Commute Guardian for Android. Last updated 30 August 2026.
Commute Guardian announces railway stations through your earphones and sounds an alarm before your stop. To do that it needs to know where you are. Your location never leaves your phone.
Commute Guardian is made by Shashank Ballaya, an individual developer based in Maharashtra, India. Questions about this policy go to commuteguardian@gmail.com.
The app uses your device location, including in the background while the screen is locked, because that is the entire feature: it has to know you are approaching a station in order to name it and to wake you before your stop. It works with no network connection.
Your location is used on your phone and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else. There is no account, no server of ours, and nothing the app sends up in order to decide anything about your journey. The stations, the geofences and the timetable of your ride are all stored inside the app on your device.
The app is deliberately built to keep it that way. It never attaches screenshots or screen contents to a report, because the ride screen shows your route. It removes anything resembling a coordinate from any diagnostic message before that message is sent.
Rides you complete are saved in a database inside the app on your phone. They are not uploaded anywhere and they are not backed up off the device. Uninstalling the app deletes them permanently.
Two things leave the app, and neither one contains your location or your route.
Sent to Aptabase, an analytics service. There are exactly two events and this is all of them:
| Event | What it carries |
|---|---|
| A ride started | Nothing at all. The count is the measurement. |
| A ride ended | How it ended, whether the wake alarm ran, and whether you answered it. |
Aptabase adds your operating system name and version, the app version, and your device language, along with a random session number that is created fresh each time the app runs and is not kept afterwards. No station name, no destination, no time of day of a journey, and no identifier that follows you between sessions is included.
You can switch this off. Settings, then turn off sharing anonymous usage. It stays off.
Sent to Sentry when the app crashes or hits an error. A report contains the technical stack trace, your operating system and device type, and the app version. It does not contain your name, your account, your IP address as an identifier, screenshots, screen contents, or any coordinate.
The app has a button in Settings that lets you send a ride log to us if something went wrong. That log does list the stations you passed and the position readings your phone took. Nothing is sent unless you tap that button and choose where to send it. The app never uploads it on its own. If you never press it, we never see it.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Location, including in the background | To cross station geofences and wake you at the right stop while your phone is pocketed and locked |
| Notifications | To show the ongoing ride and the wake alert |
| Ignore battery optimisation | So Android does not stop the app mid-ride and leave you asleep past your station |
| Vibration | The wake alarm and the pocket check |
| Internet | Only for the crash reports and usage counts above. Your ride does not need it. |
Commute Guardian is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from a child.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will also be described in the app's release notes on Google Play.