Privacy Policy — Becoming
Last updated: 8 October 2026
Becoming turns photos you already have into a timelapse. This policy describes exactly what the app does with your data. It is short because the app does very little.
The short version
Your photos never leave your phone. There is no account, no sign-up, no server of ours, and no cloud storage. Every photo you import or take, and every video the app makes, stays on your device until you delete it or uninstall the app.
What stays on your device
- Your photos. When you import photos, Becoming copies them into its own storage on this phone. Your originals in your gallery are never modified or deleted.
- Capture dates. Read from each photo's own metadata so the timeline is in the right order.
- Face and body landmark positions. Coordinates like "the left eye was at this point in this photo", computed on the device by Google's ML Kit, which runs entirely offline. These are numbers describing positions in your own photos. They are stored so the app does not have to recompute them, and they are not a face template usable to identify you elsewhere.
- Your settings, such as your reminder time and any days you marked yourself away for.
All of this lives in the app's private storage.
Android's own automatic backup is switched off for this app. By default Android copies an app's private files to the user's Google Drive; for a photo app that would mean your progress photos leaving the phone without either of us deciding to, which would make the sentence above untrue. It is disabled in the app's manifest instead.
The consequence is deliberate and worth knowing: your photos do not travel to a new phone by themselves. Use Settings → Your archive before you switch devices — it writes every photo from every project into a folder you pick, alongside a manifest.json that names the projects, the days and the app version that wrote them, so the same screen can read the whole thing back in on the new phone. Uninstalling Becoming deletes everything it stored.
Keeping a backup folder up to date (optional)
After an export you can ask Becoming to keep that folder up to date. Android then lets the app write to that one folder, and no other, until you turn it off on the same screen or delete the folder. Each new photo is copied in, a photo you delete in the app is deleted there too, and manifest.json is rewritten to match. Nothing is sent to us. Where the folder lives is your choice: if you pick a folder that a cloud app syncs, such as Google Drive, your photos go wherever that app sends them, under that app's terms.
The home-screen widget
If you add the widget, Becoming writes a small file with your project's name, the calendar days you took a photo on, and any days you marked yourself away for. It stays in the app's private storage and nothing else can read it; the widget reads it to draw itself, because a widget is redrawn by Android when the app is not running.
It is worth saying plainly what a widget is: the project name and the day number are then visible on your home screen, to anyone who picks up your phone or looks over your shoulder. No photograph is ever drawn in it. If that is not what you want, do not add it — and removing it from the home screen stops it immediately.
What we do not do
- We do not upload your photos anywhere.
- We do not have an account system, so we hold no name, email or password.
- We do not use analytics or tracking SDKs.
- We do not show ads.
- We do not sell or share your data with anyone, because we do not have it.
- We do not use your photos to train any model.
Permissions
- Camera — requested only when you first take a photo in the app, so you can shoot your daily photo. It is not used at any other time.
- Photos — Becoming uses Android's system photo picker. That means the app receives only the photos you explicitly select, and it does not request permission to read your gallery.
- Notifications — requested only when you switch the daily reminder on. The reminder is scheduled and delivered entirely by your phone; nothing about it is sent anywhere, and no server of ours is involved. Turning the reminder off cancels every pending one. If you start a free trial and notifications are already allowed, the phone also schedules one note two days before the trial ends; the app never asks for the permission for it.
The one thing that does leave your phone: payment
Becoming Plus is sold two ways: a yearly subscription, which may start with a free trial, and Forever, a single payment. Either purchase is processed by Google Play and validated through RevenueCat, our purchase-management provider. Your card or other payment details go to Google only; we never see them. To confirm that a purchase belongs to this installation, RevenueCat receives:
- an anonymous identifier generated for your installation,
- the purchase receipt issued by Google Play, and from it your purchase history for this app: which plan, when it started, and when it renews or ends,
- and basic device and app information such as platform, app version and country, which their SDK sends automatically.
Like any network request, this one carries your device's IP address, which RevenueCat's servers see and use to derive that country. We never see it.
This does not include your photos, your name, or your email address. If you never make a purchase, the app still contacts RevenueCat on launch to ask whether this installation has an entitlement — so this request happens even if you never pay.
The identifier is anonymous and is not linked to you, so there is nothing for us to look up on your behalf. To have the record removed entirely, email the address at the bottom of this policy from the device in question and we will ask RevenueCat to delete it.
- Google Play's privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
- RevenueCat's privacy policy: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy
Your control over your data
- Take everything out. Settings → Your archive writes every photo, at full resolution, into a folder you pick, with a
manifest.jsonbeside them — so you are never locked in, and the folder is readable by Becoming on another phone as well as by anything else that opens a JPEG. Export all originals on the same screen writes the photos without the manifest, for when you only want the files. Choosing the folder is the only permission involved in either, and neither export sends anything to us. The app keeps access to a folder only if you ask it to keep that folder up to date, and only to that folder. - Delete everything. Settings → Delete everything removes every photo, project and setting the app holds, immediately. Uninstalling does the same. We hold no copy anywhere, because we never had one — so this is permanent, and exporting first is the only way to keep anything. Folders you exported to are yours and are left as they are; a folder being kept up to date stops being kept.
- Since we hold no account and no personal data on any server, there is nothing for us to delete on your behalf and no data of yours for us to produce on request.
Children
Becoming is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. Because the app collects no personal data at all, it holds no information about any user, of any age.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and any change that affects what leaves your device will be announced in the app before it takes effect.