Privacy Policy

Squeeze the Orbs · effective 18 September 2026

Squeeze the Orbs is made by Bendigo Games, an independent developer in Australia. This policy covers the iPhone app and the Android app, both of which carry the identifier com.chan.games.squeezetheorbs. Contact: support@bendigogames.com.

There is no account, no advertising, no purchase of any kind, and nothing that identifies you. The iPhone app reports anonymous usage statistics — how long a game lasted and how it went — and you can switch that off in Settings. Everything else the game knows about you, your scores and your gem collection, stays on your phone.

What changed, and when

Until 18 September 2026 this app made no network requests at all, and this page said so. The iPhone version released after that date includes an analytics component, described below, so that we can see how long games last and whether people come back — the two questions that decide what gets built next. The previous policy promised that any such change would be posted here, with a new date, before the version that made it was released. This is that posting. Nothing else about the app's handling of your data changed: there is still no account, still no advertising, still nothing sold or shared, and the new reporting can be turned off in one tap.

Anonymous usage statistics

The iPhone App Store version includes Google Analytics for Firebase. It reports, anonymously:

• That the app was opened, and how long it was used for
• That a game started, and which of the two modes it was
• How a game went when it ended: the score, how far up the tiers it got, how many gems and lanterns came out of it, the longest chain, how many seconds it lasted, and whether it ended by spilling or by being crushed
• The app version, the device model, and the iOS version
• A country or region, worked out by Google from a masked IP address. The app never asks iOS where you are and has no location permission
• An app-instance identifier, which Firebase assigns to each installation. It identifies a copy of the app, not a person, and a reinstall produces a new one

That list is exhaustive: the game sends two events of its own, one when a game starts and one when it ends, and the rest is Firebase's own automatic session reporting. It is used to understand how many people play, roughly where in the world they are, whether they keep playing, and whether the game's difficulty is anywhere near right. It is not linked to your identity, it is not used to track you across other apps or websites, and it is never sold or shared for advertising.

How to turn it off

In the game, tap the Settings button on the title screen and switch off Anonymous stats. Reporting stops immediately — not just the two game events but the session reporting with them — and the choice is remembered on your device. Everything in the game keeps working exactly as before; nothing is withheld from you for turning it off.

What is not collected

To be specific rather than leave it to inference, the app does not collect any of the following:

• Name, email address, phone number, or any other contact information
• Precise location, or any location from your device's location services. The country figure described above is derived by Google from a masked IP address, and is the only geographic information that exists
• The advertising identifier (IDFA). The app is built with the Firebase analytics component that excludes advertising-identifier support altogether, which is why the app never shows a tracking permission prompt
• Photos, contacts, calendar entries, files, or any other device content
• Crash reports or diagnostics — there is no crash-reporting service in the app
• Purchase history — the game is free and contains no purchases of any kind
• Anything you type — the game has no text entry anywhere in it

Permissions it asks for

The app never shows you a permission dialogue. On iOS it requests no permission of any kind: no location, no camera, no microphone, no photos, no contacts, and no tracking prompt. The Android build declares internet access, which Android grants without asking and which the analytics component needs; it declares no permission that requires your consent, and the advertising identifier permission is explicitly removed from it. If you are ever shown a permission dialogue in this game, something is wrong and we would like to hear about it.

What is stored on your device

The game keeps a small amount of your own progress on the phone, using the operating system's ordinary app-preferences storage — NSUserDefaults on iOS, SharedPreferences on Android. That is the whole list:

• Your best score and the number of runs you have played, in each of the two modes
• The deepest tier you have ever reached
• Your gem collection: how many of each gem you have banked, and a capped list of the runs that earned them — each one a date, a score, and a count
• Your sound and haptics settings, including the gem bell's tuning
• Your anonymous-statistics choice, if you change it
• Whether you have already been shown the how-to-play screen

None of it identifies you and none of it is sent anywhere. It is not part of the usage statistics described above: your scores are on your phone, and the score attached to a finished game is reported as a number with nothing attached to it. We cannot read what is on your phone, and we could not retrieve it if you asked us to.

There is no way to erase this from inside the app. Deleting the app deletes all of it, which is the only mechanism either platform gives us and the only one we use.

Device backups

The app never backs anything up itself. However, if you have turned on your phone's own whole-device backup — iCloud Backup or a computer backup on iOS, Google's backup service on Android — the operating system may include app preferences in it, and this app's saved scores and collection would be part of that. That backup is made by your phone, held under your own account, and governed by Apple's or Google's privacy policy rather than this one. Nothing in it is sent to us, and we have no access to it.

Third parties

There is no advertising, no social integration, no crash reporting, and no third-party software development kit that collects anything about you other than Google Analytics for Firebase, described above. Google processes that data on our behalf as our analytics provider; see Firebase's privacy information and Google's privacy policy. No data is sold, and none is shared for advertising.

The app is built with Flutter. Besides Firebase it includes exactly two third-party software packages, neither of which collects or transmits data:

• shared_preferences — a thin wrapper over the operating system's own local preference storage, described above. It has no network component.
• flutter_soloud — an audio engine. It plays sound through the device's speaker and does nothing else. It has no network component and does not use the microphone.

Worth stating because it is unusual: the app ships with no asset files at all. There are no images and no sound recordings inside it. Every pixel it draws and every sound it makes is computed on your device while you play, from code that ships inside the app. There is nothing to fetch, and nowhere to fetch it from — the game itself is still entirely playable with the phone in aeroplane mode, and nothing is withheld when it cannot report.

Children

The game is suitable for all ages. It has no violence, no text entry, no chat, no user-generated content, no links that leave the app, and no purchases. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13: the usage statistics described above are not personal information, carry no identifier tied to a person, and are never used for advertising or for any profile. On that basis the app complies with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

Your rights

Data-protection laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you the right to access, correct, delete, and know what is done with personal data held about you. We hold no personal data about you: the usage statistics are anonymous and carry no name, email, account or advertising identifier, so there is no record we could connect to you in order to produce it, correct it, or delete it. Nothing has been sold or disclosed to anyone. If you want the reporting to stop altogether, the switch described above does it immediately and without asking us. If you would like any of this confirmed in writing, email the address below and you will get it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes — for example, if a future version of the game adds a feature that needs data — the revised policy will be posted on this page, with a new date, before that version is released. This page will keep working for as long as the app is available, and after.

Contact

Squeeze the Orbs is made by Bendigo Games. Questions about this policy, or about privacy in the app, go to support@bendigogames.com and get a reply from a person.

Last updated: 18 September 2026