Privacy policy
In short. Nibblings needs no name, email or phone number. Your account is a random number. Your hamster's room lives on your phone, and our server keeps your Seeds, your hamsters' DNA and a backup of the room so nothing is lost if you change phones. Meetups go directly from phone to phone. We use crash reports and anonymous usage statistics to fix and improve the app. No ads, no tracking across other apps, no selling of data.
1. Who is responsible
Nibblings is made by Florian Mueller, an individual developer who publishes apps as Lit Dog Labs ("we", "us"). Address: Muehlenstr. 62, 10243 Berlin, Germany. We decide how the app uses personal information and are the controller under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
For questions about this policy or your rights, write to contact@lit.dog. We are established in the EU, so we have no separate EU representative, and we have not appointed a data protection officer. The supervisory authority responsible for us is the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (Berliner Beauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit), Alt-Moabit 59-61, 10555 Berlin, Germany.
2. What stays on your phone
The room, your hamsters (their names, looks, ages and memories), your items and settings, the scrapbook's words and its photos, and the friends' hamsters you met are saved in the app's own folder on your phone. Scrapbook photos are snapshots of the room drawn by the app, never the camera. This folder is part of your phone's own iCloud or computer backup, which Apple and you control. Deleting the app deletes it.
The home screen widget shows your hamster using information the app shares with it on your phone; nothing about the widget is sent to us. Morning hello reminders are scheduled on the phone; we do not use push notifications.
3. What the app asks for
| Permission | When and why |
|---|---|
| Local network | When you first open the little door, so the app can find a friend's iPhone nearby for a meetup. |
| Nearby Interaction | During a meetup, to measure how close the two phones are. The distance is used on the phones and not stored. |
| Motion | During a meetup, to feel a gentle bump between two phones that cannot measure distance. |
| Camera | Only if camera assistance is switched on for a meetup, to help Nearby Interaction find the other phone's direction. No image is kept or sent. |
| Notifications | Only if you turn on the morning hello, for one local notification a morning at the time you choose. |
Nibblings does not use your location, contacts, photo library, microphone or advertising identifier.
4. Meetups
When two phones meet, they talk directly to each other over Apple's MultipeerConnectivity, encrypted by the framework. They exchange the hamster's name and DNA, the phone's display name (so "Lena's iPhone" can be shown as "Lena"), whether the room has space for a pup, your random account id (so a name can be reported and a player blocked), and timing details for the meetup. The meetup itself does not go through our server. Your phone keeps the friend's hamster's name and DNA so its card can show who it met.
If a pup is born, the app tells our server the meetup's id and the other hamster's DNA (not its name or its owner), so the server can check the pup and count births.
5. Your account and what our server keeps
At first launch the app quietly creates an anonymous account on our server. Apple's App Attest proves that requests come from the real Nibblings app on a real iPhone. You do not need to sign in. If you choose Sign in with Apple, we ask Apple for no name and no email address; we only receive Apple's random identifier for you in this app, which lets you bring your room to a new phone.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| A random account id, when the account was created, and your age range (under 13, 13-15, 16 or older, or unknown) | The account, and the age rules described in section 9. The age range comes from Apple's Declared Age Range answer on your phone. We never share it with anyone. |
| Apple's Sign in with Apple identifier, if you link it | Restoring your account on a new phone. Linking is needed before you rehome a hamster on the adoption board. |
| App Attest key information and the device link between keys and accounts; sign-in tokens (stored only as hashes) | Keeping your account secure, keeping you signed in, and preventing two accounts on one phone from trading with each other. |
| The Seeds ledger: every change to your Seeds with its reason, daily rewards given, items bought | Your Seeds are kept by the server, so they survive a new phone and cannot be faked. |
| Seed bag purchases: transaction id, product, price, currency, test or real purchase | Adding each purchase exactly once, and handling refunds. |
| Hamsters: DNA, birth time, generation, parents, where it came from and its past owners (as random account ids). Not the names you give them | The adoption board, the shelter, pups and family trees. |
| Adoption board listings: the hamster, the price, times and who adopted it | The adoption board. Other players see a hamster's DNA name (like "Lilac Teddy #LIL-7F3A"), its looks, generation, number of owners and price. They never see the name you gave it or who you are. |
| A backup of your room: the save file with your hamsters' names, the scrapbook's words, friends' hamsters you met and your settings. Not the photos | Bringing your room to a new phone. |
| Name reports: the reported name, whether it was a hamster's or a player's name, the hamster's DNA, the reason, the reporting account and the other player's account id | Reviewing reported names. If a name breaks the rules, we replace it with a preset name. |
| Blocks: which accounts you blocked | Blocked players can't meet you again, and their custom names are hidden for you. |
| Invites: your invite code, and who joined through whose invite | Invite links, and the Seeds both friends get for an invite. |
| Unusual activity and operator actions (which account, what happened) | Preventing fraud and abuse, undoing trades after a theft, and handling refunds. |
Your invite link (nibblings.lit.dog/i/…) carries a short code tied to your account and nothing else. When a friend joins with it, our server records that their new account came from your invite.
6. Crash reports and anonymous usage statistics
Crash and error reports. When the app crashes or something fails, the app sends a report to Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) so we can fix it. A report contains the type of error, a filtered error message, where in the code it happened, the app and iOS versions, the device model, and your random account id, so we can tell whether the same problem keeps happening to one person. Our server also sends Sentry alerts about unusual activity (for example a refunded purchase or a trade at the price ceiling) with the account id and the amounts involved. Reports do not contain your hamsters' names, the scrapbook, screenshots or screen recordings. Sentry keeps them for at most 90 days.
Usage statistics. The app sends anonymous usage events to PostHog (PostHog Inc., EU cloud, data stored in Frankfurt, Germany), so we can see which parts of the app are used and where people get stuck. An event is a name from a fixed list in the app, for example that the adoption board was opened, with at most a few non-personal details. Events carry a random analytics id created on your phone, which is separate from your account id and never joined to it. We ask PostHog to discard IP addresses and not to build person profiles. The app uses no automatic tap capture, no session replay and no advertising identifier, and never sends your age range, your hamsters' names or anything you write. PostHog keeps events for 1 year.
7. Who else receives information
We do not sell personal information, share it for advertising, or track you across other companies' apps and websites.
| Service | What it does |
|---|---|
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Hosts our server, its databases and this website. It handles the data in section 5 and the network information needed to deliver requests. |
| Apple | Handles App Store payments, Sign in with Apple, App Attest and the Declared Age Range answer, under Apple's own terms. We never see your payment details. |
| RevenueCat, Inc. | Processes Seed bag purchases for us. It receives your App Store purchase records and your random account id, and tells our server which purchases to credit. |
| Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) | Crash and error reports, and server alerts (section 6). |
| PostHog Inc. (EU cloud) | Anonymous usage statistics (section 6). |
| Google Workspace | Hosts our email. When you write to contact@lit.dog, it stores your email address and your message so we can answer. |
We may disclose information when the law requires it, or when necessary to establish or defend legal claims.
8. Why we use information (EU and UK legal bases)
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| The account, Seeds, Seed bags, the adoption board, the shelter, meetup pups and the room backup | Performance of our contract with you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) |
| Age-based limits | Our legal obligations to protect minors (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR) and our contract with you |
| Security, App Attest, fraud and abuse prevention, name reports | Our legitimate interest in a safe, fair game (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) |
| Crash reports and anonymous usage statistics | Our legitimate interest in finding bugs and improving the app (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) |
| Keeping purchase records | Tax and accounting law (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR) |
| Answering your emails | Our contract with you, or our legitimate interest in answering (Art. 6(1)(b) or (f) GDPR) |
9. Age
Nibblings is rated 13+ on the App Store. On iOS 26 and later, the app asks Apple's Declared Age Range whether you are under 13, 13 to 15, or 16 or older; you can decline, and Apple does not tell us your birthday. If you are under 13, the app runs in a restricted mode: no Seed bags and no adoption board, so Seeds are only earned by playing. From 13 to 15, Seed bags and adoptions have lower limits. The age range is stored only to apply these rules and is never shared, including with our analytics provider. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information beyond what is described here, write to contact@lit.dog and we will delete it.
10. How long we keep information, and deleting your account
We keep your account data until you delete your account. To delete it, open your hamster's card, tap Keep [name] safe, then Delete account. This deletes the account on our server and the room on your phone at once, including unspent Seeds. You can also write to contact@lit.dog.
What is deleted: your wallet and Seeds ledger, items, hamsters, the room backup, sign-in and App Attest records, your Sign in with Apple link, your blocks and your invite code.
What is kept, without anything that names you: hamsters that are part of another player's family tree stay there as "a hamster who moved away"; records of verified Seed bag purchases under the old random account id, as long as tax and accounting law requires (up to 10 years in Germany); and fraud, name report and operator records, for as long as needed to investigate abuse. Crash reports and usage events are not linked to the deletion and expire on their own (section 6).
Deleting the account does not delete Apple's own records of your purchases. Refunds for App Store purchases are handled by Apple.
11. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you can ask to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your information, restrict or object to its use, and withdraw any consent. Write to contact@lit.dog. Because your account is anonymous, we may ask you for something that shows the account is yours, such as details of a Seed bag purchase or of your hamster. We answer within one month. You can also complain to a data protection supervisory authority, in particular where you live or work, to the Berlin authority named in section 1, or in the UK to the Information Commissioner's Office.
If you live in a US state with a consumer privacy law, such as California, you have the right to know, access, correct and delete your personal information. We do not sell or share personal information for targeted advertising, and we will not treat you differently for using your rights.
12. International processing and security
Some of our providers are based in the United States and may process information there. Where EU or UK transfer rules apply, we rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified recipients or on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK Addendum). Requests between the app and our server are encrypted, sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes, and access to our systems is restricted. No system is perfectly secure; we will notify you and the authorities of a breach where the law requires.
13. This website
nibblings.lit.dog uses no cookies, no analytics and no third-party content. Cloudflare, which hosts it, processes your IP address and request details to deliver the pages and protect them from attacks.
14. Changes
When we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If a change affects how we use information you have already given us, we will tell you in the app.