Elseway Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 14, 2026

Elseway is a mobile app that intercepts launches of selected social apps and redirects you into a short feed of substitute content. It is designed to work without collecting your data: Elseway has no user accounts, no analytics, no advertising, and no servers of its own. Everything Elseway stores lives on your device.

What Elseway accesses, and why

Accessibility service (Android). Elseway uses an Android accessibility service to detect when an app you've chosen to track (for example TikTok or Instagram) comes to the foreground, so it can redirect you to its substitute feed. For most apps the service receives only window-change events — essentially the package name of the app coming to the foreground.

For Instagram, Elseway intercepts only Reels and leaves messages, your feed, and everything else untouched. For YouTube, Elseway intercepts only Shorts and leaves regular videos, search, and subscriptions untouched. Recognizing that Reels or Shorts is on screen requires the service to query the current window's view identifiers — the internal layout names of the screen's interface elements (for example, the identifier of the Reels video container). This is the only thing Elseway's window access is used for. Elseway never reads, processes, or stores the content of your screen: no messages, no text, no images, no keystrokes. All processing happens on your device, in the moment, and none of this information is recorded or leaves your device.

Photos (optional). If you grant photo access and keep the camera-roll card enabled, Elseway picks a random photo from your library and displays it to you, on your device. Your photos are never uploaded, copied, or transmitted anywhere. Decline the permission or toggle the card off and your library is never read.

Stock photography. Some feed cards show photography fetched from Unsplash. Requesting those images sends standard web request metadata (such as your IP address) to Unsplash, as with any image loaded from the internet. Unsplash's own privacy policy governs that processing. No personal information from Elseway is included in those requests.

What Elseway stores

Elseway keeps its settings and usage statistics (for example, which apps you track, your timer settings, and counters like "scrolls averted this week") in local storage on your device only. This data is never transmitted, and uninstalling Elseway deletes all of it. Elseway also opts out of Android's automatic cloud backup, so this data is never copied into your Google account's device backups — it exists on your device and nowhere else.

What Elseway does NOT do

• No accounts, sign-ins, or user identifiers
• No analytics or tracking SDKs
• No advertising
• No selling or sharing of data — there is nothing to sell
• No reading of your messages, text, images, or keystrokes — window access is used solely to recognize which screen is open (see above), never its content

Children

Elseway is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone — including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this URL with a new effective date. Material changes will be noted in the app's release notes.

Contact

Questions or concerns: feedback@elseway.app