Projects / Mercè

Privacy policy

This Privacy Policy applies to Mercè, an Android companion guide to La Mercè, Barcelona’s festival, published on Google Play as dev.glippi.merce.

Mercè is published by the individual developer identified on Mercè’s Google Play listing. For privacy questions, write to the developer contact email shown in the Developer contact section of Mercè’s Google Play listing.

The related Terms of Service cover the licence, the one-time Mercè Pro purchase, and the limits of what the programme, the distances and the reminders may be relied on for. A plain-language description of the app is on its overview page.

Summary

  • Mercè does not require an account. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign in to.
  • Mercè does not operate its own backend server. There is no developer-run service to which your data could be sent.
  • Mercè contains no ads, no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting SDK, and no remote configuration.
  • Mercè does not sell or share personal data.
  • Your location is read only while the Nearby screen is open, used on the device to compute a distance and a bearing, and discarded. It is never written to storage and never transmitted.
  • Reminders are local alarms scheduled by your own phone. There is no push service, and no server that can reach your device.
  • Mercè does not request the calendar permission and cannot read your calendar. “Add to calendar” hands the event to your calendar app; you complete the save there.
  • The only network requests the app makes are a conditional fetch of the published festival programme, and Google Play Billing when you view, buy, or restore Mercè Pro.

Permissions the app requests, and why

Mercè declares the permissions below. There is no calendar permission, no contacts permission, no camera or microphone permission, no storage permission, and no foreground-service permission anywhere in the manifest.

Location — precise and approximate

Mercè declares ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION and ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION. They exist for one screen: Nearby, part of Mercè Pro, which shows how far each festival venue is from you and which way to turn. Location updates are requested only while that screen is in the foreground, are combined with the device’s rotation-vector sensor to produce a distance and a compass bearing, and are then discarded. Your coordinates are:

  • never written to storage — they are not part of the app’s saved settings, and nothing derived from them is either;
  • never transmitted — they are not sent to the developer, to the programme feed, or to any third party;
  • never used for advertising, analytics, or profiling.

The GPS and compass hardware are declared as not required, so the app installs and runs on devices without them. You can deny or revoke the location permission at any time in Android settings; Today, Programme and search keep working, and Nearby explains how to turn it back on if you later want it.

Notifications

Mercè declares POST_NOTIFICATIONS (required on Android 13 and later). It is used only for reminders you set yourself, and for the quieter follow-up notice that tells you a reminded event has moved. Granting the permission does not, by itself, post anything: with no reminders set, nothing is ever posted.

Exact alarms

Mercè declares SCHEDULE_EXACT_ALARM. It is requested, not required: when it is not granted, a reminder is scheduled as a windowed alarm instead, which may fire a little less precisely. Nothing else in the app depends on it.

Boot completed

Mercè declares RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED so that, after the phone restarts, it can put back the reminders you had scheduled. The receiver does not send anything off the device.

Internet and network state

Mercè declares INTERNET and ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE. They are used to check for an updated festival programme, to avoid attempting that check with no connectivity, and — through Google Play’s own library — to offer, restore, and verify the Mercè Pro purchase. No other network request exists in the app.

Billing

The Google Play Billing library contributes com.android.vending.BILLING, which is what allows the app to offer, restore, and check the Mercè Pro purchase.

Package visibility

Mercè declares a <queries> block naming Google Calendar and the standard calendar-insert and geo: intents. On Android 11 and later this only lets the app resolve which installed app should receive a hand-off, so the “Add to calendar” and “Directions” buttons open the right thing. It does not read your installed-app list for any other purpose, and nothing about it leaves the device.

Information processed on your device

The festival programme

A copy of the programme ships inside the app, and the newest revision the app has fetched is cached in its private storage. Each entry is published festival information — an event’s identifier, its titles and summaries in Catalan, Spanish and English, its category, its start and end times, its venue and that venue’s coordinates, an access note, and a timestamp saying when the entry last changed. None of it is about you.

Reminders

If you set a reminder, the app stores which event it belongs to, how long before the start you asked to be told, and the resulting trigger time. That record exists so the alarm can be re-armed after a restart, and moved if the event itself moves. It lives only in the app’s local settings and is removed when you cancel the reminder or uninstall the app.

Settings and entitlement

The app’s local settings store holds your theme choice, your in-app language choice, your reminders, and — after a purchase — the fact that Mercè Pro is unlocked, together with the Google Play order identifier and purchase date that let “Restore purchase” work. None of this is transmitted to the developer.

Exported calendar files

“Export .ics” writes a single small calendar file for the event you chose into the app’s own cache directory and hands it to the share sheet you pick. Only that one file is ever shareable, only you choose where it goes, and Mercè does not upload it anywhere.

Information sent off your device

The programme feed

Mercè periodically checks whether the published programme has changed, over an ordinary HTTPS request. The request carries a conditional header (an ETag from the copy already on your phone) so an unchanged programme does not have to be downloaded again. It does not carry your location, your reminders, your settings, an advertising identifier, or any other device identifier. As with any web request, the server serving that file sees ordinary connection metadata such as your IP address, purely in order to answer; the developer does not operate that request as a tracking mechanism and derives no profile from it. If the network is unavailable, the app keeps showing the copy it already has.

Google Play Billing

When you open the Mercè Pro offer, complete a purchase, or restore one, the Google Play Billing library talks to Google Play. That exchange is between your device and Google, under Google’s Privacy Policy. Payment details — card numbers, billing addresses — are handled entirely by Google and are never seen or stored by the app or its developer.

Android backup

The app allows Android’s own backup and device-to-device transfer for its settings store only, so your language, your reminders and your Mercè Pro entitlement can follow you to a new phone. That mechanism is operated by Google under your device and Google account settings, not by the developer, and you can turn it off in your phone’s system settings. The programme cache is deliberately excluded from backup: a stale copy restored onto a new device is worse than fetching a fresh one.

What Mercè does not do

  • No account, sign-up, sign-in, or profile.
  • No advertising, ad SDK, or advertising identifier.
  • No analytics, telemetry, crash-reporting, attribution, or A/B testing SDK.
  • No name, email address, phone number, contacts, photos, or files are requested or read.
  • No reading of your calendar — only handing an event to yours.
  • No background location, no location history, no geofencing.
  • No sale or sharing of personal data. There is no recipient and no pipe through which to send it.

Retention and deletion

Everything the app stores is local to your device, so you control all of it directly. Cancelling a reminder removes its record. Clearing the app’s storage, or uninstalling Mercè from Android settings, permanently removes every setting, reminder, cached programme and entitlement record from the device. There is no server-side account or copy for the developer to delete separately, because none exists. A Mercè Pro purchase itself remains recorded by Google Play against your Google account, which is what makes “Restore purchase” possible.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights of access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection or portability over personal data held about you — for example under the EU or UK GDPR. Mercè holds no personal data on any server, so there is nothing held about you to produce, correct or erase; the equivalent controls are already in your hands, in the app’s settings, Android’s permission settings, and uninstalling the app. If you believe information about you is held that this policy does not describe, write to the contact address above.

Children

Mercè is a general-audience festival guide and is not directed at children. No personal data is knowingly collected from anyone, of any age.

Security

Network requests use HTTPS. Because there is no developer-run account system and no server-side store of personal data, there is no remote database that could be breached; in practice the security of your data is the security of your own device.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the effective date above is updated, and material changes are noted in the app’s release notes on Google Play. Continuing to use Mercè after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Not an official festival app

Mercè is an independent, unofficial companion guide to La Mercè. It is not produced, operated, endorsed by, or affiliated with the Ajuntament de Barcelona, the festival’s organisers, or any official festival body. “La Mercè” and related names and marks belong to their respective owners.

Contact

For anything about this policy or your data, write to the developer contact email shown in the Developer contact section of Mercè’s Google Play listing.