Constellations is played by looking. To know where you are looking, it uses the front camera and Apple's ARKit face tracking. This document says exactly what happens to that, because an app which points a camera at your face owes you a plain answer rather than a long one.
The same text appears inside the app, under How you play → What the camera does. If the two ever disagree, this document is the one to trust.
Face data
Constellations uses the TrueDepth camera by way of Apple's ARKit face tracking
(ARFaceTrackingConfiguration). This section is the whole of what that
means, in the terms Apple asks the question in.
What is collected. Per frame, ARKit hands the app a small set of numbers and nothing else: a gaze direction, a head orientation, a left and right eye-blink amount, and the distance of your face from the camera. The app never receives the camera image, the depth map, or the face mesh, and has no code capable of requesting them.
What it is used for. One thing: working out which star on the screen you are looking at, so that looking at it draws the line. Nothing else in the app reads it. It is not used for authentication, identification, advertising, marketing, analytics, or building a profile of you, and it is not used to identify anyone.
Where it is stored. Nowhere. Those per-frame numbers exist in memory for the fraction of a second they are used and are then discarded. The only thing derived from them that is written down at all is your calibration — six coefficients describing how your gaze maps to your screen — which is kept in this device's own private app storage and nowhere else. Six numbers of screen geometry are not a face and cannot be turned back into one.
How long it is kept. The per-frame data is not retained past the frame. The calibration is kept until you recalibrate or delete the app.
How it is deleted. Deleting the app removes the calibration along with everything else the app has written. Nothing survives elsewhere, because nothing was ever sent elsewhere.
Who it is shared with. Nobody. No face data, gaze data, or calibration is ever transmitted off the device — not to us, not to Apple beyond the on-device ARKit call itself, and not to any third party. There is no server that could receive it, and no third-party SDK in the app is given access to it.
Nothing is recorded
No photograph, video, or audio is captured, saved, or retained. The camera feed is consumed by ARKit frame by frame and discarded. Constellations never receives an image of you and has no code capable of storing one.
What the app does receive, per frame, is a small set of numbers: a gaze direction, a head orientation, an eye-blink amount, and a distance from the camera. These exist only in memory while the app is running.
Nothing leaves your device
Everything Constellations knows is written only to this device's own app storage:
- the calibration that maps your gaze to your screen
- which figures you have drawn, and where you stopped
- your settings
- whether the sky has been bought
There is no account and no login, and none of it is ever uploaded. Deleting the app removes all of it.
The app talks to two companies, and neither exchange carries anything about you.
Expo, whose tooling the app is built with:
- Update checks. On opening, the app asks whether a newer version of its own code is available, and downloads it if so. This is how fixes reach you without waiting on an App Store review.
- Performance timings. How long the app took to start, and whether it dropped animation frames. These describe the software, not the person using it — no gaze data, no calibration, no figures drawn, and no identity.
RevenueCat, which keeps track of whether the sky has been paid for:
- The purchase itself is handled entirely by Apple. Constellations never sees your payment details, your name, or your Apple Account — the App Store takes the payment on its own screen and tells the app only whether it succeeded.
- A purchase record is then held by RevenueCat against a random identifier their software generates on this device. It is not your name, your email, or your Apple Account, and it is not linked to anything else about you. It exists so that Restore purchases can give you back a sky you have already paid for, including on a new phone.
- Nothing else is sent. No gaze data, no calibration, nothing you have drawn.
If you would rather the app made no network requests at all, turning off Background App Refresh and putting the device in Airplane Mode while you play costs you nothing: everything the game does works offline, and a sky you have already bought stays unlocked with no network at all. The app remembers what it last knew and trusts it — if it cannot check, it never takes anything away.
Nothing is sold, shared, or profiled
Face and depth data is never used for advertising, marketing, identification, or building a profile of you, and is never shared with anyone. It never leaves the device in any form.
There are no advertising frameworks, no trackers, and nothing that follows you between apps or across the internet. The performance timings described above are the only measurement of any kind, they are about the software rather than about you, and they are not linked to an identity.
Apple requires this commitment from any app using depth or facial-mapping APIs. It costs us nothing to make, because we never wanted the data in the first place — we only ever wanted to know which star you were looking at.
Diagnostic recordings
The app contains a hidden developer tool that can record a session's gaze accuracy to a file, used for tuning the game on real hardware. It is off by default, it is not reachable through normal play, and the resulting file stays on the device unless you explicitly share it yourself. It contains gaze coordinates and head angles — no images and nothing identifying.
Children
Constellations collects no personal data from anyone, of any age, and has no social features, chat, or links out. The performance timings above contain nothing personal and are not linked to a person, so nothing here changes with the age of the player.
There is one in-app purchase — a single unlock, bought once, that is never a subscription and never recurs. It is offered in exactly one place, at the end of the free chapter, and never during play. Payment goes through Apple, so an App Store family's usual controls over purchases apply to it unchanged.
Playing without the camera
If you would rather not enable the camera at all, choose Play by touch in the settings and hold a finger where you would look. It is the same game with the same content; nothing is withheld for choosing it.
Changes
If this policy ever changes, it will change here first, and the app will tell you before it does anything new with your data.
Contact
Questions about this policy: info@faithdev.co