NeverLeaves — Privacy Policy

Last updated 22 August 2026

NeverLeaves is a fantasy role-playing game made by Derek Soltis. It is built so that it does not need to know who you are, and it does not ask. There is no sign-up, no email address, no password and no social login.

What the game stores about you

• An account identifier. A random identifier created on your device the first time you open the game, and kept in your phone's secure storage. It is not derived from your name, your email, your phone number or any device serial. It is the only thing that ties your progress to you.
• A device key. A second random value kept on your device, so that nobody else can claim your account by guessing its identifier. The server never stores the key itself — only a one-way hash of it.
• Names you choose. A display name, and the name of the character you create. These are free text and are shown to other players in the shared world.
• Your progress. Your character's level, health, gold, possessions, quests, and where they are standing in the fictional world.
• What you said in the game. When you speak to a character in the world, the words you type are sent to Google's Gemini API, which writes what happens next. Please do not type anything into the game that you would not want processed by Google.
• A portrait, if you upload one. Optional. See below.
• Purchases. Which items you have bought, so the game can give you what you paid for.

Where you have walked, and why it never leaves your phone

The in-game map can clear its fog over places you have actually walked. This is optional and off until you allow it.

• Location is read only while the game is open and on screen. NeverLeaves does not request background location and cannot read your location when you are not looking at it.
• A reading is immediately rounded to a grid tile of roughly 50 metres and the exact coordinates are discarded in the same step. What is kept cannot reconstruct a route finer than that grid.
• None of it is ever sent anywhere. The tiles are written to your device's own private storage and read back by the map. The NeverLeaves server has no route that would accept them and does not know where you are.
• Deleting the app deletes the trail with it.

Speaking instead of typing, and why your voice never leaves your phone

You can say what you do out loud instead of typing it. This is optional, appears only on phones that can do it offline, and asks for the microphone the first time you press it.

• The recognition happens on your phone. NeverLeaves asks Android for on-device recognition and will not accept anything else. On a phone that can only recognise speech by sending audio away, the microphone button does not work at all — the game tells you so and you type instead. There is no quiet fall back to a network recogniser.
• No audio is recorded, kept or uploaded. Not by the app, not to the NeverLeaves server, not to Cloudflare. Nothing writes an audio file, and the server has no route that would accept one.
• The microphone is on only while you are holding a turn open, and stops by itself when you stop speaking.
• The words go into the text box, not into the world. What was heard is written into the same box you would have typed into, and nothing is sent until you press Act — so you can read it and fix it first. Once you do press Act, those words travel exactly as typed words do, which is described above.

Portraits you upload

You may choose a face for your character from a drawn library, or upload your own image. An uploaded image is stored on Cloudflare's storage and is shown only to you — other players see a drawn portrait instead. You can replace it at any time, and deleting your account deletes the image.

Who else is involved

• Google — Play Billing handles payments; Gemini generates the story from what you type; AdMob serves advertisements. Google receives advertising and device identifiers in order to show ads. See Google's own privacy policy at policies.google.com/privacy.
• RevenueCat — records which purchases belong to which account identifier, so that a purchase survives a reinstall. See revenuecat.com/privacy.
• Cloudflare — hosts the game's server and storage.

NeverLeaves does not use an analytics SDK, does not sell or share personal information, and has no advertising partners other than Google AdMob.

Payments

Purchases are handled entirely by Google Play. NeverLeaves never sees and never stores your card number, billing address or any other payment detail.

Advertising

The free game shows occasional advertisements between fights. Buying the ad-free upgrade stops them. Ad personalisation is controlled by Google and by your Android settings, not by this app.

How long it is kept

Your account and progress are kept while your account exists. Delete your account and it is removed as described on the deletion page. Records that tax and payment rules require Google or RevenueCat to keep are held by them under their own policies.

Children

NeverLeaves is not directed to children under 13 and is not designed or marketed for them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

dj@soltis.info