MACHINAUT STUDIOS LLC

Privacy Policy for Clappy Bird

Last updated: September 3, 2026

Clappy Bird ("the app") is developed and published by Machinaut Studios LLC ("we", "us"). This policy explains what data the app handles. The short version, and the one you came here for: the microphone is used only to measure how loud the room is. The audio is analysed on your device, in memory, and is never recorded, never written to a file, and never transmitted anywhere. There is no account and no server of ours. Your scores, coins, birds and settings are written to your phone and stay there. Two things touch the network — the ads, served by Google, and your purchases, handled by Apple or Google.

The microphone

Clapping is the control scheme. There is no touch input during play, so the app needs the microphone the way another game needs the screen — and that makes exactly what it does with it the most important thing on this page.

What it does.

  • It reads the incoming audio in short slices and computes one number per slice: how loud that slice was. That number, and a slow running average of it that stands in for the room's background noise, is the entire contents of what the game knows about the sound around you.
  • When the loudness jumps sharply above that background — a clap, a shout, a snap, a whistle, a thump on the table — the bird flaps. That is the whole of the analysis. The game does not care what made the sound, only that it arrived suddenly.
  • Every slice is discarded as soon as its loudness has been measured. Nothing is accumulated, buffered into a recording, or kept.

What it is not.

  • It is not recording. No audio file is created. Nothing is written to disk, to your photo library, to a cache, or to a backup. There is no "recording" for anyone — you, us, or anyone else — to play back, because none is ever made.
  • It is not transmitted. The audio never leaves your device, because it never leaves memory. There is no upload, no streaming, no cloud analysis, no server of ours to send it to.
  • It is not speech recognition. There is no speech engine, no keyword spotter, no transcription, and no word list anywhere in the app. Words, voices and conversations are indistinguishable to it from a door slamming; all it can tell you about any of them is how loud they were.
  • It is not always on. See below.

When it is open. The microphone opens when you enter the game screen and closes when you leave it. It also closes when the app is backgrounded — put the phone in your pocket mid-run and the mic shuts with it — and reopens when you come back to that screen. It also stops for the duration of any full-screen ad and restarts afterwards. The only other place it ever opens is the Test my mic button in Settings, which you press deliberately, and which stops when you press it again or leave the screen. It is never open on a menu, never open in the background, and never open while the app is not running.

Tuning it. Settings has five sensitivity steps and a live level meter, so you can watch your own clap and pick a step that works in your room. The setting stored is the step number you chose. The meter is drawn from the same single loudness figure described above and is not retained after it is drawn.

Declining it. The app asks for microphone permission through the operating system's own prompt, and honours a refusal: the game screen explains that Clappy Bird needs the mic, tells you exactly where in your phone's own settings to grant it, and leaves the rest of the app working. Nothing about the game will try to talk you around, and there is no alternative control scheme it can fall back to, because there is deliberately no touch control to fall back on. You can revoke the permission at any time in your phone's settings.

Information we collect

None. We run no server for Clappy Bird, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no tracking of any kind — there is no analytics SDK and no crash reporter in the build. There is no account to create and no sign-up: we never ask for your name, email address, phone number, or contacts. High-score entries are three characters chosen off a wheel, kept on your device, and cannot hold anything that looks like a name. We build no profile of you, and we have nothing to sell, rent, or trade. We hold no record that you exist.

What the app stores, and where

Everything the game remembers is written to your device's own local app storage and stays there. That is:

  • your high-score tables — the top ten for each mode, each row being three initials, a score and the date;
  • your coin balance, and how many coins you have earned in total;
  • which birds you own and which one you are flying;
  • your Daily results, keyed by day, and the streak they add up to;
  • lifetime statistics — runs flown, pipes cleared, claps made, and your best run;
  • which Flight School lessons you have finished;
  • settings — sound, haptics, reduce motion, and the microphone sensitivity step;
  • a local flag recording which purchases you own.

That is the complete list, and audio is not on it. None of it is uploaded, backed up to us, or synced between your devices — we have nowhere to sync it to. Deleting the app deletes all of it; see Deleting your data.

The game runs on your device

All 412 courses — the 12 Flight School lessons and 400 daily courses — ship inside the app, already built and already proved flyable. The Daily is identical for every player on a given day because it was baked into the build, not because a server handed it out; your phone never asks anyone which course today is. The physics runs locally at a fixed rate, scores are computed locally, and there is no leaderboard and no matchmaking. Apart from loading ads, Clappy Bird is fully playable offline and in aeroplane mode.

Permissions

Clappy Bird requests exactly one permission: the microphone (RECORD_AUDIO on Android, NSMicrophoneUsageDescription on iOS), for the reason described in The microphone above. No camera, no location, no contacts, no photo library, no notifications, no speech recognition. The other entries that appear in the built app belong to the software development kits it bundles: ordinary network access for loading ads, the advertising-identifier and ad-services entries that come with Google's ad SDK, and Google Play Billing for purchases. None of those are runtime permissions — none of them shows you a prompt.

Advertising

Clappy Bird is free, and ads are what pay for it. They are served by Google AdMob. There are two kinds:

  • Interstitials between runs — shown only as you leave a game-over screen, never during flight. Your first five lifetime runs are ad-free entirely; after that an interstitial can appear at most on every third run, never less than 90 seconds after the last one, and never more than four times in one session.
  • An optional rewarded ad — one revive per run, if you want it. It is offered, never forced: you choose to watch, and declining it simply ends the run. You can also pay for the same revive in coins you earned by playing.

We hand Google nothing about you, because we have nothing to hand over, and no audio or microphone data is involved in an ad in any way. But an ad network is still a network. To select, deliver, measure and cap ads, Google's SDK receives information from your device directly — typically device model and operating system, language, coarse location derived from your IP address, your device's resettable advertising identifier, and which ads were shown and interacted with. Depending on your device settings and your region, that information may be used to personalize the ads you see. Google's handling of it is governed by the Google Privacy Policy and How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services. What comes back to us is an aggregate dashboard — impressions and revenue — never anything about an individual player.

Where consent is legally required first — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — Clappy Bird asks before any of that happens. On first launch, before a single ad is requested, the app presents Google's consent form through the industry-standard UMP framework and honours what you choose. Decline personalization and the ads still appear, because they are what pay for the game, but they are selected without using your data to profile you. You are not stuck with your first answer: wherever that consent is required an Ad privacy choices row appears in the app's Settings screen and reopens the same form whenever you want. Outside those regions the row is deliberately absent rather than present-but-dead — a control that opens nothing is worse than no control at all.

Purchases

Clappy Bird offers four things you can buy: a one-time Remove Ads purchase that ends the between-run interstitials, and three consumable coin packs for players who would rather buy birds than fly for them. Coins are also earned by ordinary play, one per pipe cleared. Birds are cosmetic only — nothing you can buy changes how the bird flies, and a test in the build asserts that no property of a bird skin can reach the physics. There is no subscription. Purchases are processed entirely by the store you downloaded the app from — Apple's App Store on iOS, or Google Play Billing on Android. We do not receive or store your payment details, card information, or billing address. On iOS, payment handling is governed by the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions and the Apple Privacy Policy; on Android, by the Google Play Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy. The app stores only a local flag for what you own, and "Restore purchases" asks the store, not us.

High scores

Beat a mode's best and the game asks for three initials. That table is a file on your phone. There is no leaderboard, no ranking, no friends list, no account, and nowhere for a score to be uploaded to — the initials exist so the table looks like an arcade cabinet, not so that anyone can be identified. Nobody else can see your scores unless you show them your phone.

Data sharing

We do not sell, rent, or trade your data, and we have none to share. The only third parties in the picture are Google, whose AdMob network serves the ads described above, and Apple and Google as the stores that distribute the app and process payments. No third party receives audio, microphone data, or anything derived from the microphone, because none of that leaves your device.

Children's privacy

Clappy Bird is a bird that flies through pipes. It has no chat, no accounts, no user-generated content, and no way for one player to reach another; the only thing a player enters is three characters chosen off a wheel. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included, and the microphone handling described above applies to every player equally — nothing heard is kept or sent. The part worth a parent's attention is advertising: ads come from Google's network, which receives the device information and advertising identifier described above and may use it to personalize what is shown. Ad personalization can be limited in your device settings, and the Remove Ads purchase removes the between-run ads entirely — the revive ad remains, and remains opt-in.

Your choices

  • Revoke the microphone permission at any time in your phone's settings. The game will tell you it cannot be played without it, which is the truth, and nothing else in the app will stop working.
  • On iOS, limit ad personalization in Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising, and stop apps from asking to track you in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.
  • On Android, reset or delete your advertising ID in Settings → Privacy → Ads.
  • Buy Remove Ads to end the between-run interstitials for good.
  • Decline the revive ad. It is never required; the run simply ends, which is how an endless flyer is supposed to work.
  • Play with the network off. The game works completely; the ads simply do not load.
  • Delete the app, which removes everything it stored.

Deleting your data

Every piece of Clappy Bird data lives on your device, so you delete it yourself and it is gone. There is no account for us to close, no copy on a server, and no request to file with us. There is, in particular, no audio to delete, because none was ever stored. To erase the rest:

  1. 1. Android — open Settings → Apps → Clappy Bird → Storage and tap Clear storage. Every score, coin, bird, streak, statistic and setting is erased; the app stays installed.
  2. 2. Android — or touch and hold the Clappy Bird icon and choose Uninstall. The app and all of its data go together.
  3. 3. iOS — touch and hold the Clappy Bird icon, tap Remove App, then Delete App. This removes the app along with everything it stored. (Choosing Offload App instead deliberately keeps the data.)
  4. 4. Either platform — that is the entire procedure. Nothing about you exists off the device, so there is nothing left to request, revoke, or wait on.

Purchases are the one exception, and they are not ours to delete: the record of what you bought is held by Apple or Google. Deleting the app does not cancel a purchase, and reinstalling and tapping "Restore purchases" brings Remove Ads back. Coin packs are consumable — the coins were spent into a wallet that lived on the deleted device, so they do not come back.

Third-party content in the app

The bird, the scenery and the interface sprites are from the CraftPix "Birdy Bird" asset pack, used under the CraftPix Premium file licence, which permits commercial use and requires no attribution or royalty — this acknowledgement is here because we think it is polite, not because we owe it. The typeface is Londrina Solid, used under the SIL Open Font Licence; the licence text ships inside the app and can be read from Settings → Open-source licences, alongside the licences of every open-source package in the build. Every sound effect in the game was synthesized in-house. None of these involve a third party receiving anything about you: they are files in the app bundle, not services.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by updating the "Last updated" date above.

Contact

Questions about this policy — especially about the microphone — can be sent to info@machinautstudios.com.