The Bottle — Privacy Policy
Effective: September 11, 2026 · Applies to the mobile game The Bottle: Flip Rings Land (bundle id com.thebottle), for iPhone and Android, published by SMARTNESS HOME.
The short version: there is no account, no sign-in and no server of ours. Your levels, stars, coins, bottles, lives and settings are written to your phone's own storage and nowhere else, and they go when the game goes. The game is free because Google AdMob shows ads in it, and an ad request is the only thing that ever leaves your device. On iPhone the game never shows Apple's tracking prompt, so it never receives the advertising identifier and ads are not personalised from it; on Android, Google may use your device's advertising ID unless you switch that off in Android settings. Google also derives an approximate location from your IP address when it serves an ad. That is the whole list — and it is not the same thing as "no tracking at all".
1. Who publishes The Bottle
Company: SMARTNESS HOME, SAS (French simplified joint-stock company)
Registered office: 5 rue Agrippa d'Aubigné, 91090 Lisses, France
Contact e-mail: contact@smartnesshome.com
The Bottle has no website of its own: this page and the Support page are hosted here, on the publisher's site. Full publisher details are in our Legal Notice, and your use of the game is governed by our End User License Agreement. The game is offered in the United States only, in English.
2. What stays on your device
Everything the game remembers about you is held in the app's own local storage — NSUserDefaults on iPhone, shared preferences on Android — under the game's own keys. That is:
- the levels you have unlocked and the stars you earned on each one;
- your coins, the bottles you own and the one you are throwing;
- your achievements and the secrets you have found in the scenery;
- your best endless run, whether today's daily challenge is done, and your streak;
- your remaining lives and the time the next one is due;
- your settings — music, sound, haptics, the aim guide, in-flight steering and swipe sensitivity;
- a few local counters (sessions, days played) and the date the game last asked you to rate it.
None of it is transmitted to us. There is no account system, we keep no copy, and we could not restore any of it if you lost it. Deleting the game deletes all of it, permanently.
3. What leaves your device
One thing, and nothing else: ad requests to Google, described in full below. Beyond advertising, the game makes no network call at all — we run no server it could talk to, there is no leaderboard, no chat, no social link and no cloud save. The game plays entirely offline; only the ads need a connection.
4. Advertising — where ads appear
The Bottle is free and supported by advertising served by Google AdMob. Four formats are used, and the limits below are enforced by the game itself, not by good intentions:
| Format | Where, and how often |
|---|---|
| Banner | In the menus only — home, shop, settings. Never during a throw. |
| Interstitial | Full screen, only when a level ends, at most once every three levels and never less than 60 seconds after the previous full-screen ad. Never between a failed throw and your retry. |
| App open | Full screen when you come back to the game after leaving it — never on the first launch, at most once every four minutes, never during play. |
| Rewarded video | Only when you tap the button yourself: to get lives back when you run out, to double the coins you just won, or to unlock a bottle in the shop. Nothing in the game is locked behind a video. |
Ads are ordinary AdMob inventory. The game has no in-app purchases of any kind, so there is no paid "remove ads" option, and nothing you do in the game is charged for.
5. Personalised or not — what actually decides it
This is the part most policies fudge, so here it is exactly:
On iPhone. The game never shows Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt — it does not ask for permission to track, because it never asks for the advertising identifier at all. There is no tracking-permission call in the app and no tracking-usage key in its iOS property list. Without that permission, iOS hands out a zeroed identifier, so Google does not receive your IDFA and serves ads that are not personalised from it: they are chosen from the context — the app itself, the device type, and the approximate region Google derives from your IP address. Our App Store privacy label answers "No" to Apple's tracking question for that reason, and if that ever changes it changes in a new version of the game, announced here on the same day.
On Android. Apple's prompt does not exist there. Google's advertising ID is available to the ad SDK unless you say otherwise, and Google may use it both to personalise ads and to cap how often you see the same one and to detect fraud. You control it in Settings → Privacy → Ads, where you can Delete advertising ID or opt out of ads personalisation; that setting is honoured for ads in this game.
The game itself has no ads switch to offer you — there is no setting inside The Bottle that turns advertising on or off, and we would rather say so than imply a control that does not exist. The controls that do work are your device's, above.
6. What an ad request carries
These are the data types Google's own advertising SDK declares as collected from apps like this one, and what each means here:
| Data | Detail |
|---|---|
| Device identifier | The advertising identifier. On Android it is read unless you delete it or opt out in device settings. On iPhone it is never requested, so Google receives a zeroed value. |
| Advertising & usage data | Which ad was shown, whether it was seen, tapped or closed, and interaction with the ad unit itself. |
| Approximate location | The game never asks for location permission and has no location code. Google derives a coarse, approximate location from your IP address when it serves an ad — that is how ads are matched to a region. |
| Diagnostics | Crash, performance and other technical data from the ad SDK. |
What an ad request does not carry is anything about your game: no keywords, no custom targeting, no gameplay content. Your level, your stars, your coins, your best endless run and your settings are never put into an ad request.
For advertising, Google acts as an independent controller of the data it receives. Its own handling is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites and policies.google.com/technologies/ads. You can reset or delete your advertising identifier at any time in your device settings.
7. What the game never collects
We do not ask for your name, address, phone number, e-mail or date of birth — there is no account, so there is no password to lose either. The game never requests location, contacts, photos, files, camera or microphone. There are no in-app purchases, so no payment details ever pass through it.
There is also no analytics SDK: Unity Analytics, Unity Cloud Diagnostics, Unity Ads and Unity Purchasing are all switched off in the build, and the game's own play counters are written to your device and never sent anywhere. Google AdMob is the only third-party SDK in the game that sends anything, and the only crash and performance data that leaves your phone is the ad SDK's own diagnostics.
8. Permissions
Two, both narrow. Internet access — used for ad requests only; the game is fully playable with no connection. Vibration on Android, for the short buzz on landings and impacts, which you can turn off in Settings → Haptics. Nothing else is requested.
9. Your US privacy rights
California's CCPA, as amended by the CPRA, gives you the right to know what personal information is collected, to have it deleted, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. Comparable rights exist under the laws of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Texas, Utah and Virginia. We apply the same handling to everyone rather than sorting players by state.
We do not sell personal information. Serving ads through Google can count as "sharing" for cross-context behavioural advertising under the CPRA where an advertising identifier is used. On iPhone that identifier is never requested, so there is nothing to share by that route. On Android, deleting the advertising ID or opting out of ads personalisation in Settings → Privacy → Ads withdraws it, and takes effect on the next ad. That device switch is the opt-out — you do not have to e-mail anyone to use it.
Because your progress never reaches us, a deletion request is satisfied by uninstalling the game, which you can do yourself at any moment. For anything else, write to contact@smartnesshome.com and we will respond within 45 days. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.
10. Children
The Bottle contains nothing unsuitable for a general audience — it is rated 4+ on the App Store, with no violence, no gambling and no purchases. It is not published as a "Made for Kids" or child-directed app, and it is not configured as child-directed for advertising purposes, so the ads in it are ordinary AdMob ads rather than the restricted kind a children's app would serve. It is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided information to us, write to contact@smartnesshome.com and we will delete it.
11. Security, and its limits
We keep no central store of player data, which removes the thing that most commonly gets breached — there is no database of yours to breach, because there is no database. Ad traffic is served over HTTPS. No system is perfectly secure, and data on your phone is only ever as safe as the phone itself: a device passcode and up-to-date software do more for it than anything we could add.
12. Retention
Your progress lives on your device for as long as you keep the game. We hold no copy to retain, so there is nothing on our side to expire. What Google retains for advertising is governed by Google's own policies, linked above. See also our site-wide Delete Account & Data page.
13. Changes
If we change what is collected or where it goes, we change this policy on the same day and update the date above. In particular, if a future version ever asks for the advertising identifier on iPhone in order to serve personalised ads, that prompt and this page ship together — the page is never updated after the fact.
14. Contact
Privacy questions and requests: contact@smartnesshome.com. Postal address: SMARTNESS HOME, 5 rue Agrippa d'Aubigné, 91090 Lisses, France.