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Privacy Policy

App: Pill Ringer (Android)
Developer: Rj Creatz
Contact: support@pillringer.com
Effective date: 1 September 2026
Last updated: 1 September 2026

The short version

Pill Ringer keeps everything on your phone.

There is no account. There is no password. You never sign up, and you never sign in. The app has no server of its own, and it does not send your medicine list, your doses, your photos or your name anywhere. There is no advertising in it and there is no analytics or tracking in it.

There is one thing the app can send, and only when you ask it to. If you open What the label says and press the button to look a medicine up, the app sends that one medicine name to the US Food and Drug Administration's public label website, so it can show you the label back. Nothing else goes with it — not your list, not your doses, not your times, not your photos, not your name, and no identifier of any kind. It happens only when you press that button. There is a section on it further down this page.

The app is free and it stays free. If you choose to support it with a payment, that payment is handled entirely by Google Play. Pill Ringer never sees your card, your name or your address — Google tells it only that a purchase happened, and that fact is written on your phone and nowhere else. Supporting the app changes nothing about how it works, and you never have to.

If you want all of it gone, uninstall the app. That is the whole deletion process. Nothing of yours is left behind on a server, because we run no server and your medicines, doses and photos were never sent to one.

The rest of this page explains that in full, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

What the app keeps, and where it keeps it

Everything below is written into a small database file inside Pill Ringer's own private storage area on your phone. Android does not let other apps read that area. It is not a shared folder, and it does not appear in your photo gallery or your file browser.

For each medicine you add:

• The name you typed.
• The dose you typed - for example "1 tablet" or "5 ml".
• The form you picked: pill, capsule, syrup or injection.
• When you take it: the clock times, or the days of the week, or "as needed".
• The colour and shape of the pill, if you chose them.
• How many you have left, if you told the app.
• A photo of the medicine, if you added one.

For each dose:

• Whether you tapped Taken or Skipped, and the moment you tapped it.
• If you chose to add one: how you felt afterwards - "good", "a bit off" or "bad" - and a short note in your own words. Both are optional, both are blank unless you fill them in, and you can clear them at any time. The app only stores what you typed. It never interprets it, never draws a conclusion from it, and never shows you advice based on it.

The app only stores the doses you actually answered. It does not write a record for every dose of every day.

Your settings:

• Your first name, if you chose to give one during setup. You can skip that step.
• Whether you are using the app for yourself or for someone else.
• Your reminder preferences - how often a follow-up repeats, and how many times.
• A note that you read and accepted the disclaimer, and the date you did.
• Small housekeeping marks, such as which setup steps you have completed.

Behind the scenes:

• The identifiers Android gives back for the reminders the app has booked, so that editing a medicine cancels exactly the right alarms.

That is the complete list. Apart from the optional note you can attach to a dose, there is no diary and no symptom log. There is no health condition field, and nothing about your doctor, pharmacy, insurance or payment.

What the app does not do

• It does not create an account for you.
• It does not ask for your email address, your phone number or your date of birth.
• It does not send or receive your information over the internet, with the two exceptions below. Everything the app is for — the reminders, the schedule, the record, reading a prescription label with the camera, the medicine-name suggestions — works with the phone completely offline, and an automated test refuses to build the app if networking code appears anywhere except in the one named file that is allowed to have it.
  • A payment, if you choose to support the app. Google Play handles it, and Google is told only that a payment happened.
  • A label lookup, if you press the button on What the label says. One medicine name goes to the FDA's public label website and the label comes back. See the section below.
• It does not handle your payment details. If you support the app, Google Play takes the payment and Pill Ringer is told only that it happened. Google's own privacy policy covers that transaction.
• It does not tell anyone who supported it. That is one row on your own phone, it is never transmitted, and its only effect is that the app stops asking.
• It does not contain advertising software.
• It does not contain analytics, crash-reporting or tracking software.
• It does not read your contacts, your location, your messages or your call history. It does not ask for those permissions at all.
• It does not sell or share your information with anyone, because it does not have your information.

Photos of your medicines

You can add a picture of a medicine so you can tell three white tablets apart at a glance. You can take that picture with the camera, or choose one you already have.

The picture is shrunk down and saved into Pill Ringer's own private folder on the phone. Location information is deliberately stripped from it, so a medicine photo does not carry the place it was taken. It is never uploaded. It is never written into your gallery, which also means that tidying up your camera roll cannot delete the picture of your pills by accident.

Delete the photo in the app, or delete the medicine, and the file is deleted from the phone with it.

Scanning a prescription label

Pill Ringer can read a US prescription label with the camera so you do not have to type the details in.

This happens entirely on your phone. The text is read by Google's ML Kit text recognition running on the device itself. There is no cloud reading step and no fallback to an online service - if the on-device reader is unavailable, the app tells you so and asks you to type the medicine in by hand. It does not quietly send the picture somewhere else instead.

The photograph of the label is put in a temporary folder, read, and then deleted straight away. It is not kept and it is not added to your medicine's photo.

Whatever the scan reads is shown to you as a suggestion to check and correct before anything is saved. Cameras misread small print, so nothing goes in until you confirm it.

Looking up what a label says

This is the one screen in Pill Ringer that uses the internet, and the one place anything is sent anywhere.

Open a medicine and choose What the label says, and the app offers to look up the FDA-approved label for it. Nothing happens until you press that button, and the screen shows you the exact name it is about to send before you press it.

What is sent: one medicine name, and nothing else. It is trimmed to at most 64 characters and stripped of anything that is not an ordinary letter, number, space, hyphen, apostrophe, comma, full stop or slash. It goes over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection to api.fda.gov, a public website run by the US Food and Drug Administration.

What is not sent, and cannot be: your medicine list, your doses, your times, your dose history, your name, your photos, your notes, your readings, a device identifier, an install identifier, an advertising identifier, your timezone or your location. The part of the app that makes this request is deliberately written so that it has no way to read any of that — it can send only the single name it is handed — and an automated test fails the build if that ever stops being true.

Two things go with any request to any website, anywhere, and we cannot remove them: the internet (IP) address your phone is using at that moment, and a “user agent” line that Android's own networking writes to identify the phone's software. We add nothing to either and we send no name of yours with them. What the FDA does with the requests it receives is governed by the FDA's own privacy policy, not ours. We receive nothing: there is no server of ours anywhere in this, and the reply goes straight from the FDA's website to your phone.

What comes back is stored on your phone so you can read it again without another lookup, and it goes when you delete the medicine or uninstall the app.

This is not a drug-interaction checker. Pill Ringer does not check your medicines against each other, does not compare anything and never tells you whether two medicines can be taken together. It shows you the manufacturer's own FDA-approved words so you can read them yourself, and it tells you to ask your pharmacist, who can check everything you take with software this app does not have.

You never have to use it. If you never open that screen, the app never makes a network request at all.

Backups

Pill Ringer can write a backup of your medicine list, your dose record and your settings.

The backup is an ordinary file saved inside the app's own private folder on your phone. It stays there. It is not uploaded and it is not sent to us. The app keeps the five most recent backups and quietly deletes older ones.

You can choose to send a backup somewhere yourself, using the Share button next to it. That opens your phone's normal share sheet, and you pick where it goes - your own email, a notes app, a cloud drive. That only ever happens because you tapped it. Once a file has left through that share sheet, it is in the hands of whichever app or service you sent it to, and that service's own privacy policy applies to it from then on. We have no way to reach it.

The doctor's report

The History screen can make a PDF report of your medicines and how often you took them, for a doctor's appointment.

The PDF is created on the phone. You can print it, or send it through your phone's share sheet, exactly like the backup above. The same thing applies: it only leaves the phone because you chose to send it, and after that it is governed by whatever you sent it to.

What appears on your lock screen

By default, reminders show the name of the medicine and the dose. Android puts that on the lock screen, so anyone who can see your phone screen when it rings can read the medicine's name. That is deliberate - a reminder you cannot read is not a reminder - but you should know it.

If you would rather it were hidden, Pill Ringer has its own switch for it: Reminder setup > What shows on the lock screen > Hide medicine names on the lock screen. With it on, every reminder just says a dose is due and names no medicine. That is true on the lock screen, and it stays true after you unlock - open the app to see which medicine a reminder is for. Refill warnings and the follow-up reminders are hidden the same way.

The app does this by leaving the medicine name out of the reminder altogether, rather than by asking Android to hide it. That is deliberate: Android does not let an app control whether its own notifications are hidden on the lock screen - the phone's own setting decides - so a reminder that carries no name is the only version of this that works the same on every phone.

Your phone also has its own, separate setting covering every app: Settings > Notifications > Notifications on lock screen. You can use either, or both.

Android permissions, and why each one is asked for

Pill Ringer asks for the following, and nothing else.

None of these permissions is used to gather information about you. The camera reads a label on this phone and the photograph is deleted straight after; the one thing that ever goes out over the internet is a medicine name you asked us to look up, and it goes to the FDA rather than to us. We have no server, so there is nowhere for information about you to go even if the app tried to send it.

Security

Pill Ringer's database, its photos and its backups live in the app's private storage area. On Android, that area is not readable by other apps you install.

To be plain about the limits: the app does not add a password, a PIN or its own encryption layer on top of that. It relies on your phone's own protection - your screen lock and the device encryption Android provides. Anyone who can unlock your phone can open Pill Ringer and see what is in it, in the same way they could open your photos or your messages. If that matters to you, use a screen lock.

No method of storing information is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

We are not a HIPAA covered entity

Pill Ringer is not subject to HIPAA, and this policy does not claim HIPAA compliance. HIPAA is a US law that governs health plans, healthcare providers and their business associates. An app you download yourself, that keeps your notes on your own phone and sends them to no one, is not any of those things. Being outside HIPAA is not a loophole here - there is no transmission and no third party, which is a stronger protection than a compliance badge.

Nothing here is medical advice, and Pill Ringer is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any medical condition. It repeats what you typed in. Only your doctor or pharmacist decides what you take, how much and when. You accepted this when you first opened the app, and it has not changed.

Children

Pill Ringer is meant for adults managing their own medicines, or the medicines of someone they care for. It is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly gather anything from anyone at all - including children. There is no sign-up, so there is no age or identity information for the app to hold.

Your rights, including in the United States

Some US states - California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas and others - give you rights to know what a company holds about you, to get a copy, to correct it and to have it deleted.

In our case there is a simple answer. We hold nothing about you. The developer of this app receives no information from it, so there is no file to disclose, no copy to send, nothing to correct and nothing on our side to delete. Your data is on your phone and under your control.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for advertising. We have never done either, and the app has no mechanism that would allow it.

How to delete everything

To delete one medicine: open it in the app and delete it. That removes the medicine, its dose history, its pending reminders and its photo from the phone.

To delete everything: uninstall Pill Ringer. Android deletes the app's private storage with it - the database, every photo and every backup. Nothing survives, and there is nothing anywhere else.

There is no "delete my account" step, because there is no account.

Changes to this policy

This policy describes the version of Pill Ringer available on Google Play on the effective date shown at the top.

If a future version ever does something this page does not cover - the most likely example being a caregiver feature that would send a missed-dose alert to a family member, which would require sending information off the phone for the first time - then this policy will be rewritten before that version is released, the effective date will change, and the app will ask for your agreement in the app before any such feature is switched on. We will not quietly start transmitting anything under a policy that says we do not.

Material changes will be posted at this same address with a new effective date.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything Pill Ringer does with your information:

support@pillringer.com Rj Creatz