Privacy Policy — Pip & Patch
For parents and carers. Pip & Patch is a gentle village-building and story game made for children aged about 6 to 9. It has no accounts, no sign-in, no chat and no way to share anything with other people. Everything your child makes and every adventure they finish is stored only on the device. We do not collect your child's name, email, photos, voice, location or any other personal information, and we cannot see anything they do in the game.
The game is free to play with a small number of child-safe ads, and one optional purchase — made by a grown-up — unlocks the rest of the story and turns the ads off.
What the game stores on the device
The village layout, decorations and buildings, which friends have moved in, activity and story progress, keepsakes and scarves, the saved paintings made in the art studio, sunshine points, and the sound, movement and read-aloud settings. All of it lives in the app's own storage on the device. It is never uploaded, and uninstalling the app or clearing its data removes it.
Read-aloud
"Read it to me" uses the speech engine built into the phone or tablet (Android Text-to-Speech or Apple's speech synthesis). The words are spoken on the device; the game does not record audio and has no microphone permission.
Advertising
Pip & Patch shows ads supplied by Google AdMob: a banner on the title screen only, and occasionally a full-screen ad between story adventures — never during an activity. Every ad request is marked as coming from a child-directed app, is limited to content rated suitable for general audiences, and is non-personalised: no interest-based or behavioural advertising and no remarketing.
The Android version does not request the Advertising ID permission, and the iOS version never asks for tracking permission (App Tracking Transparency), so no advertising identifier is shared. To serve an ad, Google still receives limited technical information such as the IP address, device model and operating system, which it uses only to deliver the ad, count it and prevent fraud. Google's handling of this is described in Google's Privacy Policy and its child-directed treatment documentation.
The optional purchase
"The full Friendship Festival" is a one-time purchase that opens story chapters 2–5 and removes the ads. Before any purchase screen appears, the game asks a grown-up question that a young child is unlikely to answer. The purchase itself is made through Google Play Billing on Android or the Apple App Store on iOS, using the device owner's account; we never see or receive payment details.
So the game knows the purchase is active, its status is checked through our billing provider, RevenueCat. This involves the store's purchase/receipt record and an anonymous identifier RevenueCat assigns to the installation — no name, email or other personal detail. A purchase can be restored from the grown-up settings after reinstalling.
Permissions
- Internet — to load ads and check the purchase status. The whole game works offline; ads and purchases simply wait for a connection.
- Billing — for the optional purchase through Google Play or the App Store.
The game does not request location, camera, microphone, contacts, photos, storage or advertising-ID permissions.
No links out, no social features
There are no links to websites, social networks or other apps inside the game, no chat, no user profiles and no way to send or receive messages or pictures.
Children's privacy
Pip & Patch is directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and the game is designed so that it has no way to. If you believe any personal information about your child has reached us, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes
If this policy changes, the Last updated date above changes with it.
Contact
admin@appforgedigital.com.au