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This policy explains what data the Lingo Reign mobile application ("the app") handles. The app is developed and published by Roberto Amadio ("we", "us").
We run no analytics, and your progress lives on your device. The app signs you in to Google Play Games Services, which stores your achievements, your leaderboard scores and a copy of your game progress under your Google account.
Four things are also stored by us, in a Google Firebase project: an optional account — an email address and a password — which exists only to hold your place on the standings board, and which the game is complete without; the public standings row that account holds, carrying your monarch's name, four figures describing how you have played and the level you have reached in each language; anything you choose to send through the petition box; and, while you play a duel or melee online, the short-lived room that carries the match. All four are described below. Everything else that leaves your device is handled by Google — Play Games Services, advertising and payments. A duel played over Bluetooth leaves your device only as far as the phone across the table.
The app saves your game progress locally — current run state, unlocked content, gem balance, settings and whether your ad-free subscription is active. This data is stored in the app's private storage on your device. It is not readable by other apps, and it is not sent to us. Uninstalling the app deletes this local copy; the cloud copy held by Play Games Services is separate and is removed as described under Play Games Services.
The app uses Google Play Games Services. On Android, Play Games signs you in automatically when the game starts, unless you have turned automatic sign-in off in the Play Games app. We do not see your Google account credentials at any point.
Through this service the following is stored under your Google account, on Google's servers:
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in Italian while studying Korean).Leaderboards are public. Unlike your achievements and cloud save, a score you submit is visible to other players, shown next to the gamertag on your Play Games profile and next to the language pair described above. Nothing else reaches Google's boards: not your monarch's name, not the words in your codex, and nothing you have typed. Your monarch's name does appear on our own board, described under the standings board. If you would rather not appear on Google's boards, you can decline or turn off Play Games sign-in, as described below; the game plays identically, and no score is sent to Google. Our own board is governed separately, by whether you take the optional account — Play Games sign-in no longer writes a standings row, and turning it off does not remove one.
The cloud save contains game progress only. It holds no name, email address, contact details or location, and nothing you type. Google's handling of Play Games data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.
Play Games Services is optional in practice: if you decline sign-in, or play on a device without it, the game runs exactly as before — progress is kept on the device only, and no achievement or cloud save is sent.
Play Games is no longer how the app identifies you to us. It carries your achievements and your cloud save and nothing else: it does not create, hold or unlock the account described next, and the two are not connected. Your badges and your saved game hang off your Google account; your standings row hangs off the email address you sign in with, if you choose to have one.
You can create an account inside the game, in Settings, under Your seat. It exists for one purpose: to hold your place on the standings board, so that the row carrying your figures and your monarch's name is recognisably yours when you reinstall the app or move to a new phone. It is the only account this app has, and creating one is entirely your choice.
What is stored, and by whom: the email address you type and a hash of the password you choose are held by Firebase Authentication, a Google service, in our Firebase project. A password hash is not the password, and we cannot read your password from it. We can see the email address in the Firebase console, where it is the identifier of your account and nothing more. The address is used to sign you back in, and — only if you ask for it with "Forgotten the watchword?" — to send you a password-reset link.
Your email address is never shown to another player. It is not written into your standings row, not into your cloud save, not into a petition, and not into a multiplayer room. Nothing on the public board is derived from it. We do not use it to send you anything else, and it is not shared with anyone or used for advertising.
The game is fully playable without it. Every language, every card, every reign, the achievements, the cloud save, duels and melees, and reading the standings board all work with no account at all. What you give up by not having one is a row of your own on our board.
In the game, open Settings → Your seat and choose "Abdicate for good". This deletes the account — the email address and the password hash — from Firebase Authentication. It cannot be undone, and it does not touch your Play Games achievements or your cloud save, which are held under your Google account and are deleted as described under Play Games Services. If you only want to sign out and keep everything, use "Step down" instead, which leaves the account, the row and the name exactly as they are.
Two consequences of deleting are worth stating plainly. Your monarch's name is released and becomes claimable by another player. Your standings row is not deleted: the database rules give no app any permission to delete a standings row, which is what stops one player erasing another's, so the figures you have already published stay on the board, carrying the monarch name as last written, but no longer attached to any account that exists and no longer traceable to one. If you want that row taken down as well, write to the address at the foot of this page and we will remove it.
The same four figures the leaderboards hold are also written to a database of ours, a Google Firebase project. They are kept there for one reason: so the standings can be shown somewhere other than inside an Android app — on this website, and in the game on devices where Play Games is unavailable.
If you hold an account, the app writes one row for you. It contains:
Monarch names are unique, so the app also keeps a short record of which names are claimed and by which account identifier. That record is what lets the game tell you a name is already taken while you are still typing it.
This row is public. Anyone can read the standings, in the same way anyone can read a Play Games leaderboard. It holds no email address — not the one you sign in with — no contact details, no location, no advertising identifier, and nothing you have typed apart from your monarch's name.
It is written only while you are signed in to the account described above. Create none and no row is ever written; the game plays identically, and you can still read the standings — reading them requires no account at all. To have a row that already exists removed, write to the address at the foot of this page.
If you send word to the court from inside the game, the message is stored in the same Firebase project, along with the category you chose, the language pair you were playing, the app version, your Android version, and an anonymous account identifier used to recognise repeated submissions. Petitions are not readable by the app or by anyone but us. A name is attached only if you switch on the option to sign it; unsigned is the default, and an unsigned petition carries no name at all.
The game can be played against other people: a duel of two, or a melee of up to six. There is no matchmaking and no list of strangers to play against — a match exists because one player opens a room, reads out its five-digit code, and the others type it in. A match can travel two ways, and you choose which on the screen where you open it.
Here the phones talk to each other directly, using Google's Nearby Connections service over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Direct. Nothing about the match passes through our servers or anyone else's — no account is needed, and it works with no internet connection at all. What one phone broadcasts while looking for the other is the five-digit code and nothing else: not your monarch's name, not your languages, not your progress. Once connected, the phones exchange only what the match needs — in a melee, that includes the monarch's name each player chose, shown to the other players at the table.
Here the match is carried through the same Firebase project as the standings board. A room is a short-lived set of records under its five-digit code, holding:
Rooms are temporary. When you leave, your phone deletes its own messages and its seat on the way out. If the app is killed mid-match — a crash, a dead battery — those records can be left behind; they expire from relevance in hours, but if you want leftovers of a match of yours removed from the database, write to the address at the foot of this page.
Playing online requires a Firebase sign-in of some kind, so that the room can tell whose writes are whose. If you hold an account it is used; if you do not, the app signs in anonymously and silently for the match, which asks nothing of you and creates no account you could sign in to. Playing over Bluetooth requires neither an account nor a network.
The app shows optional rewarded video ads, supplied by Google AdMob. To serve and measure those ads, Google may collect and process information such as your device's advertising identifier, IP address, device and operating-system details, and ad interaction events. We do not receive this information in an identifiable form; we only see aggregate reporting such as impression and revenue totals.
Google's handling of this data is described in the Google Privacy & Terms and the AdMob policies. You can limit ad personalisation in your device settings (Android: Settings → Google → Ads), or remove ads via the in-app subscription or lifetime purchase described in the Terms and Conditions.
In-app purchases and the ad-free subscription are processed entirely by Google Play. We never see or store your payment details. Google provides us with a purchase record used only to tell whether your subscription is currently active, so the app knows whether to show ads, and to restore it if you reinstall the app. The app re-checks this with Google Play rather than keeping its own record of what you paid. See the Google Privacy Policy for how Google handles payment data.
Internet access is required to load ads, to verify purchases, to sync achievements, leaderboard scores and your cloud save with Play Games Services, to sign in to your account and publish the standings row, and to carry online duels and melees.
Nearby-device permissions (Bluetooth and nearby Wi-Fi) exist for one feature only: finding the phone across the table when you play a duel or melee over Bluetooth. The app asks for them at the moment you open one, never before, and playing online instead asks for none of them. On Android 13 and later these permissions are declared with the system-enforced promise that they will not be used to derive your location. On Android 12 and 12L only, the system still gates nearby Wi-Fi discovery behind the location permission, so the app must ask for it there to offer same-room play — it reads no location, and on every later Android version it does not hold the permission at all.
The app does not request access to your contacts, camera, microphone, files, or any other sensitive permission.
The app is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided personal information through the advertising services above, please contact us and we will assist in raising the matter with Google.
The front page carries a playable demo of the game. It runs entirely in your browser: the cards are part of the page itself, nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is written to storage, and reloading the page discards everything you did. The site sets no cookies and loads no analytics, advertising or other third-party scripts.
Access to the closed test is granted through a Google Group, lingo-reign-closed-tester@googlegroups.com. Joining it is entirely your choice, and it is the only part of this site that asks anything of you.
The group is run by Google, not by us, so joining is a transaction between you and Google Groups, which records the membership under the account you join with. We, as the group owner, can see the email address of each member, and use it for one purpose only: Google Play reads the membership list to decide who may install the test build. That list is not exported, not used to send you anything, and not shared with anyone.
You can leave at any time from your groups, which removes your address from the list and ends your access to the test build. Google's handling of Groups data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be published at this address with a new "last updated" date. Material changes will also be noted in the app's store listing.
Questions about this policy: llamadio.develop@gmail.com