Akimbolt
Privacy Policy
Last updated 11 August 2026
Akimbolt has no servers. Your phone talks to your Mac directly over the Wi-Fi you are already on. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and we receive no data about you or your devices. Not your messages, not your usage, not even the fact that you installed it.
What we collect
Nothing. We operate no servers, no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising. The apps contain no third-party SDKs of any kind. There is no mechanism by which data could reach us, which is a stronger guarantee than a promise not to look.
What the apps read on your phone
Akimbolt reads what it needs to show on your Mac, and only while it is connected. Everything below travels directly to your paired Mac and nowhere else.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Notifications | So they appear on your Mac and you can reply or dismiss them |
| Text messages (SMS and MMS) | So you can read and send them from your Mac |
| Call history and call state | So the Mac can show who is calling and let you answer or decline |
| Contacts | So calls and messages show names instead of numbers |
| Files you browse | So you can open and copy them from your Mac |
| Clipboard | So copying on one device pastes on the other |
| What is playing | So the Mac's menu bar can show it and control playback |
| Battery, storage, network, Do Not Disturb | So the Mac can show your phone's status |
| Wi-Fi network name | So the phone only looks for your Mac on networks it has found one before, which is what saves battery |
Every one of these can be switched off individually in the Android app, at any time, without uninstalling anything or revoking an Android permission.
About the location permission
Android classifies the name of the Wi-Fi network you are on as location data, so the app must hold a location permission to read it. Akimbolt reads the network name and nothing else. It never requests, receives or stores your position, and it does not use location in the background for any other purpose.
About the SMS and call permissions
Google Play restricts these permissions to a small number of purposes. Akimbolt uses them under the Cross-Device Synchronization exception, which covers syncing texts and phone calls between a phone and a computer. That is the app's entire reason to exist. They are not used for anything else.
What is stored, and where
Everything below stays on your own devices. None of it is backed up to us, because there is no us to back it up to.
| On your phone | |
|---|---|
| Its own encryption key, and a record of each Mac you have paired with | Held in Android's encrypted storage, backed by the device keystore |
| Your settings, and which features you have turned on | Local app storage |
| A daily count of items forwarded | Counts only, never content. Resets at midnight and never leaves the phone |
| On your Mac | |
|---|---|
| Its own encryption key, and a record of each phone you have paired with | Held in the macOS Keychain |
| Which conversations you have read, and your preferences | Local app settings |
| Files you choose to download from your phone | Saved to your Downloads folder, in a folder named for the phone |
| Recent clipboard items | Held in memory only, capped at twenty, discarded when the app quits |
Messages, calls, contacts and notifications are never written to disk on your Mac. They are held in memory while the app is running so it can display them, and they are gone when it quits.
How the connection is protected
Pairing performs an X25519 key exchange authenticated by the QR code, which carries a single-use secret valid for two minutes. Everything after that is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with separate keys in each direction so a captured frame cannot be replayed at its sender.
Each paired phone holds its own key relationship with the Mac. There is no shared key, so one compromised device cannot read another's traffic. Fresh session keys are derived on every reconnection, so a device lost next year cannot decrypt a recording made today.
Your control
- Turn any feature off in the Android app. It stops immediately, and the Mac stops showing it.
- Unpair from either device. The other loses access at once.
- Uninstall. Everything either app stored goes with it. Files you already downloaded stay in your Downloads folder, because they are yours.
Children
Akimbolt is a utility for connecting your own devices and is not directed at children. We collect no data from anyone, of any age.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and any change that affects what the apps access will be described in the app's release notes. We will not quietly start collecting something.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about privacy generally, can go through the contact page.