PlacePing
Reminds you at the place. Tells you when it cannot.
PlacePing alerts you when you arrive at a place you saved, or when you leave it. Your places, reminders and checklists stay on your phone. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no internet permission.
PlacePing's manifest does not request INTERNET or ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE; it explicitly removes them. An Android app cannot open a network connection without INTERNET — the operating system refuses. You can confirm this in the Play listing's permission list or by inspecting the APK.
This is why there is no map, no address search, and no way to resolve a shortened map link inside the app. Those are not missing features; they are the cost of an app that cannot talk to anyone about where you are.
PlacePing does not watch your position. It hands Android a list of circles — the places you saved, with their radius — and Android wakes the app when you cross one of them. That mechanism is the system's geofencing service, part of Google Play services.
The app therefore never receives a stream of your positions and never stores one. It asks for a single position fix in exactly one situation: when you tap Use my current position while creating a place. That coordinate is written into that place and nothing else.
There is no continuous tracking mode, no foreground service and no "your location is being used" persistent notification, because there is nothing running that would need one.
This is the complete list. There are no others.
| Permission | Why | Without it | Withdraw |
|---|---|---|---|
Precise location (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION) |
The system geofencing service needs a precise position to tell a 100–2000 m circle from the surrounding streets. | Nothing can detect an arrival. | Settings › Apps › PlacePing › Permissions › Location |
Approximate location (ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION) |
Android requires this alongside the precise grant and asks for both in one dialog. | Same as above. | Same place |
Location all the time (ACCESS_BACKGROUND_LOCATION) |
The whole product is a reminder that arrives while the app is closed. Android only allows that with this grant. | Reminders would only work while PlacePing is open on screen. | Settings › Apps › PlacePing › Permissions › Location › Allow only while using the app |
Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS) |
The alert itself is a notification on the alarm channel. | The app would be silent. | Settings › Apps › PlacePing › Notifications |
Run at startup (RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED) |
Android drops every geofence on restart without telling the app. This is how they are registered again. | Reminders would stop working after every reboot, silently. | Install-time; not revocable |
Vibration (VIBRATE) |
The alarm-style alert vibrates as well as sounding. | The alert would not vibrate. | Install-time; not revocable |
Full-screen alerts (USE_FULL_SCREEN_INTENT) |
Only for reminders where you switched on "Take over the screen". | That optional alert style would not appear. | Android 14+: Settings › Apps › PlacePing › Full-screen notifications |
Wake lock (WAKE_LOCK) |
Declared by WorkManager, which runs the once-a-day check that your geofences still exist. PlacePing itself takes no wake lock. | The daily safety-net check could not run. | Install-time; not revocable |
| Stored | Where |
|---|---|
| Places: the name you typed, the coordinate, the radius | App database, placeping.db |
| Reminders: text, note, direction, repeat rule, days, hours, dwell time, alert options | Same database |
| Which reminder watches which place, and whether the phone is currently inside it | Same database |
| Checklists attached to places | Same database |
| A short activity log — the last 200 entries: registration results, detected arrivals, alerts raised and skipped, with the system's own error codes | Same database; shown on the Reliability screen and clearable there |
| Theme, language, whether onboarding is done | App preferences |
Nothing else. The activity log deliberately holds no coordinates.
Location history, movement traces, timestamps of where you were, usage statistics, session counts, device identifiers, crash dumps.
Android cloud backup and device-to-device transfer are switched off for this app, so your places are not copied into a Google backup. Moving your data to another phone is deliberate: Settings → Export to a file, then Import on the other phone. The file is plain JSON, readable by you.
PlacePing is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone.
Everything lives on your phone until you delete it. A place, a reminder or a checklist item is deleted from inside the app; the activity log is cleared on the Reliability screen. Uninstalling PlacePing removes the database and all preferences with it.
These are limits of Android, not choices, and they are written in the app as prominently as the features:
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the new text replaces this page. Material changes are also described in the app's release notes.