In plain words
Better runs on your iPhone. Your website's analytics go from Google straight to your phone and stop there. We never see them, we never store them, and there is nothing of yours for us to sell, share or lose.
Better asks Google for read-only access. It cannot change anything in your Google Analytics account, and it never asks for anything outside it.
Who we are
Better is made by an independent developer, operated as a sole proprietorship from Bengaluru, India. You can reach us at pyxelapps@gmail.com. Better is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Google. Google Analytics is a trademark of Google LLC.
What Better asks for
When you sign in with Google, Better requests one scope:
https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly. That is read-only
access to the Google Analytics properties you already have access to. It also reads
your name, email address and profile picture from your Google account, which is what
Google returns when you sign in, so the app can show whose account is connected.
With Better Pro you can sign in with more than one Google account. Each one is asked for exactly the same scope, on Google's own screen, and each is kept separately.
Better cannot create, edit or delete anything in your Google Analytics account. It does not request access to Gmail, Drive, Contacts, your calendar, or any other Google service.
Where your data goes
Your iPhone talks to Google's Analytics APIs directly. The reports come back to the app and are cached on the device so the screen is not empty the next time you open it, and so the widget can draw without a network call. That cache lives in the app's own storage on your iPhone and is covered by the device's encryption.
Better also keeps your website's history on your iPhone: its figures day by day, week by week and month by month, back to the day your property began counting, with the sources, countries, pages and key events in them. It is read from Google once, when you first open All time, and then a few closed days at a time. It stays so that Better can tell you about records and firsts without asking Google again, and so months Google may later stop returning are not lost. It lives in the app's own storage, is covered by the device's encryption, and goes into your iPhone's own backup with the rest of the app's data.
Your Google sign-in tokens are held in the iOS Keychain, one entry per Google account, by AppAuth and GTMAppAuth, the open source libraries Google's own sign-in is built on. We never transmit them anywhere except to Google.
No Better server ever sees your analytics. We operate no analytics pipeline and no database of your data. Your website's traffic figures are never sent to us and we could not read them if we wanted to. The one thing we run is a small wake-up service for notifications, described below, and it knows nothing about your website.
The only other places your iPhone connects to
- Google. For sign-in and for the Analytics reports you asked for.
- The websites in your own reports. Where a traffic source has a website, Better fetches that site's favicon from the site itself so the row has a recognisable mark. This means those sites can see a request from your device, the same as if you had visited them in a browser. Better never uses a third-party favicon service, because that would tell a stranger which sites send you traffic. Better fetches each referring site's public icon directly from that site, and nothing else is sent.
- Better's wake-up service. Only when notifications are on, to register your iPhone's push token so it can be woken to check. See Notifications.
- Apple. To place a dot on the map for a visitor's city, Better asks Apple's geocoder to turn a city name such as "Berlin, Germany" into a coordinate. Only the city name is sent. Apple's handling of that request is covered by Apple's own privacy policy. Results are cached on your device so the same city is only ever looked up once.
What we do not do
- No analytics SDK, no tracking, no advertising identifiers, no ads.
- No third-party crash reporting or telemetry.
- No selling, renting or sharing of any data. There is nothing to sell.
- No account with us. Better has no login of its own.
The only third-party code in the app is Google's own sign-in library, which is there to sign you in to Google.
Apple Intelligence
Better's insights are computed by its own engine on your device, from the numbers Google returned. If you switch on "Write insights with Apple Intelligence" in Settings, Apple's on-device language model rewords those insights. It runs on your iPhone and the numbers do not leave it. The setting is off by default, and everything works without it.
Notifications
Every notification is written by your iPhone, from numbers it read from Google itself, and shown by your iPhone. No notification's words pass through us.
When notifications are on, Better's wake-up service sends your iPhone a silent push a couple of times an hour, so it can check your website sooner than iOS would otherwise let it. The push carries no content. For that, the service stores five things: your iPhone's push token from Apple, a random id Better made on your phone, a fingerprint of a random code also made on your phone, so that only your phone can change or delete its entry, whether the app is a test or App Store build, and your time zone, so it can stay quiet at night. It stores nothing about your website, your Google account or you. Turn notifications off in Better, or sign out, and your phone asks the service to delete its entry; one that goes unused for 30 days is deleted anyway. The service runs on Cloudflare Workers.
If you have scheduled summaries switched on, the service also stores which ones (morning briefing, evening wrap, weekly, monthly and year in review), the hour you picked for each, and the date each was last sent. At that hour it sends a notification with general wording such as "Yesterday's numbers are ready". Your iPhone then reads your analytics itself and writes the numbers into that notification. The service never sees them.
If you turn on hourly checks, the service also stores that choice. Once an hour between 8 am and 10 pm in your time zone, it sends your iPhone a notification with the general wording "Checked your website." Your iPhone looks at your analytics itself and replaces that wording with what it found.
What Apple tells us
If you install Better through the App Store or TestFlight, Apple may give us the usual aggregate developer reports: download counts, and crash logs if you have chosen to share analytics with developers in your iPhone's settings. That is Apple's system, not ours, it is aggregated, and it does not identify you. You can turn it off in Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements.
Limited Use
Better's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data received from Google APIs is used only to provide and improve the features you can see in the app. It is not used for advertising, it is not sold, and it is not transferred to anyone else, except where you direct it or where the law requires it.
Your rights, and how to remove everything
- Sign out in Better's Settings. This clears the cached reports, the stored history and the stored tokens from your device. With several accounts, swipe one to sign just that account out, along with the history of its websites.
- Clear cached data in Better's Settings, to empty the cache and the stored history while staying signed in.
- Delete the app. iOS removes its storage with it.
- Revoke Better's access to your Google account at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. You do not need to ask us.
Because we hold nothing, there is no data for us to export, correct or delete on your behalf. If you are in the EU or UK and want to exercise a right under the GDPR, or in California under the CCPA, write to us and we will explain exactly what exists and where, which in almost every case is: only on your own device.
This website
betteranalytics.app sets no cookies and runs no analytics. The homepage shows a satellite map from Apple Maps behind the text, so your browser loads that map from Apple, the same as any website with an Apple map on it. Apple's handling of that request is covered by Apple's own privacy policy. Nothing you do on the page is sent to us, because there is nowhere for it to go.
Children
Better is a tool for people who run websites. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the previous versions stay in the page's public history. If a change materially affects how your data is handled, we will say so in the app.