Privacy Policy for Lanly

1. Who We Are

Lanly (the “App”) is an Android controller for compatible smart lights on your own Wi-Fi network, provided by Latent Divergence Studios (“we”, “us” or “our”). This policy explains how information is handled when you use the App. Privacy enquiries may be sent to privacy@latentdivergence.com.

2. The Short Version

Lanly has no user account, no analytics, no telemetry and no crash-reporting service, and no cloud service or API of our own. Controlling your lights happens entirely on your own network: everything the App stores about your lights stays in app-private storage on your phone, and every packet it sends to a device is addressed to your own local network.

The App does show adverts. Lanly is free and is supported by full-screen adverts supplied by Google AdMob, shown at most once every fifteen minutes. AdMob is the only third party in the App and the only part of it that talks to the internet. Section 5 sets out exactly what it receives. A one-time in-app purchase removes the adverts permanently, and once it is owned the advertising SDK is never asked for an advert again.

We never receive your device list, your light names, your network name, your Wi-Fi password or your local IP addresses. There is nowhere in the App to send them.

3. What Lanly Stores on Your Device

• Configured lights: a device identifier, display name, manufacturer and model, capabilities, local IP address and port, room, favourite flag and last-known state such as power, brightness and colour. This is held in the App's local database.
• A saved Wi-Fi password (only if you ask): when you set up a factory-reset bulb and leave Remember switched on, the network name and password are encrypted with a key held in your phone's Android Keystore and written to app-private storage. Only the most recently used network is kept. You can forget it at any time in Settings.
• Preferences: such as whether dynamic colours are enabled and whether Beta provider discovery is on.
• Advertising timing and consent: the time the last advert was shown, so the fifteen-minute gap can be enforced, and the consent choices recorded by Google’s User Messaging Platform. Both are local to your phone.
• Your purchase: nothing. Whether you have bought the ad-free upgrade is read from your Google Play account each time the App starts. We do not store a receipt, and there is nothing to restore beyond asking Play again.

The device database and the encrypted credential file are excluded from Android cloud backup. The encrypted credential file is additionally excluded from device-to-device transfer, because the key that decrypts it never leaves the original phone.

4. Where Network Traffic Goes

Lanly sends traffic only to private-network destinations. Every address the App connects to is checked before a socket is opened and must be a numeric IP address in private, link-local or loopback space; host names are refused rather than resolved, so the App does not perform DNS lookups for device addresses.

Traffic consists of: discovery messages broadcast on your local network; direct connections to the lights you have configured; and, during bulb setup, connections to a factory-reset bulb's own temporary setup hotspot.

Lanly declares Android’s INTERNET permission because Android requires it for any socket, including purely local ones. Beyond your local network the App makes two kinds of outbound connection, and only these two: requests to Google AdMob for adverts and its consent form (Section 5), and requests to Google Play to check whether you have bought the ad-free upgrade. We operate no server of our own, and no data of yours is sent to us.

5. Advertising

Adverts in Lanly are served by Google AdMob (Google Ireland Limited / Google LLC). To select and measure an advert, the AdMob SDK may receive and process an advertising identifier, an approximate location derived from your IP address, your device model, operating-system version, language and country, and in-app activity such as the fact that an advert was requested, shown or clicked. Google acts as an independent controller for that data; its practices are described in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Where the law requires it — the UK, the EEA and equivalent regions — the App shows Google’s User Messaging Platform consent form before any advert is requested, and makes no ad request until you have answered it. You can reopen that form at any time from Settings ▸ Ad privacy options and change your mind.

You can remove advertising entirely with the one-time in-app purchase described in Section 6. Once it is owned, the AdMob SDK is never initialised and no ad request is ever made from your device.

Lanly shows no banners, no native adverts and nothing inline. There is at most one full-screen advert every fifteen minutes, it appears only when you return to your list of lights, and never while you are setting up a bulb.

6. Purchases

The ad-free upgrade is a one-time purchase handled entirely by Google Play. Payment details are entered in Google Play and never pass through, or become visible to, the App or to us. We receive no name, address or payment information — only, through Play’s billing API, the fact that the purchase exists, so that the App can stop showing adverts. Google’s handling of the transaction is covered by the Google Privacy Policy.

7. A Note on Local Network Security

The Yeelight LAN protocol is unencrypted by design; that is a property of the protocol, not a choice Lanly makes. Commands and responses between the App and a bulb travel as plaintext on your Wi-Fi, so use Lanly on a network you trust. During bulb setup, your Wi-Fi credentials are sent to the bulb encrypted with the Xiaomi miIO scheme, or, if that fails, over the bulb's plaintext setup channel as a fallback.

8. Permissions

• Nearby Wi-Fi devices (Android 13+): required by Android to find lights on your network. Lanly declares this with the neverForLocation flag, so it is not used to derive your location.
• Local network access (Android 17+): required by Android to reach devices on your own network.
• Location (optional): requested only from the bulb setup screen, and only because Android will not reveal nearby Wi-Fi network names without it. Discovery and control never ask for it, and you can use the App fully without granting it.
• Change network state: lets the App ask Android to join a bulb's setup hotspot. Android always shows its own confirmation for this and you approve each network.
• Wi-Fi state and multicast: used to see which network you are on and to receive discovery replies while a scan is running.

None of these are used to collect contacts, media, precise location, or any information sent off your device.

9. Third Parties

Google is the only one, in two roles: Google AdMob, which supplies the adverts described in Section 5 and its consent form, and Google Play, which processes the ad-free purchase and tells the App whether you own it. There is no analytics provider, no crash reporter, no attribution or mediation partner, and no backend service of ours. Removing the adverts removes AdMob from the App entirely.

10. Children's Privacy

Lanly is a general-audience home utility. It is not directed to children, its Google Play target audience is adults aged 18 and over, and it creates no account. We do not knowingly direct advertising to children, and the App is not enrolled in Google Play’s Designed for Families programme.

11. Your Choices and Control

You can reopen your advertising consent choices from Settings ▸ Ad privacy options, remove advertising altogether with the one-time purchase, remove an individual light, forget a saved Wi-Fi password, or use Erase all Lanly data in Settings to clear everything the App has stored. Uninstalling the App also removes its data under Android's normal behaviour. Because nothing is transmitted to us, there is no server-side copy to request or delete.

12. Changes

We may update this policy if the App's permissions or data practices change. The current version will be posted at this address with a revised effective date.

13. Contact