinese.com

If anything here is unclear, email us — we’d rather explain it than have you guess.