First Word Privacy Policy

Effective date: 2026-10-02

First Word is a word-association game for Android, published under the package name com.firstword. This policy covers that app.

The short version

First Word collects no data. It sends no data. It cannot send data: the app is built without permission to use the internet, so your phone's operating system blocks it from making any network connection at all. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising, and nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing being gathered in the first place.

Why "cannot" rather than "does not"

Most apps promise not to send your data. First Word is incapable of it. Android only lets an app use the network if it declares the INTERNET permission, and First Word does not declare it. Without that permission, Android keeps the app out of the group of processes allowed to open network connections, and the system refuses any attempt at the lowest level. This has been verified on a real device against the built app.

The practical difference: even if a bug or a bad dependency ever tried to send something, the attempt would fail. The claim does not depend on the code behaving well. It depends on a permission the app does not have.

What the app stores, and where

Everything the app remembers lives on your phone:

• Your run history: the words you were shown, your answers, your hesitation times, and each run's summary statistics.
• Your settings: text size, haptics, run length, round duration, and similar preferences.
• Your theme choice.

All of it is stored in the app's private storage on the device. Automatic backup to Google Drive is switched off in the app, so this data is not copied to the cloud by Android either. You can clear your run history inside the app (History > Your data > Clear history), and uninstalling the app removes everything.

There is no microphone in this app. It never records your voice, has no permission to do so, and never will. You answer by tapping, and the app times your tap.

The two things that can leave your phone, both started by you

• Sharing a result. If you tap share, the app draws a result card image and hands it to Android's share sheet. You pick where it goes. The card contains only what the result screen shows, and the app itself transmits nothing.
• An optional tip. Settings has an optional Support development screen where you can leave a tip. Tips are handled by the Google Play Store app on your phone. This app still has no internet permission and never sees your payment details. Google Play processes tips under Google's privacy policy. The app stores nothing about a tip, and a tip unlocks nothing, because nothing is locked.

No ads, no trackers

The app is free. It contains no advertising, no subscriptions, no analytics library, no crash reporting, and no third-party SDK that communicates with anyone, apart from Google's Play Billing Library, which is there only for optional tips. There is no AI-generated content in the app.

Children

First Word is a general-audience app and is not aimed at children. Whoever uses it, the answer is the same: the app collects nothing from anyone.

Changes

If a future version of the app ever changes what this policy describes (for example, by adding any network feature), this policy will be updated first and the effective date above will change.

Contact

Questions about privacy: christos@sudo-ezekiel.com