Privacy Policy
App: Pill Ringer (Android)
Developer: Rj Creatz
Contact: support@pillringer.com
Effective date: 1 September 2026
Last updated: 1 September 2026
The short version
Pill Ringer keeps everything on your phone.
There is no account. There is no password. You never sign up, and you never sign in. The app has no server of its own, and it does not send your medicines, your doses, your photos or your name anywhere. There is no advertising in it and there is no analytics or tracking in it.
The app is free and it stays free. If you choose to support it with a payment, that payment is handled entirely by Google Play. Pill Ringer never sees your card, your name or your address — Google tells it only that a purchase happened, and that fact is written on your phone and nowhere else. Supporting the app changes nothing about how it works, and you never have to.
If you want all of it gone, uninstall the app. That is the whole deletion process. Nothing is left behind on a server somewhere, because it was never sent to one.
The rest of this page explains that in full, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What the app keeps, and where it keeps it
Everything below is written into a small database file inside Pill Ringer's own private storage area on your phone. Android does not let other apps read that area. It is not a shared folder, and it does not appear in your photo gallery or your file browser.
For each medicine you add:
- The name you typed.
- The dose you typed - for example "1 tablet" or "5 ml".
- The form you picked: pill, capsule, syrup or injection.
- When you take it: the clock times, or the days of the week, or "as needed".
- The colour and shape of the pill, if you chose them.
- How many you have left, if you told the app.
- A photo of the medicine, if you added one.
For each dose:
- Whether you tapped Taken or Skipped, and the moment you tapped it.
- If you chose to add one: how you felt afterwards - "good", "a bit off" or "bad" - and a short note in your own words. Both are optional, both are blank unless you fill them in, and you can clear them at any time. The app only stores what you typed. It never interprets it, never draws a conclusion from it, and never shows you advice based on it.
The app only stores the doses you actually answered. It does not write a record for every dose of every day.
Your settings:
- Your first name, if you chose to give one during setup. You can skip that step.
- Whether you are using the app for yourself or for someone else.
- Your reminder preferences - how often a follow-up repeats, and how many times.
- A note that you read and accepted the disclaimer, and the date you did.
- Small housekeeping marks, such as which setup steps you have completed.
Behind the scenes:
- The identifiers Android gives back for the reminders the app has booked, so that editing a medicine cancels exactly the right alarms.
That is the complete list. Apart from the optional note you can attach to a dose, there is no diary and no symptom log. There is no health condition field, and nothing about your doctor, pharmacy, insurance or payment.
What the app does not do
- It does not create an account for you.
- It does not ask for your email address, your phone number or your date of birth.
- It does not send or receive your information over the internet. The app needs no internet connection to work at all, and an automated test refuses to build it if any networking code appears in it. The one exception is a payment: if you choose to support the app, Google Play handles that, and it is told only that a payment happened.
- It does not handle your payment details. If you support the app, Google Play takes the payment and Pill Ringer is told only that it happened. Google's own privacy policy covers that transaction.
- It does not tell anyone who supported it. That is one row on your own phone, it is never transmitted, and its only effect is that the app stops asking.
- It does not contain advertising software.
- It does not contain analytics, crash-reporting or tracking software.
- It does not read your contacts, your location, your messages or your call history. It does not ask for those permissions at all.
- It does not sell or share your information with anyone, because it does not have your information.
Photos of your medicines
You can add a picture of a medicine so you can tell three white tablets apart at a glance. You can take that picture with the camera, or choose one you already have.
The picture is shrunk down and saved into Pill Ringer's own private folder on the phone. Location information is deliberately stripped from it, so a medicine photo does not carry the place it was taken. It is never uploaded. It is never written into your gallery, which also means that tidying up your camera roll cannot delete the picture of your pills by accident.
Delete the photo in the app, or delete the medicine, and the file is deleted from the phone with it.
Scanning a prescription label
Pill Ringer can read a US prescription label with the camera so you do not have to type the details in.
This happens entirely on your phone. The text is read by Google's ML Kit text recognition running on the device itself. There is no cloud reading step and no fallback to an online service - if the on-device reader is unavailable, the app tells you so and asks you to type the medicine in by hand. It does not quietly send the picture somewhere else instead.
The photograph of the label is put in a temporary folder, read, and then deleted straight away. It is not kept and it is not added to your medicine's photo.
Whatever the scan reads is shown to you as a suggestion to check and correct before anything is saved. Cameras misread small print, so nothing goes in until you confirm it.
Backups
Pill Ringer can write a backup of your medicine list, your dose record and your settings.
The backup is an ordinary file saved inside the app's own private folder on your phone. It stays there. It is not uploaded and it is not sent to us. The app keeps the five most recent backups and quietly deletes older ones.
You can choose to send a backup somewhere yourself, using the Share button next to it. That opens your phone's normal share sheet, and you pick where it goes - your own email, a notes app, a cloud drive. That only ever happens because you tapped it. Once a file has left through that share sheet, it is in the hands of whichever app or service you sent it to, and that service's own privacy policy applies to it from then on. We have no way to reach it.
The doctor's report
The History screen can make a PDF report of your medicines and how often you took them, for a doctor's appointment.
The PDF is created on the phone. You can print it, or send it through your phone's share sheet, exactly like the backup above. The same thing applies: it only leaves the phone because you chose to send it, and after that it is governed by whatever you sent it to.
What appears on your lock screen
Reminders show the name of the medicine and the dose. Android puts that on the lock screen, so anyone who can see your phone screen when it rings can read the medicine's name. That is deliberate - a reminder you cannot read is not a reminder - but you should know it.
If you would rather it were hidden, you can change it in your phone's own settings: Settings > Notifications > Notifications on lock screen. That is an Android setting, not one inside Pill Ringer.
Android permissions, and why each one is asked for
Pill Ringer asks for the following, and nothing else.
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS) |
To show the reminder at all. Without it the app cannot ring. You are asked for this during setup. |
Alarms and reminders (SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM, USE_EXACT_ALARM) |
So a 8:00 reminder arrives at 8:00. Without exact alarms Android is free to hold a reminder back for a long time to save battery, which is the exact failure this app exists to prevent. |
Full-screen notification (USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT) |
So a dose reminder can take over the screen the way a phone alarm does, instead of sitting silently in the notification tray where it is missed. |
Start at boot (RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED) |
Android forgets every scheduled alarm when the phone restarts. This lets the app put your reminders back after a reboot, so they do not silently stop. |
Vibrate (VIBRATE) |
So the reminder can vibrate as well as ring. |
Keep the screen awake (WAKE_LOCK) |
So the phone can wake up enough to sound a reminder while it is asleep. |
Ignore battery optimisation (REQUEST_IGNORE_BATTERY_OPTIMIZATIONS) |
So you can tell Android not to put Pill Ringer to sleep. Android's battery saving is the single most common reason a reminder never arrives. The app only ever opens your phone's own settings screen and asks - you decide, and you can say no or change it later. |
Camera (CAMERA, asked only when you use it) |
Two things, both optional: photographing a medicine, and reading a prescription label. Both are handled on this phone. Nothing is uploaded. |
| Photos (asked only when you use it) | To let you pick an existing picture as the photo of a medicine. The app reads the one picture you choose. It does not browse, index or upload your gallery. |
None of these permissions is used to gather information about you. There is nowhere for that information to go.
Security
Pill Ringer's database, its photos and its backups live in the app's private storage area. On Android, that area is not readable by other apps you install.
To be plain about the limits: the app does not add a password, a PIN or its own encryption layer on top of that. It relies on your phone's own protection - your screen lock and the device encryption Android provides. Anyone who can unlock your phone can open Pill Ringer and see what is in it, in the same way they could open your photos or your messages. If that matters to you, use a screen lock.
No method of storing information is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
We are not a HIPAA covered entity
Pill Ringer is not subject to HIPAA, and this policy does not claim HIPAA compliance. HIPAA is a US law that governs health plans, healthcare providers and their business associates. An app you download yourself, that keeps your notes on your own phone and sends them to no one, is not any of those things. Being outside HIPAA is not a loophole here - there is no transmission and no third party, which is a stronger protection than a compliance badge.
Nothing here is medical advice, and Pill Ringer is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any medical condition. It repeats what you typed in. Only your doctor or pharmacist decides what you take, how much and when. You accepted this when you first opened the app, and it has not changed.
Children
Pill Ringer is meant for adults managing their own medicines, or the medicines of someone they care for. It is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly gather anything from anyone at all - including children. There is no sign-up, so there is no age or identity information for the app to hold.
Your rights, including in the United States
Some US states - California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and others - give you rights to know what a company holds about you, to get a copy, to correct it and to have it deleted.
In our case there is a simple answer. We hold nothing about you. The developer of this app receives no information from it, so there is no file to disclose, no copy to send, nothing to correct and nothing on our side to delete. Your data is on your phone and under your control.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for advertising. We have never done either, and the app has no mechanism that would allow it.
How to delete everything
To delete one medicine: open it in the app and delete it. That removes the medicine, its dose history, its pending reminders and its photo from the phone.
To delete everything: uninstall Pill Ringer. Android deletes the app's private storage with it - the database, every photo and every backup. Nothing survives, and there is nothing anywhere else.
There is no "delete my account" step, because there is no account.
Changes to this policy
This policy describes the version of Pill Ringer available on Google Play on the effective date shown at the top.
If a future version ever does something this page does not cover - the most likely example being a caregiver feature that would send a missed-dose alert to a family member, which would require sending information off the phone for the first time - then this policy will be rewritten before that version is released, the effective date will change, and the app will ask for your agreement in the app before any such feature is switched on. We will not quietly start transmitting anything under a policy that says we do not.
Material changes will be posted at this same address with a new effective date.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything Pill Ringer does with your information:
support@pillringer.com Rj Creatz