Privacy Policy
Last updated: November 9, 20261. Overview
Astrocean builds lightweight macOS utilities and iOS / watchOS apps. This policy applies to all Astrocean apps and the astrocean.love website. Data handling differs by product and by the optional services you enable. The product-specific sections below explain which data stays on your device and which information is processed by external services.
2. Product-Specific Data Handling
Many app workflows run locally. Optional network features, website services, payments and support requests may require data processing as described below. Statements about one app do not apply automatically to other products. For Dopamine, see section 2g, including our commitment not to collect unrelated data or proactively inspect your statistics or notification content manually.
2a. zizaiRemote (iOS / watchOS) — Bluetooth and Location
zizaiRemote is an iPhone and Apple Watch app that controls compatible cameras over Bluetooth. It uses two device permissions:
- Bluetooth — used solely to scan for, connect to, and send control commands (shutter, zoom, countdown) to your camera. No Bluetooth data is uploaded, stored, or shared.
- Location (When In Use) — only when you explicitly enable "Location Sync" inside the app. Your current location is transmitted directly to your camera over Bluetooth so newly captured photos can be tagged with GPS metadata. Location data is never stored on our servers, never shared with third parties, and is not retained by the app between sessions.
zizaiRemote does not access your photo library, contacts, microphone, or any other system data. It works entirely offline — no network connection is required.
2b. zizai TV Remote (iOS / watchOS) — Local Network
zizai TV Remote is an iPhone and Apple Watch app that controls Xiaomi smart TVs over the local Wi-Fi network. It uses one device permission:
- Local Network — required to discover and send control commands (key events such as direction, enter, back, home, volume, and app launch intents) to a Xiaomi TV on the same Wi-Fi LAN as your device. All discovery probes and control requests are sent directly from your device to the TV's IP address over your Wi-Fi router. No traffic is routed through Astrocean servers.
What is stored locally and what stays local:
- Favorited TVs (display name, IP address, Wi-Fi SSID, optional platform identifier) are stored only on your device, inside an App Group container shared between the iOS app, the Apple Watch app, and the widget extension. They sync between your own iPhone and paired Apple Watch via Apple's standard App Group / WatchConnectivity mechanism. They are never uploaded to any server.
- Custom shortcut sequences (named lists of key events / app launches you create) are stored the same way and remain local.
- Widget configurations (which TV / shortcut a small or medium widget points at) are stored by WidgetKit on your device.
No Xiaomi account, no cloud, no telemetry. zizai TV Remote does not access your photo library, contacts, microphone, or location. It requires no internet connection beyond your local Wi-Fi to function. Siri integration runs entirely through Apple's on-device App Intents framework — voice phrases are processed by Apple under Apple's privacy policy and are not visible to us.
2c. 3Body (iOS) — Camera, Microphone, and Photo Library
3Body is an iPhone camera effect app that turns a countdown, the current time, or a short signal phrase into a glowing dot-matrix effect over live camera video or user-selected media. It uses these device permissions and system pickers:
- Camera — used solely to show the live camera preview and render the dot-matrix effect on top of that preview. Camera frames are processed on your device and are not uploaded.
- Microphone — used only while you record from the live camera, so the saved video can include audio. If microphone permission is denied, recording can still work as a silent video. Audio is written into the local recording file and is not uploaded.
- Photo Library picker — used when you choose an existing photo or video to render with the 3Body effect. The app receives only the media item you select through Apple's picker. It does not scan your full photo library.
- Photo Library Add Only — used to save recorded or rendered results back to Apple Photos when you choose to save them. 3Body does not delete or modify existing photos or videos in your library.
All live camera rendering, selected-media rendering, video export, and saving happen on your device using Apple's AVFoundation, Metal, and PhotoKit frameworks. 3Body has no user accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no cloud sync, and no third-party SDKs. Your camera frames, selected photos, selected videos, rendered outputs, and audio are not sent to Astrocean or any third party.
2d. Remove RAW (iOS) — Photo Library Access
Remove RAW is an iPhone utility that helps you reclaim photo library storage by removing RAW originals and replacing them with a renderable copy — either the embedded JPEG / HEIF when the asset already contains one, or a HEIF transcoded from the RAW via Apple's on-device image pipeline. It uses a single device permission:
- Photo Library (Full Access) — required to scan your library for assets containing RAW resources, export the renderable image data, create the replacement asset, and remove the original. All image decoding and HEIF encoding happens on your device through Apple's PhotoKit and CIRAWFilter frameworks.
Safety design:
- Hidden photos are always excluded from candidate scans and can never appear in the processing list.
- Favorited photos are excluded by default. You may opt them in via an in-app setting.
- The replacement asset preserves the original creation date, location (GPS coordinates), album membership, favorite status, and hidden status.
- The original asset is removed via the iOS system "Recently Deleted" album and remains recoverable for 30 days from within Apple's Photos app.
Network use. Remove RAW has no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party SDKs, no user accounts, and no cloud sync of its own. The only network activity is downloading your own photos from iCloud Photos when you ask Remove RAW to process a photo that is not currently stored on your device. This download is performed by Apple's PhotoKit framework directly between your device and Apple's iCloud, and is required because RAW image data must be locally available to be transcoded or extracted. Your photos are not sent to Astrocean or any third party.
2e. AlbumBee (iOS) — Photo Library Access
AlbumBee is an iPhone library-tidying utility. It helps you find oversized files, process RAW photos (delete the RAW half of a RAW+JPG pair, or transcode a solo RAW to HEIF), compress videos using HEVC, backfill missing location metadata on photos, and view per-day / per-month statistics. It uses a single device permission:
- Photo Library (Full Access) — required to read photo and video metadata, scan for RAW resources, transcode RAW originals via Apple's CIRAWFilter, re-encode videos via AVAssetWriter, write replacement assets back to the library, and apply location metadata edits to existing assets. All processing happens entirely on your device through Apple's PhotoKit, ImageIO, AVFoundation, and Vision frameworks.
What AlbumBee does with your library:
- Metadata-only scans. The main library scan, the big-files Top list, the RAW candidate scan, and incremental refreshes all read only PhotoKit metadata (creation date, modification date, pixel dimensions, file size, media subtype, asset resource list). Your image and video pixel data is never read during scanning.
- Per-asset processing on demand. RAW transcoding, video compression, and original-RAW deletion are triggered only by your explicit action (a confirmation button after a per-job summary). The pixel data of an asset is read only at the moment you start processing that asset.
- Two-phase safety for RAW. RAW processing creates a replacement asset first, the system confirms it was written successfully, and only then is the original (with the RAW resource) removed. The replacement carries over creation date, GPS coordinates, album membership, favorite status, and hidden status. Removed assets go to Apple's "Recently Deleted" album and remain recoverable for 30 days.
- Hidden assets. Hidden photos and videos are always excluded from candidate lists and cannot be processed by AlbumBee.
- Favorites. Favorited photos and videos appear in candidate lists with a visible heart badge; AlbumBee never acts on them without your explicit selection.
- Location backfill. The bulk location-backfill feature reads the GPS coordinates of nearby (in time) photos that already have a location and writes a copy of those coordinates to nearby photos that don't, using the standard PHAssetChangeRequest.location API. Original photos remain in place; only location metadata is updated.
Map rendering. The "Places" tab uses Apple MapKit to display photo clusters on a map. MapKit loads its map tiles from Apple's servers; tile requests are issued by Apple's framework using only the visible map region. AlbumBee does not see and does not forward any of your photo content or location data to Apple beyond what MapKit's tile loading requires. Reverse geocoding (turning coordinates into place names) uses Apple's CLGeocoder; this sends the coordinate to Apple under Apple's privacy policy.
Network use. AlbumBee has no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party SDKs, no user accounts, and no cloud sync. The only network activity is (a) Apple MapKit tile loading and CLGeocoder reverse-geocoding as described above, and (b) downloading your own photos from iCloud Photos via Apple's PhotoKit when you process a photo that is not currently stored on your device (required because video and RAW data must be local to be re-encoded). Your photos are not sent to Astrocean or any third party.
2f. Cheese (iOS) — Camera Connection and On-Device AI
Cheese currently supports Sony Alpha cameras only, with USB / Wi-Fi connection, remote control, live view, AI shooting, and focus assistance. AI processing takes place on your device; images are not uploaded. Cheese has no account login, usage analytics, crash reporting, or other data uploads. Communication with your connected camera is separate from uploading data to a server.
The dedicated Cheese privacy policy explains these practices in English and Chinese, including information you voluntarily send when contacting support.
2g. Dopamine — Data and privacy
Scope and our commitment. This section applies to the Dopamine iPhone app and website statistics and notification services operated by Astrocean for use with Dopamine. Apart from information necessary to provide features you choose to enable, we do not collect additional data unrelated to those features. We do not sell this data or use it for advertising tracking or profiling. We do not proactively inspect your statistics or notification content manually. If troubleshooting requires such access, we will obtain your explicit consent first, except where required by law. This commitment does not exclude the automated processing and storage needed to provide those features.
Apple accounts and on-device data. Your device retrieves the App Store Connect data you authorize directly from Apple. Your Apple API private key, account identifiers and related credentials are stored in the local Keychain and are not sent to us as part of website push registration. The app does not require your Apple ID password or upload App Store financial reports to our servers. App information, reports, reviews and sync state are stored locally with system file protection. The app does not integrate advertising tracking or third-party behavioral analytics SDKs or request location permission. Its map displays countries or regions from reports.
Optional website statistics and notifications. Website statistics connect to a compatible project server you configure; not all data from independently hosted websites passes through Astrocean. The app reads project and app information, download statistics, country or region summaries and events from that server. When you enable website push notifications, the app sends a randomly generated device identifier, Apple push token, platform and push environment, enabled state and detail-display preferences to that server for registration and delivery. The device identifier is not an advertising identifier. The operator of the service you connect handles data under its own policy.
Information processed by services we operate. When you use website statistics and notification services we operate, the server processes and stores the relevant project and app identifiers, download or message event times, titles, bodies, countries or regions, counts, push registrations, notification preferences and delivery status. Our website download statistics also record the file, request and session identifiers, request time, country, network location, request type, browser or operating-system category and referring domain for statistics and deduplication. Notifications are delivered through Apple Push Notification service (APNs), which receives the token and notification payload needed for delivery. Detail-display preferences control what a notification displays; they do not make events already on the server unreadable.
Transport protection and exported backups. Website connections use HTTPS encryption in transit. The current website statistics and notification features are not end-to-end encrypted: the relevant server can process notification content, and we do not claim that reading or decrypting it is technically impossible for us. Historical backups you choose to export are separately encrypted with AES-256-GCM and have an independent recovery key that you must keep safe. The app does not send that backup or recovery key to us. Backups contain apps, reports, reviews, sync state and some account identifiers, but not your Apple API private key or website access token. The service you choose to store or share a backup handles that copy under its own practices.
External services and website visits. The app also connects to report-download locations supplied by Apple and uses Apple’s public lookup service for app icons and version information. Website project icons may come from public HTTPS addresses supplied by that project. When you manually update exchange rates, the app requests rates from open.er-api.com without sending your account or sales reports. These providers receive information needed to complete network requests. Visiting the Astrocean website is separate from using the app: the homepage uses Microsoft Clarity, while the Dopamine product page and this privacy policy page do not include that analytics script. Website hosting providers may process access logs to deliver and protect the site.
Retention, disconnection and deletion. Disconnecting an Apple account removes local credentials and stops refresh for that connection but preserves local historical reports; it does not erase all history. Normally turning off website push or disconnecting a website requests device deregistration from the server. Local connection credentials are removed after a successful disconnection. On services we operate, confirmed deregistration deletes the device registration and cancels pending notifications, but does not delete website event history or statistics. Choosing to remove only the local connection does not deregister the device on the server, and pushes may continue until the project operator acts. Turning off system notification permission also does not delete server data.
Server records and privacy requests. For services we operate, push diagnostics expire after 7 days and sync change logs after 30 days, with cleanup performed in batches. These periods do not apply to business events, statistical history or all delivery records. Those records are retained for historical queries, synchronization and delivery management and currently have no single automatic deletion deadline. To request deletion of data we hold, or help managing local history, contact contact@astrocean.love. For services operated by others, contact the relevant project operator. We will handle requests after verification, except for records that must be retained by law. Backups and copies you export must be deleted separately from their storage locations.
Support you choose to request. If you email us, we receive your email address, message and attachments you choose to provide and use them to respond to your request. Do not send Apple API private keys, website access tokens, backup recovery keys or Apple ID passwords. Troubleshooting that involves viewing statistics or notification content follows our commitment above: no proactive manual inspection, and explicit consent first.
3. Purchase and Payment Data
For Mac apps purchased directly from astrocean.love, payment is processed by Stripe, Inc. We receive only the information necessary to fulfill your order (e.g., email address for license delivery, order ID, and transaction status). We do not store your credit card number or full payment details. Stripe's privacy policy governs the handling of your payment data: stripe.com/privacy. For apps distributed via the Apple App Store (including 3Body, zizaiRemote, zizai TV Remote, Remove RAW, and AlbumBee), all purchase data is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy; we do not receive your personal payment information.
4. Automatic Updates
Mac apps distributed from astrocean.love use Sparkle for automatic updates. When checking for updates, Sparkle contacts our update server and sends your macOS version and app version number. No personal data is transmitted. iOS / watchOS apps are updated through the App Store and are governed by Apple's update mechanism.
5. Website Analytics
The Astrocean homepage uses Microsoft Clarity to understand visits and interactions with the website. This website analytics tool is separate from our apps: Cheese does not include usage analytics, crash reporting, or other data uploads. The dedicated Cheese and Dopamine product pages and our privacy policy pages do not include the Clarity script. Website hosting providers may process access logs to deliver and protect the site.
6. Cookies
Our website remembers your language preference in browser local storage. Website analytics on the homepage may use cookies or similar browser storage. This website storage is separate from the Cheese app and its on-device processing.
7. Data Sharing
We do not sell, rent, or share your personal data with third parties, except as required by law or as needed to provide the features, hosting, support and purchases described in this policy (for example, Apple for push delivery and Stripe for payment processing). The relevant product section describes these data flows.
8. Data Retention
Purchase records (order IDs, email addresses) are retained as required for tax and legal compliance. Product-specific retention and deletion practices, including the distinction between local data and server records for Dopamine, are described in the relevant sections above. You may request deletion of data we hold by contacting us.
9. Children's Privacy
Our apps and website are not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy? Contact us at contact@astrocean.love.