Last updated 15 August 2026

Privacy policy

Violin Skills does not collect, store or transmit anything about you. It has no accounts, no analytics and no advertising. Your microphone audio and your practice history stay on your phone. This page explains that in detail, including the one network request the app does make.

Microphone

The tuner, the scales screen and the intonation trainer need to hear you, so the app asks for microphone permission the first time you open one of them.

Audio from the microphone is read into a short buffer in memory, analysed to work out the pitch, and then overwritten by the next buffer. It is never written to storage and never leaves your device. The app keeps only the result of the analysis — a frequency in hertz — and even that is discarded unless you are in an intonation session, where the resulting score is saved.

You can refuse or revoke the permission; the drone and metronome still work.

What is stored on your device

The app keeps a private record on your phone of your practice sessions (which tool, when, and for how long), your intonation results (the target note and how far off you were, in cents), and your settings such as the reference pitch.

None of it is uploaded. Deleting the app deletes all of it. There is no backup and no sync service.

The one network request

So that fixes can reach you without waiting for a store release, the app checks for a newer version when it starts. That check goes to https://u.expo.dev, a service run by Expo.

The check contains no personal data and nothing about your practice. As with any request over the internet, the service does see your IP address and basic details such as which version of the app you are running. Expo's handling of that is covered by Expo's privacy policy.

Apart from update checks, and links you deliberately tap that open your browser, the app makes no network requests at all.

Permissions, and why each one exists

• Microphone — pitch detection for the tuner, scales and intonation trainer.
• Foreground service & media playback — lets the drone and metronome keep sounding when the screen is locked, which is the whole point of a practice drone.
• Notifications — shows the playback control while audio is running. The app sends no other notifications.

No third parties

There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising network and no social login. No third party receives data from this app, and nothing about you is sold or shared, because nothing about you is collected.

Children

The app is suitable for all ages and collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Verifying any of this

You do not have to take this page's word for it. Violin Skills is free software under the AGPL-3.0 and the complete source is at github.com/simoneb/violin-skills. Every claim above can be checked against the code, and you can build the app yourself.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes and the previous versions remain in the repository's history.

Contact

Questions about privacy: open an issue at github.com/simoneb/violin-skills/issues, or email simone.busoli@gmail.com.