Privacy Policy for Advent Beam

Advent Beam collects no personal data. There are no accounts, no advertising, and no analytics or tracking software. To pay the musicians whose recordings it plays, the app counts how often each recording is played, without your name, your account, or your device. Everything else you do in the app stays on your phone.

This policy covers the Advent Beam iOS app. The website you are reading it on is a separate thing with different rules, and there is a short note about it at the end.

What stays on your device

The app saves your activity locally so it is there next time. None of it is uploaded, synced to iCloud, or shared with anyone:

• Bookmarked and recently viewed hymns
• Set lists you build, and your presentation history
• Custom slides and saved scripture passages you write or share in
• Photos, videos and logos you add to your themes, except while you share with Sing Along (below)
• Recent searches
• Settings, appearance, and typography preferences
• Your subscription status, and how much of the free trials you have used
• Crash reports, kept for 30 days. They leave your phone only if you choose to share one from Settings.

Hymn recordings you download are cached on the device too. You can remove all of it at any time by deleting the app.

What leaves your device

Requests to fetch content. The app asks our content service for hymn text and metadata, and downloads hymn recordings from a content delivery network. These requests carry no name, no account, no device identifier, and nothing about what you have saved.

As with any request over the internet, the servers that answer them can see the requesting IP address and which hymn was asked for. Our recording server keeps a count of requests for each recording, with no IP address and no location.

Listen counts. When a recording has played for 30 seconds, the app counts one listen, and from time to time it sends these counts to our server as totals: which recording, the date, whether it was a subscriber or a free play and on which plan, and whether it was played on its own, shuffled, in order, or under the words on a screen. The counts carry no name, account, device identifier, or location, and nothing in them can say who listened to what. We use them to pay the musicians for the recordings people play, and to show them how their music is used.

While you share with Sing Along, the words on your screen, your slide colors and background choice, and the display name you picked go to Advent Beam’s server so people with your link can follow along. So their screens match yours, your theme’s own pictures go too: its background photo (a still frame, for a video), its standby picture and its logo. The pictures are deleted when you stop sharing. If your phone can’t reach the server, the room deletes them on its own 12 hours after its last message, and our storage clears anything older than a day as a backstop. Settings › Sing Along › Session log shows each picture sent and when it was deleted, and can ask the server to confirm they are gone. Nothing else is kept once you stop. If your phone never says it stopped, a room is cleared 12 hours after its last message. Your phone gets a random room number the first time you share, so your link stays the same each week. The server keeps that number and a scrambled copy of your phone’s key to it, so no one else can take your link. Neither is tied to your name or your Apple ID.

Searching happens entirely on your device, against content already downloaded. Your search terms are never sent anywhere.

Purchases

Advent Beam Premium is a subscription that unlocks presenting and the hymn recordings. Purchases are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never see or receive your payment details or your Apple ID, and the app checks your subscription on the device itself. The only part our server sees is the plan label on the listen counts above (monthly, yearly, or free plays), which says nothing about who you are.

Permissions

The app asks for two permissions, both optional, and both only when you turn on the feature that needs them.

• Location, to calculate your local sunset for Sabbath times. It is requested once, at reduced accuracy, and the result is kept on your device and never transmitted. You can skip it entirely and enter your sunset time by hand instead.
• Local network, so nearby phones with Advent Beam open can see that you’re sharing and join with one tap. This carries your display name and the name of what’s on screen. The slides themselves come through the link above.

The app does not use the camera, the microphone, your contacts, your calendar, or push notifications. Importing a background uses the system photo picker, which gives the app only the item you pick and never access to your library.

What Advent Beam does not do

• No accounts, sign-in, or email collection
• No analytics software, and no usage measurement beyond the anonymous listen counts above
• No automatic crash reporting
• No advertising, ad networks, or third-party trackers
• No advertising identifier, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because there is nothing to track
• No iCloud or CloudKit sync
• No third-party software development kits of any kind
• No selling of data. Listen totals are shared only with the musicians whose recordings were played, and never identify anyone.

Children

Advent Beam is safe for all ages. It collects no personal information from anyone, so it collects none from children.

Changes to this policy

If the app ever starts collecting something, this page will say so before that version ships, and the date below will change.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or anything else, go to info@adventisthymns.com.