MACHINAUT STUDIOS LLC

Privacy Policy for Widgetastrophe

Last updated: September 2, 2026

Widgetastrophe ("the app") is developed and published by Machinaut Studios LLC ("we", "us"). This policy explains what data the app handles. The short version: there is no account and no server of ours. Your contracts, stars, statistics, Daily results, Bolts and settings are written to your phone and stay there. The app requests no permissions of its own. Two things touch the network — the ads, served by Google, and your purchases, handled by Apple or Google.

Information we collect

None. We run no server for Widgetastrophe, 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. 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:

  • settings — sound, music, haptics, the factory palette you picked, whether you asked for reduced motion, and whether the ticker at the bottom of the stage is running;
  • lifetime statistics — shifts played, widgets shipped, revenue, and a count of every way a widget has gone wrong: fires, launches, bee escapes, tears, gunked belts, floaters, mutinies, machines lost, widgets saved, Bailouts taken, your best single widget, and your best Endless day;
  • your Daily Shift results, keyed by calendar date — the day's number, sales, how many of the five days you survived, widgets shipped, and the row of glyphs that day's share card draws; the streak is counted from those dates rather than stored as a number of its own;
  • campaign progress: your best star rating for each of the forty contracts, and which factory palettes you have unlocked with Bolts;
  • your Bolt balance, and the running total you have earned;
  • three saved shifts in separate slots — one campaign contract, one Endless run, one Daily — so opening one can never discard another, and so a shift survives the app being closed or killed;
  • a local flag recording which purchases you own, together with the expiry time of any Quiet Hours window you bought with Bolts.

It is eight keys in your device's ordinary preference store, all of them prefixed wa. — one each for settings, statistics (the Daily ledger lives in that one), campaign progress, your Bolt wallet and your purchases, plus one for each of the three saved shifts. 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

The whole factory is simulated on your phone. All forty contracts across the five districts, the Endless Shift and the Daily Shift ship inside the download; nothing is handed out by a server, and the app does not phone home to find out what today's shift is. The Daily is seeded from the calendar date and the simulation is deterministic to the tick, which is exactly why every player worldwide gets the identical five days and the identical twist. Your shifts, your sales and your disasters are never sent anywhere. Apart from loading ads, Widgetastrophe is fully playable offline, in portrait or landscape, with no account.

Permissions

Widgetastrophe itself requests none. No camera, no microphone, no location, no contacts, no photo library, no notifications. The app's own Android manifest declares not a single uses-permission, and its iOS Info.plist declares not a single usage description. Every entry in the built Android app is merged in from the software development kits it bundles, and this is the whole list, read off the release build's own merged manifest:

  • INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE — loading ads, and noticing when there is no connection to load them over.
  • com.google.android.gms.permission.AD_ID and the three ACCESS_ADSERVICES_* entries — Google's ad SDK, for the resettable advertising identifier and Android's own privacy-sandbox interfaces for attribution and topics.
  • WAKE_LOCK and FOREGROUND_SERVICE — pulled in by the background-work library that Google's ads stack depends on. Widgetastrophe schedules no background work of its own.
  • com.android.vending.BILLING — Google Play Billing, so a purchase can be offered and confirmed.
  • One permission named after the app itself, ending DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION — an Android platform convention that keeps a component private to this app rather than granting it anything.

The share plugin adds a private file provider and a receiver, not a permission, and the audio plugin adds nothing at all. None of these is a runtime permission — not one of them shows you a prompt, and not one of them reaches the camera, the microphone, your location, your contacts, your photos or your notifications.

On iOS there is no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because there is nothing to ask for: the app declares no NSUserTrackingUsageDescription, does not request tracking authorization, and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites. The Info.plist does list fifty SKAdNetwork identifiers. Those are not a permission and grant no access to your device: they are Apple's own install-attribution scheme, which tells an ad network that an install followed an ad without telling anyone which person it was.

Advertising

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

  • Interstitials after a cleared contract — never during a shift, and never anywhere else. Your first three cleared contracts are ad-free entirely; after that an interstitial can appear at most on every second clear, never less than two minutes after the last one, and no more than four times in a session. It is never shown after a bankruptcy or a missed deadline, never after the Daily Shift, and never in the Endless Shift, which has no cleared state to begin with.
  • One optional rewarded ad — the Bailout on the bankrupt screen, offered once per run for players who would rather watch a video than spend Bolts. Nothing makes you watch it; declining just ends the shift.

We hand Google nothing about you, because we have nothing to hand over. 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. Every creative is capped at a general-audience content rating, because the game files an all-ages rating on both stores and an ad has to match the game it interrupts.

Where consent is legally required first — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — Widgetastrophe asks before any of that happens. On first launch, before the ad SDK is even started, 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.

What we declare to the stores

Everything on this list is collected by Google's ad SDK, not by us. We run no server, so there is nothing for us to collect. The two stores ask the question in different shapes, so here are both answers.

Google Play's Data safety section lists four things, all of them the ad SDK's, all of them shared with Google, none of them optional:

  • Device or other IDs — your device's own resettable advertising identifier, and the app-set identifier that sits alongside it.
  • Approximate location — derived from your IP address, at the coarse level an ad exchange uses to pick a country or region. The app never reads your device's location.
  • App interactions — that an ad was requested, shown, or tapped. Not what you did in the factory.
  • Diagnostics — the SDK's own performance, such as how long it took to load an ad.

Apple's App Privacy label answers the same question in its own vocabulary, and lists six, every one of them filed as Data Not Linked to You: Coarse Location, Device ID, Product Interaction, Advertising Data, Crash Data and Performance Data. The first four are used for third-party advertising and analytics; the last two only for analytics. The crash and performance entries are the ad SDK reporting on itself — how long an ad took to load, whether its own code fell over. The app ships no crash reporter of its own and nothing about your game reaches either list.

On both stores the same two things are true. It is not linked to your identity, because there is no identity here to link it to: no account, no login, no name, no email. And it is not used for tracking as Apple defines the word — we do not join it to data from any other company to follow you around, which is why the app has no tracking prompt. Nothing of yours is on either list. Not your progress, not your Bolts, not your Daily results, not a device identifier of ours, and no crash reporter, because the app ships without one.

Purchases

Widgetastrophe offers four things you can buy: a one-time Remove Ads purchase that ends the between-contract interstitials, and three consumable Bolt packs for players who would rather buy Bolts than earn them. Bolts are also earned by ordinary play — clearing contracts, showing up for the Daily, surviving Endless days — and Bailouts, Quiet Hours and every factory palette are priced in Bolts, not money. There is no subscription, and no purchase makes a contract clearable that wasn't. 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.

Sharing a Daily Shift result

The share button hands a short block of plain text — the day's shift number, whether the factory survived, your sales, one glyph per day and your streak — to your device's ordinary share sheet. You choose where it goes. It carries no identifier of you or of your device, it does not pass through us, and we never see it.

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.

Children's privacy

Widgetastrophe is a cartoon factory game. It has no chat, no accounts, no user-generated content, and no way for one player to reach another; the content is suitable for all ages. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included, and we do not knowingly collect it from children under 13 in particular — if you believe a child has provided us with personal information, there is nothing for us to hold, because we operate no server that could receive it. 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, and creatives are capped at a general-audience rating. Ad personalization can be limited in your device settings, and the Remove Ads purchase removes the between-contract ads entirely — the rewarded Bailout ad remains, and remains opt-in.

Your choices

  • 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.
  • In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, reopen the consent form any time from Settings → Ad privacy choices inside the app.
  • Buy Remove Ads to end the between-contract interstitials for good, or spend Bolts on a 24-hour Quiet Hours window.
  • Decline the rewarded Bailout. It is never required — a Bailout you don't take just ends the shift, and every contract can be replayed.
  • Play with the network off. The game works; the ads simply do not load.
  • Delete the app, which removes everything it stored.

Deleting your data

Every piece of Widgetastrophe 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. To erase it:

  1. 1. Android — open Settings → Apps → Widgetastrophe → Storage and tap Clear storage. Every contract star, statistic, Daily result, Bolt, setting and saved shift is erased; the app stays installed.
  2. 2. Android — or touch and hold the Widgetastrophe icon and choose Uninstall. The app and all of its data go together.
  3. 3. iOS — touch and hold the Widgetastrophe 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. Bolt packs are consumable — the Bolts were spent into a wallet that lived on the deleted device, so they do not come back.

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 can be sent to info@machinautstudios.com.