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42nd Design

Unicom Privacy Policy

Effective date: 2026-07-29

Applies to: Unicom for Android (com.fortysecond.unicom), published by 42nd Design.

Unicom is a quick-reference app for general-aviation airport information. It has no accounts, no sign-in, no ads, and no data broker or advertising integrations. This policy describes exactly what data the app handles, what leaves your device, and who processes it.

Summary

  • No accounts and no sign-in. We cannot identify you.
  • Your device location is used on your device only to list nearby airports. It is never transmitted to us or anyone else.
  • The app fetches weather and FAA data over the internet; like any internet request, those requests expose your IP address to the servers involved.
  • The app sends crash reports (via Sentry) and, unless you turn it off, anonymous usage statistics (via Aptabase). Neither contains your location, the airports you look at, your searches, or any persistent device identifier.
  • Usage statistics are not sent until you have acknowledged the first-launch notice, and can be turned off entirely in Settings. (Database-update checks do start at launch — see “FAA data downloads”.)
  • We do not sell data or share it for advertising. The only data reported to a third party on our behalf is the crash and usage telemetry named below; the other services the app contacts are described in “Data sharing and selling”.

Location

If you grant the (optional) location permission, Unicom uses your device position to sort the airport database — which is stored entirely on your device — by distance. The app requests precise location (GPS) so the Nearby screen works reliably in areas without cell or Wi-Fi coverage, such as a cockpit. If you choose “Approximate only” on Android 12+, the app still functions using network-based geolocation. The position is used in memory, on device, for that computation only. It is never written into any network request, never logged off-device, and never stored beyond the immediate lookup. Denying the permission disables only the “Nearby” listing; search and saved lists work without it.

Weather requests (third-party services)

To show METARs and TAFs, the app requests weather from two U.S. government services: the FAA/NOAA Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov) and the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov). These requests contain the airport identifiers of airports in your saved lists, favorites, and recently viewed airports — not your device location. As with any internet request, the services also see your IP address and a User-Agent string identifying the app (not you). The airports you keep in lists may of course correlate with where you fly; the requests carry no account or device identifier, and the operators of those services handle them under their own (U.S. government) privacy policies.

Purchases

The only thing you can buy in Unicom is an optional tip, and tips are processed by Google Play. Unicom does not receive or store your payment method. A tip buys nothing and unlocks nothing — it is voluntary support for the app’s development.

Raw purchase tokens, order IDs, and Play account identifiers are never logged, stored by Unicom, or sent to our servers. So that an interrupted purchase is not charged twice, the app briefly keeps a one-way fingerprint of the transaction on your device; it cannot be turned back into a purchase token, it is excluded from device backup, and it is deleted once the purchase settles.

Once a tip completes, the app records on your device that you have left one, so it can show you a small thank-you in Settings. That record is a simple yes/no marker — it unlocks nothing and contains no purchase details — and it is included in Android device backup (see “What stays on your device”).

FAA data downloads (our servers)

The airport database and its updates are downloaded from our data endpoint (unicom-data.42nddesign.com, served via Cloudflare). The app checks that endpoint for database updates starting at first launch and periodically thereafter — a functional data download, not telemetry. Chart Supplement PDFs are downloaded directly from the FAA (aeronav.faa.gov). These requests are subject to standard web-server access logging (IP address, user agent, request time) by Cloudflare and the FAA respectively. We look only at aggregate request counts (e.g. “how many devices checked for updates this week”) and do not attempt to identify individual devices.

Crash reports

If the app crashes or hangs, a crash report is sent to Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., processing in the United States) so we can fix the bug. Crash reporting is limited to exactly that — crashes and app-not-responding reports; there is no performance tracing, session tracking, screen recording, or screenshot capture.

A crash report contains: the stack trace, app version, Android version, device model, and a short trail of recent technical log events. It does not contain your name, email, account (none exist), IP address (storage is disabled on the server), precise or approximate location, or screen contents. Web-request details in the log trail are scrubbed of query parameters so that coordinate or airport-list query strings never appear in a report. Crash reports are retained for 30 days and cannot be linked to you; because they are essential diagnostics, they do not have an in-app toggle.

Usage analytics

Unless you turn it off (Settings → “Send anonymous usage statistics”), the app sends anonymous usage events to Aptabase (Aptabase / Sumbit Labs Ltda., processing in the United States), acting as our processor. This is on by default; the toggle takes effect immediately.

What an event contains: the event name (e.g. “screen viewed”, “search completed”, “database update succeeded/failed”), coarse properties (counts, true/false flags, category codes), plus app version, OS version, device model class, and country (derived from your IP address at ingestion, after which the IP is discarded and not stored). Events carry an ephemeral session identifier that exists only for the session.

What an event can never contain — by design rule, enforced in code review: no airport identifiers, no coordinates, no search text, and no persistent device or user identifier. There is no way for us or Aptabase to link events to you, your device, or your flying history. Events are used solely to compute aggregate statistics (which features are used, whether updates succeed fleet-wide) and are deleted when no longer needed for that purpose.

No analytics event is sent before you acknowledge the first-launch notice.

What stays on your device

The app’s data is stored on your device — including your saved lists, favorites, recently viewed airports, settings, whether you have left a tip, the airport database, cached weather, and cached Chart Supplement PDFs. We have no copy of any of it and no way to read it.

If Android device backup is enabled on your device, Android may include the app’s data — such as your saved lists, favorites, recently viewed airports, settings, and whether you have left a tip — in the device backup to your own Google Account, and restore it after a reinstall or onto a new device. That backup is an Android service acting for you, under Google’s backup terms — it is not sent to us and we cannot access it. You can turn device backup off, or manage it, in Android’s system settings.

Uninstalling the app (or clearing its storage) deletes all of this data from the device. Any copy in your device backup is managed by Android under your Google Account, not by us.

Data sharing and selling

We do not sell any data, and we do not share any data for advertising. There are no advertising or social SDKs in the app, and no data broker receives anything from Unicom.

The only data the app reports to a third party on our behalf is telemetry: crash reports to Sentry and anonymous usage statistics to Aptabase, each bound to process it only for us. Beyond those two processors, we hand no data about you to anyone.

Separately from that, the app makes ordinary internet requests to the services described in the sections above — Google Play (purchases), Cloudflare (which serves our data endpoint and keeps standard access logs for us), the FAA (Chart Supplement PDFs), and the FAA/NOAA and National Weather Service weather services (which receive airport identifiers). Those services see what any web server sees when your device contacts it. The FAA/NOAA and NWS services are independent U.S. government services operating under their own privacy policies, not processors acting for us.

Data deletion

The app collects no identifiers, so we cannot locate “your” crash reports or usage events to delete them on request — they are anonymous by construction. Crash reports expire automatically after 30 days. All data on your device is deleted when you uninstall the app; if Android included the app’s data in your device backup, that copy is controlled by your Google Account, not by us (see “What stays on your device”).

Security

All network traffic — weather, data downloads, crash reports, analytics — uses HTTPS.

Children

Unicom is a utility for pilots and is not directed at children.

Changes

If we change what the app collects, we will update this policy before the change ships and note the new effective date above. Material changes will also be noted in the app’s release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy: contact@42nddesign.com
42nd Design — publisher of Unicom.