Privacy Policy

01 Who we are

Relay ("the App") is developed and operated by Livotov Labs Ltd. ("we", "us", "our"), P.O. Box 99, Varna 9002, Bulgaria, Company ID 202346120. For any privacy question, contact labs@livotov.eu. This Policy explains how the App and this website handle information.

02 Our core principle: on-device processing

Relay is designed so your message content never leaves your device except as texts you send and to the destinations you explicitly set up: another phone number you choose, your own email account or Postmark server, your own Telegram bot and chat, a web address you control, or an automation app on the same phone. There is no Relay cloud, no Relay account, and no intermediary server that receives, stores or reads your messages. This is true for every destination kind, email included.

03 Information the App accesses on your device

Relay is a messaging app with forwarding built in. To do that, the App accesses the following locally, on your device:

Your text messages (SMS and MMS), only while Relay is your default SMS app, a role you grant in Android and can move to another app at any time. As the default SMS app, Relay receives incoming texts and picture messages, stores them in your phone's own message store, shows your conversations, and checks incoming texts against your forwarding settings (RECEIVE_SMS, READ_SMS, RECEIVE_MMS, RECEIVE_WAP_PUSH). The messages stay in your phone's message store, where they always were; we never receive a copy.
Sending texts: Relay sends the texts you write, including replies from a notification, and, if you set up another phone number as a destination, forwards texts to it as ordinary SMS (SEND_SMS). Carrier charges may apply. The App never makes calls and does not request any call-log or phone-call permission.
Contacts: read on the device to show names instead of numbers and to let you pick a recipient (READ_CONTACTS). Contacts are never copied off the device or sent anywhere. This is optional; without it the App shows numbers.
If another app is your SMS app, Relay stops reading, receiving and sending SMS, and can instead read incoming texts from that app's notifications to keep forwarding, which requires notification access and no SMS permission.
Notifications: to show incoming texts, with reply and mark-as-read actions, and to tell you when a text or a forward has failed (POST_NOTIFICATIONS).
Network access: to deliver to Telegram, email and webhook destinations you configure, and to download picture messages from your carrier (INTERNET).
Background work: to finish a delivery after a message arrives and to retry a failed one, the App schedules short background jobs and may ask you to exempt it from battery optimisation (REQUEST_IGNORE_BATTERY_OPTIMIZATIONS, RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED).

We request only the permissions the feature you use needs, and the App works, with the feature disabled, if you decline.

04 Information stored on your device

Stored locally only:

Your text messages, in the phone's own message store, as with any SMS app. Deleting a conversation in Relay removes it from that store.
Unsent drafts, your rules, destinations and app settings.
A capped activity log of forwarded, skipped and failed messages (sender and a short preview), so you can see what happened and retry failures. For a failed delivery the full text is kept for up to seven days so it can be resent, then deleted.
Secrets, meaning a Telegram bot token, a webhook header value, a mail password or a Postmark server token, are held in your device's hardware-backed encrypted storage and are never written to logs or exports.

Clear the log at any time (Activity → Clear, or Settings → Your data). Uninstalling removes all locally stored data.

05 Information sent to third parties: only the destinations you choose

When a message is forwarded, automatically or because you chose to forward it, its content is transmitted from your phone directly to the destination(s) you configured. Those services have their own terms and privacy policies:

Another phone: sent as an ordinary SMS through your mobile carrier to the number you chose.
Telegram: delivered through the Telegram Bot API to the chat or channel you specify, using your own bot.
Email: delivered either through the mail server and account you provide (SMTP) or through your own Postmark account using your server token. Either way the connection is made from your phone.
Webhook: posted as JSON to the web address you provide.
Automation app: handed to an app on the same phone (such as Tasker) by an Android broadcast. If you do not name a target app, any app on the phone that listens for that broadcast can receive it; the App warns you about this.

We neither control nor take responsibility for how those services process messages you route to them, and we never add ourselves as a recipient or intermediary.

06 Purchases and crash reports

Relay offers an optional "Pro" upgrade, as a one-time purchase or a monthly or annual subscription with a free trial. Payments are processed by Google Play; we never see or store your card details. The App asks Google Play on your phone which Pro purchase your Google account owns and keeps that answer on the device; no purchase data is sent to us or to anyone else, and there is no account with Relay. Manage or cancel subscriptions in Google Play; refunds follow Google Play policies.

If the App crashes, Firebase Crashlytics (Google) sends us a technical report so we can fix the fault: the stack trace, the app version, the Android version, the device model, free memory and storage, and a random installation identifier that Crashlytics generates. A report never contains a message, a phone number, a rule or a destination, because the App does not hand any of those to Crashlytics. Reports are kept by Crashlytics for 90 days. Crash reporting is switched off in development builds and there is no analytics or usage tracking (see Firebase's privacy documentation).

07 What we do not do

We do not operate a server that receives your messages.
We do not sell, rent or share your data with anyone.
We do not use advertising, ad networks or advertising identifiers.
We do not embed analytics or tracking SDKs. The only components that talk to a network on our behalf are Google Play billing and the crash reporter described above, and neither ever receives a message.
We do not require an account, an email address or a sign-up.

08 This website

This website uses no cookies, no trackers, no analytics and no third-party scripts. Nothing about your visit is collected or stored by us, so there is no cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts solely to render the page, which means your browser requests them from Google's servers under Google's privacy policy. If the site is served through a hosting provider, that provider may keep ordinary server logs (such as IP addresses) for security and operation.

09 Children

Relay is intended for adults and is not directed to children under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

10 Your rights

Because your data lives on your own device, you control it: view, edit or export the activity log, or delete everything by clearing it in the App or uninstalling. Data-protection rights under the GDPR and equivalent laws apply; since we hold no personal data on servers of our own, most requests are satisfied directly on your device. You may still contact labs@livotov.eu, and you have the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority.

11 Security

We minimise risk by keeping data on your device, encrypting secrets in the Android Keystore and using encrypted connections (HTTPS, or TLS for mail) to every destination that supports them. No method is perfectly secure, but by design there is no central store of your messages to breach.

12 Changes

We may update this Policy for new features or legal requirements. Material changes update the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, are noted in the App.

13 Contact

Livotov Labs Ltd.
P.O. Box 99, Varna 9002, Bulgaria
Company ID 202346120
Email labs@livotov.eu