Privacy policy

Effective date: November 13, 2026

Watchers Bible ("the app", "we") is a Bible reading app built to be private by default. Your Bibles, highlights, notes and bookmarks live on your device. This page explains exactly what the app stores, what it optionally shares, and what it never does.

Contact: apostolic.intel@gmail.com

The short version

• Your reading is yours. Bibles, highlights, notes, bookmarks, search history and reading positions are stored on your device and are never read by us.
• Search never leaves your device. The app searches only the Bibles stored on it; your search words are never sent anywhere.
• Cloud sync is optional. Nothing leaves your device unless you sign in and turn sync on.
• Anonymous and optional statistics. One toggle in Settings controls both usage statistics and crash reports. They contain no account, no email and no reading content, and you can turn them off anytime.
• Donations are optional and anonymous by default. A name appears on the supporter list only when you explicitly ask for it, and receipt images are deleted after a manual check.
• No ads. No tracking across other apps or websites. No selling of data, ever.

What the app stores on your device

The app works fully offline. The following data lives only on your device:

• Downloaded Bible translations and the bundled KJV.
• Highlights, notes and bookmarks you create.
• Your reading position, search history, preferences and appearance settings.
• A random, meaningless identifier used only for anonymous statistics (see below).

Uninstalling the app removes this data from your device. Deleting the app's downloaded translations via Settings → Data & storage does not touch your highlights, notes or bookmarks.

Features that never touch the internet

Reading, searching, read-aloud narration, the daily verse notification, the home screen widget, and saving a verse as a shareable image all happen entirely on your device. Read-aloud speaks through your device's built-in speech engine. None of these features send data anywhere, and every one of them works with airplane mode on.

Optional cloud sync

If you choose to sign in (with Google or email) and use cloud sync, your highlights, notes, bookmarks and reading positions are stored on our backend (hosted on Vercel and Neon, database and authentication managed by Neon in the AWS US region) so they can follow you between your devices.

We store the minimum needed for sync: your account identifier, your display name and email address from the sign-in provider (so your account can be listed in Settings), and the sync content listed above. We do not read the content of your notes beyond what is technically required to sync them.

You can delete your account and all synced data at any time from the app (Settings → Backup & sync), which removes your account and every synced row from our servers immediately.

Donations

Watchers Bible is free and runs on gifts. Giving is entirely optional and never unlocks anything in the app.

If you choose to give, you scan one of the payment QR codes (in the app's give screen on the web, or on our website biblewatchers.vercel.app/#give, which the Give button opens inside the Android app) and send the gift from your own banking or e-wallet app. A listing form appears only if you switch on "Show my name on the supporter list": it sends the developer what you typed: the name to list, the amount and currency, an optional note and optional contact details, and a receipt screenshot or transaction reference number (at least one is required, so the gift can be checked by hand). The note and contact are never displayed anywhere; they stay in the developer's private ledger.

The submission and its receipt are stored in the developer's private operations account (Airtable) and are used only to verify the gift by hand. The supporter list is curated manually by the developer: nothing is ever published automatically, names appear only when you explicitly opted in, and receipt images are deleted once the submission is checked. Submissions are rate-limited and never published while unreviewed.

Optional anonymous usage statistics

To understand how the app is used and what to improve, the app can send anonymous usage statistics to PostHog (PostHog Inc., cloud-hosted in the United States). This feature is controlled by the "Share anonymous usage statistics" toggle in Settings → Data & storage. The toggle is off on a fresh install: nothing is sent until you turn it on.

What is collected while the toggle is on:

• A random install identifier that is not connected to your account, email or identity in any way.
• The app version and platform (Android or web).
• Anonymous events such as: app opens, that a chapter was opened (which translation and Bible book, not what you did with it), that a translation was downloaded, that a verse image was saved, that a daily verse notification or widget was tapped, that an account was signed in, signed out or deleted, that a search was performed (recorded only as a shape: which translation, and whether the words were written in a non-Latin script, never the words themselves), that the supporter form was opened, that a gift submission was sent (only whether a receipt image was attached — never the amount or the name), and that a giving QR image was saved.
• An approximate country, derived from IP address by the analytics provider, to know which languages matter. Full IP addresses are not stored in analytics events.

What is never collected:

• Your name, email or account identifier.
• The content of your notes, highlights or bookmarks.
• The specific verses you read or saved, and the words of any search.
• Advertising identifiers, contacts, photos, location or anything else on your device.

Turning the toggle off stops all collection immediately and erases anything already queued on your device.

Crash reports (optional)

When the app breaks, it can send an anonymous crash report to Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., cloud-hosted in the United States) so the fault can be found and fixed. Crash reports are governed by the same "Share anonymous usage statistics" toggle in Settings → Data & storage.

A crash report carries the technical detail of a failure: its type and stack trace, the app version, the device model and operating system version, and the recent steps that led up to it. To keep your reading out of it:

• The app's own page address is cut to the bare origin, because in this app the address itself can name a verse.
• Console output is dropped entirely, since it can carry verse text, and network records keep only the verb and address of a call, never its query strings or contents.
• No name, email, account identifier or advertising identifier is attached.

Like statistics, crash reports stop the moment the toggle is turned off.

Bible downloads

Downloaded translations stream from our storage host (Cloudflare R2). These downloads are anonymous file transfers and carry no information about you beyond what any HTTPS connection technically involves.

Children

Watchers Bible is a general-audience app and does not knowingly collect any personal information from anyone, including children under 13. Accounts are only created by a deliberate sign-in, and the data collected is described above.

Your rights

You control your data:

• Local data: stored on your device; uninstall or use Settings → Data & storage to manage it.
• Synced data: delete your account and all cloud data from Settings → Backup & sync.
• Statistics and crash reports: turn off the toggle in Settings → Data & storage. The identifiers involved are random and cannot be traced back to you, so no other deletion is possible or needed.

If you have a privacy question or request, contact us at apostolic.intel@gmail.com.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new effective date. Material changes will also be announced in the app.