Data and privacy

We did not get it from you. Everything here is read from places that are already public: launch posts on Hacker News and Product Hunt, App Store and Google Play listings, domain registration records, and the pages apps publish about themselves. Because it was not collected from you directly, we are required to tell you it exists. That is what this page is.

A root domain, a name and tagline, when we first saw it, whether it still responds, what its site links to, and a category we infer. Every inferred label is stored with the evidence behind it, so anything we assert can be checked and argued with.

Business profiles only. If a founder attached a professional handle to their own public launch post, that handle may appear against the app. Personal accounts, personal photographs and anything about someone's life outside their product are out of scope permanently. Not scoped down for now, excluded.

Role addresses like hello@ or support@ are treated as business contact details. Anything that looks like a personal address is used only to verify a claim over an app and is never displayed; those are deleted after 12 months.

The news page reproduces a headline, a publisher's name, a publication date and the short summary the publisher broadcasts in their own feed. We never store or show the article itself — every item links out to the publisher, and the traffic goes to them. We only read feeds from a list of outlets we maintain by hand, and an outlet that would rather not appear is removed from it on request.

Legitimate interest: keeping an accurate public record of which products exist and which have stopped. That record is the entire point of the site, it concerns businesses rather than private life, and the personal data involved is the minimum that identifies who is behind a product. Our reasoning is written down and we will share it on request.

Use our contact form and say what should go. We suppress rather than delete: the row stops being published anywhere on this site, immediately and permanently, while the historical record of what happened stays intact and unpublished. That is deliberate: deleting a domain would destroy years of observations about other things, and suppression removes you from public view just as completely.

You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or object to us holding it at all.

Use the Report an error link on any app page, or our contact form. We take funding and team-size labels especially seriously: those are inferred, they are the ones most likely to be wrong, and a confidently wrong “venture-backed” on somebody's side project is the most damaging thing this site could print.

Signing in sets a cookie. That one is not optional: without it there is no way to stay signed in, so it is set whether or not you agree to anything else.

Analytics is optional and we ask first. If you are in the EU, the UK or Switzerland, Google Analytics and PostHog load only after you accept, and declining means neither script is ever fetched. Elsewhere they load unless you decline or your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, which we treat as a decline. We also count how often an app appears in results and how often its record is opened, so that founders who have proved a listing is theirs can see what it did. Those counters hold a date, an app and a number, with no cookie, no address and nothing that could identify you.

We respect robots.txt, identify ourselves as AppWatchBot, and use official APIs wherever one exists. If our crawler is causing you a problem, tell us through our contact form and we will stop fetching your site.