Privacy policy

Last changed 15 September 2026.

Neochess is a chess app that runs on your phone. The engine that plays you, the coach that explains what a move cost, and games against the engine are all on the device. Games with another player use a service to carry the moves between phones. There is no account and nothing to sign in to. There are no ads, no advertising identifier, and nothing that follows you to another app or website.

Three things can leave your phone. Two of them happen only because you asked: playing somebody else, and telling me something went wrong. The third is a count of what the app does, which is sent without asking you each time. All three are described below. Only playing another player sends the chess itself; reports and counts do not.

1. Who is responsible

Christoffer Niska. For privacy questions or rights requests, write to hello@getneochess.app. For general questions, you can also reach me through the Neochess Discord↑ (opens in a new tab).

2. Why I process data

For a game with another player, I process the moves because that is necessary to provide the game you asked to play. For an error report, processing is based on your choice to press send. For feature counts, I rely on my legitimate interest in understanding and improving the app. Those counts are limited to what the app did, contain no chess, and are not used for advertising or profiling. You can object to this counting by writing to hello@getneochess.app.

3. What stays on your phone

Your games against the engine, the game you have in progress, the coach's comments on it, your saved replays, and your settings stay on the device. A game played with another player is the exception: its moves have to travel between the two phones, as described below. Deleting the app deletes everything kept locally.

4. Playing another player

When you play somebody else, one of you shows a six-digit number and the other types it in. What is sent from then on is the game: the moves, as chess notation. The number names a pairing rather than a game, is single use, and stops meaning anything within a minute.

The game is held under an identifier made for it, long enough that nobody can guess it. Nothing is stored with it that says who played: no name, no account, no email address, no device identifier. A game neither side has touched for a day is deleted.

5. Telling me something went wrong

If the app fails, it can show you what went wrong and offer to send it. Nothing is sent unless you press send, and the app shows you what would go before you do.

A report holds:

• what went wrong, as the error the app hit;
• what the app was doing, as a list of event names — search finished, move rejected — and the moves of the game in progress;
• the app's version and whether the phone is an iPhone or Android.

There is nothing in it that identifies you or your phone, and two reports sent from the same phone say nothing about each other. Reports are deleted after 90 days.

6. Counting what the app does

The app is here to teach you chess, and I cannot tell whether it does that from my own phone. So it counts what it does and sends the counts to me: which lesson steps people reach, which games are completed or left, which strength gets chosen, and how often the coach measured that a move cost something but could not put it into words.

Unlike the other two, this is not something you press. The counts are held on your phone and sent when you put the app away, so nothing waits on a network while you are playing.

What is never in them:

• no move, no position, no score, no clock, no opening, and nothing naming a game — the chess stays on your phone;
• no name, email address, account, or contact of any kind;
• no advertising identifier and nothing the phone itself hands out, so nothing here can be matched with another app's records.

What is in them is the name of the thing that happened, a few plain facts about it, the app's version, whether the phone is an iPhone or Android, and the day it happened on — never the time of day.

One identifier travels with them: a random value your phone makes the first time the app is opened. It is tied to no account and to nothing the phone hands out, and reinstalling the app makes a new one. It is there for a single reason — without it there is no way to tell whether anybody comes back, only how busy a day was. What is kept under it is a count of days the app was opened and nothing else; the counts themselves are stored with no identifier beside them at all.

Counts are deleted after 400 days.

7. What is never collected

No name, email address or account. No contacts, photos, calendar or location. No advertising identifier, no device fingerprint, no cookies, no tracking across apps or sites, no ads, and no third-party kit of any kind — the counting above is mine, written for this app, and reaches nobody else. Nothing is sold or shared with anybody for marketing.

8. Who else touches the data

Cloudflare runs the three services that a paired game, a report and the counts reach, and stores them. Nobody else receives anything. Cloudflare may process data outside the European Economic Area. Where a transfer requires safeguards, Cloudflare's Data Processing Addendum provides the applicable standard contractual clauses and supplementary measures; it is available in Cloudflare's DPA↑ (opens in a new tab).

To stop a service from being flooded, each request is counted for a short time against the network it came from. The address is turned into a fingerprint before it is counted and the address itself is never stored; the count is deleted within the hour.

Apple and Google distribute the app and know what every store knows about an install. That is between you and them, and this app tells them nothing extra.

9. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask what is held about you, have it corrected or deleted, and complain to a supervisory authority. A game and a report carry no identifier at all, so there is nothing in either to look up.

The counts carry the random value described above, and I want to be plain about what that means rather than promise a process that could not run: it names an install, not a person, and nothing here can tell me which install is yours. So I cannot find your counts to show you or to delete them, and I could not verify a claim that a particular value was yours. What I can tell you is that they hold none of the things that would make them yours to begin with, and that they are deleted after 400 days whatever happens.

10. Children

The app is for anyone who wants to learn chess and has nothing in it aimed at children specifically.

11. Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.