Privacy Policy
Deal Shelf does not collect any personal data. There is no account, no sign-up, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind. Everything the app saves stays on your device.
What the app stores, and where
Deal Shelf saves a few things so it works the way you left it. All of it is written to your device's local app storage and none of it is transmitted anywhere:
- The games on your shelf, and the price information shown for each
- Which games you have chosen to watch for price drops, and the lowest price the app has seen for each of them
- Whether you have marked a game as played, liked or not for you, and the recommendations derived from those ratings
- A local copy of the descriptive tags for games you have browsed, so the app does not have to look them up again
- Your settings — appearance, notification preferences, and your selected stores
This data never leaves your phone. It is not backed up to any server operated by the developer, because there is no such server. Deleting the app deletes all of it permanently.
Notifications
If you turn on price-drop notifications, the app periodically checks the current price of the games you are watching and shows a notification when one falls below the lowest price it had previously recorded.
These are local notifications, created and scheduled by your own device. The app does not use remote or push notifications, does not register for a push token, and therefore holds no identifier that could be linked to you or your device. You can turn notifications off at any time in the app's Settings or in the iOS Settings app.
The services the app talks to
Deal Shelf reads public data from three services. It has no account with any of them and sends none of them anything about you.
- CheapShark — prices and discounts. Requested whenever you browse or search.
- Steam and SteamSpy — the descriptive tags that make recommendations possible. The app looks up a game by its title or its Steam identifier and stores the result on your device.
As with any request to any website, these services receive your device's IP address and whatever the request contains — a game title, or a search term you typed. Their own privacy practices apply to that. This is standard for any app or web page that loads data from the internet, and it is disclosed here for completeness.
None of them are told anything about you. Your shelf, your ratings and your settings are never sent anywhere. There is no identifier, no account and no profile transmitted with any request — a game title lookup is indistinguishable from any other visitor's.
The one exception is one you start yourself: importing a Steam wishlist. The profile link or name you type is sent from your device to Steam — steamcommunity.com and api.steampowered.com — to read that profile's public wishlist, and nowhere else. It never reaches us. The app keeps the games it adds to your shelf, not the profile.
Tapping a price link opens the CheapShark redirect page in your browser, which then forwards you to the store. Once you leave the app, that store's own privacy policy applies.
The tip jar
This website's home page and the app's Settings screen both carry an optional link to Buy Me a Coffee. Both are ordinary links that open in your browser: the app never contacts any payment service itself, and tapping nothing is a complete answer.
If you follow the tip jar link, you leave this site and Buy Me a Coffee's own privacy policy and payment terms apply from that point.
Nothing about a payment comes back to the app. Deal Shelf never learns whether you donated, is not told your name, email or payment details, and behaves identically either way — there is nothing to unlock, and no feature is withheld from anyone.
What the app does not do
- No account, login, email address or password
- No analytics, telemetry or usage measurement
- No advertising and no ad networks
- No tracking across apps or websites, and no data shared with data brokers
- No access to your location, contacts, photos, camera, microphone or health data
- No sale of personal information — there is none to sell
Children
Deal Shelf is rated 4+ and is safe for all ages. It collects no data from anyone, which includes children under 13. It knowingly collects nothing from any user of any age.
Your rights
Privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export or delete the personal data a company holds about you. Deal Shelf holds none, so there is nothing for the developer to retrieve or erase.
The data on your device is entirely under your control: remove individual games from your shelf in the app, or delete the app to erase everything it has stored at once.
Changes to this policy
If the app ever changes what it stores or which services it contacts, this page will be updated and the effective date at the top will change. Since the app has no account and no way to contact you, this page is the only notice given — worth re-reading after a significant update.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about privacy in the app, can go to austinzurbuchen@gmail.com.