Effective date: 2026-10-21 (last updated 2026-10-21)
Little Painter (package io.github.johanneshoh.childpaint) is a shape and
drawing app for children. This policy is short because the app does very
little with data: it has no internet access and nothing to send anywhere.
core-ktx, activity, appcompat, constraintlayout)
and Material Components — libraries, not services, and none of them phone
home.The current drawing is autosaved to the app’s private internal storage
(filesDir/canvas.png), a location only this app can read. It is not
readable by other apps and is not uploaded anywhere.
If a parent taps the save button, the app writes a PNG of the drawing to the
device’s own gallery, under Pictures/Little Painter, using the standard Android
MediaStore (or, on Android 9 and below, the legacy public Pictures directory
via the WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE permission, which the app requests only on
those older versions and only for this purpose). That file stays on the
device; the app has no means of transmitting it elsewhere.
The app opts out of Android’s Auto Backup (allowBackup="false") and excludes
all of its data from both cloud backup and device-to-device transfer. Drawings,
saved pictures, the kid-mode session and the PIN are therefore never copied to
a Google account or to a new phone by Android. A phone set up from another one
starts with an empty Little Painter. The one exception is a picture a parent
saved to the gallery with the save button: that is an ordinary file in the
Pictures folder, which the phone’s own gallery or photo-backup app may handle
like any other photo, under that app’s own settings and not under this app’s
control.
A parent can optionally switch on “Paint on a photo”, which opens the Android system photo picker. The app never receives access to the gallery as a whole: the picker runs outside the app, it requests no photo permission, and the app is handed only the single image the parent chose. That image is drawn onto the current page and from then on is part of the drawing, stored exactly like any other drawing — in the app’s private internal storage, and in the gallery only if a parent taps save. It is not transmitted anywhere, because the app has no means of transmitting anything.
The feature is off until a grown-up turns it on, and its button is hidden while kid mode is running.
Kid mode lets a parent hand the phone to a child for a limited, supervised session. The optional 4-digit unlock PIN is stored in the app’s private SharedPreferences, on-device only. Like everything else the app stores, it is excluded from Android’s automatic cloud backup and from device-to-device transfer (see “Backup and transfer” above).
Little Painter is directed at children. It collects no personal information, and no information of any kind, from anyone — including children — so there is nothing about a child to disclose, share, or delete. Because no personal information is collected, no parental consent is required under COPPA or the GDPR’s child-consent rules.
A parent who wants to remove all app data can do either of the following at any time:
Controller for this app: Johannes Hohenbichler, Ganswiesenweg 21, 73728 Gerlingen, Germany. Questions about this policy and any request about your data: johanneshohenbichler@googlemail.com. See the Impressum.
The app does not process any personal data about you (Art. 4(1) GDPR). If you email me, your address and your message are processed to reply, on the basis of Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (legitimate interest in answering enquiries), and deleted when no longer needed. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection under Art. 15 to 21 GDPR. You may complain to a supervisory authority, for example the Landesbeauftragte für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Baden-Württemberg.
The canonical copy of this policy lives in the app’s source repository at
docs/privacy-policy.md. The version published at
https://waterplane-dev.github.io/child-paint/privacy-policy is generated from
that file.