Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 10, 2026

Your photos and projects stay on your device unless you back them up

Everything you create in Boxlapse — your projects, your daily photos, and the timelapse videos stitched from them — is stored on your device. We run no servers of our own and hold no copy of your data, and the contents of your frames are never tracked, analyzed, or shared.

The one thing that sends your photos anywhere is cloud backup, and you decide whether it happens. Backup is off until you pick a destination — Google Drive or, on iPhone, iCloud — and switch it on for a project. When you do, the files go to your Drive or your iCloud, under your own account; they never pass through us. Both are described in detail below, and turning backup off stops any further uploading.

No ads, no behavioural analytics, no Boxlapse account

Boxlapse contains no advertising and no product analytics. Nothing records which screens you open, which features you use or what you photograph, and there is no Boxlapse account to create — the app works fully without signing in to anything. The only sign-in in the app is the optional Google sign-in for Drive backup, described below.

The one thing that leaves your device without you asking is crash reporting, and to be exact about it: as well as sending a report when the app actually errors, it sends a short anonymous session record each time the app starts and stops — including when you come back to it after it has been in the background for more than about half a minute — so we can tell what share of sessions ended in a crash. Because that record is tied to your installation, it does tell us how often that copy of the app is opened; what it does not tell us is anything about what you did while it was open. Crash reporting below describes both of them in full.

Google user data (Drive backup)

Google Drive backup is opt-in. If you choose it as your backup destination, Boxlapse asks you to sign in with your Google account and requests a single OAuth scope, https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive.file. That scope grants an app access only to files it creates itself in your Drive. Boxlapse therefore cannot see, list, open or modify any other file in your Google Drive, and it asks for no other Google scope.

For each project you enable backup on, Boxlapse uploads to your Drive:

• the project's frames — the photos you captured, the originals kept behind any edits, and the intro clip if you added one — copied byte for byte, not re-encoded;
• a small manifest.json describing the project itself: its name, its dates, its settings, and the per-frame edit details the app needs to rebuild it;
• an index.json listing what has already been uploaded, so an interrupted backup can pick up where it left off.

These land in a normal, visible folder called Boxlapse Backups in your Drive, one subfolder per project. The purpose is only this: so that a lost, wiped or replaced phone doesn't take a years-long series with it, and so you can restore your projects onto a device. Boxlapse does not use this data for advertising, does not sell it, does not transfer it to anyone else, and no human reads it. The email address shown as "connected as" in the app is read from Google purely to display which account is linked, and is stored only on your device.

Retention is in your hands: the files live in your own Drive, owned by your account, for as long as you keep them. The backup is a mirror, so a frame you delete in the app is removed from Drive on the next backup, and you can delete the Boxlapse Backups folder from Drive yourself at any time. Disconnecting the account in the app stops all further uploads, asks Google to revoke the app's access and clears the stored credentials from your device; you can also revoke that access yourself from your Google account permissions page.

Boxlapse's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

iCloud backup

On iPhone you can choose iCloud instead. It is opt-in in exactly the same way, and it copies exactly the same project files — frames, originals, intro clip, manifest and index — into Boxlapse's own app container in your iCloud Drive, where they belong to your Apple account. iCloud then uploads them on its own schedule. Boxlapse does not read anything else in your iCloud Drive, the data is used only to back up and restore your projects, and turning backup off stops further copying. It is a mirror here too, so a frame you delete in the app is removed from the container on the next backup, and you can delete Boxlapse's data from iCloud Drive yourself. Apple's handling of what is stored in your iCloud account is covered by Apple's privacy policy.

Crash reporting

To find and fix bugs, Boxlapse sends an automatic diagnostic report when the app crashes or hits an unexpected error, using Sentry. These reports are hosted in the European Union (Sentry's EU region). A report contains only technical diagnostics: the error and its stack trace, your device model and operating-system version, and the app version. It never includes your photos, your projects, or anything you create, and it isn't linked to your identity or used to track you. File paths that could reveal a name are stripped before a report leaves your device. See the Sentry privacy policy for how they process this diagnostic data.

Crash reporting also measures release health — the share of app sessions that end in a crash — and that is the one thing sent when nothing has gone wrong. Each time the app starts, stops, or comes back from the background after more than about half a minute, it sends a session record. The fields it carries are: a randomly generated session id, and whether this is the first record for that session; an anonymous installation identifier, tied to the installed copy of the app rather than to you or to any account; when the session began, when the record was sent, and how long the session had lasted; whether it ended normally, in a crash, or was cut short, and how, if it was; how many errors happened during it; the app version and which kind of build it is; and, as with any request over the internet, the IP address it was sent from. Those are all of its fields — unlike a crash report, a session record carries no device model and no operating-system version. It contains no photos, no project data, no screen or feature usage, and no history of what you did in the app. What it does show is how often a given installation is opened, which is what release health is worked out from: whether a release is crashing more than the one before it.

Subscriptions

If you subscribe to Boxlapse Pro, the purchase is processed by the store you bought it from (Apple's App Store on iPhone, Google Play on Android); we never see your payment details. To know whether your subscription is active, the app uses RevenueCat, which processes your purchase receipt and an anonymous app user ID — nothing that identifies you personally, and nothing about your photos. See the RevenueCat privacy policy for how they handle that data.

Changes and contact

If this policy ever changes, the update will be posted here. Questions? Email support@boxlapse.com.