Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 October 2026

Additiva (“the app”) is a food additive and E-number decoder for iOS and Android, published by TLM Software Design, Inc., 27280 Haggerty Road, Ste C-6, Farmington Hills, MI 48331, USA (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what data the app handles, who receives it and why.

Short version: what you search for and the labels you scan stay on your phone. There is no Additiva server and no account. What leaves the device goes to the providers listed below: anonymous usage statistics and crash reports, a purchase record if you buy Premium, and, in the free version only, the requests that show a banner ad, after any consent your region requires.

What stays on your device

• Searches. The whole additive database is inside the app, so a search is answered on the phone. We never receive what you look up. That matters, because what you look up can say something about your diet, your religion or your allergies.
• Label scanning (Premium). When you scan a label with the camera or pick a photo, the text is read on the device: by Apple’s Vision framework on iPhone, and by Google’s ML Kit and the open-source Tesseract engine on Android. Camera frames and photos are not stored, and are never uploaded to us or to anyone else.
• Settings. Your language and the fact that you accepted the opening disclaimer are stored on the device.

The app does not ask for your diet, religion or allergies, and it has no account or sign-in.

Permissions

• Camera, only when you start a scan. You can refuse and still use search, or pick a photo instead.
• Photos: the app uses the system photo picker, so it sees only the photo you choose and never your library.

What leaves your device

Usage statistics and crash reports

We use two Google Firebase services, in release builds of the app:

• Firebase Analytics records how the app is used, for example that it was opened, that a session started, that the rate-the-app prompt was shown, or that a purchase was made. It ties these events to a random app instance ID (not your name, email or an account), and Google derives an approximate location (country or region) from your IP address. It does not receive your searches, your scans or any text you type.
• Firebase Crashlytics sends a report when the app crashes: the device model, operating system version, app version, the technical state at the time of the crash and a random installation ID.

We use them to fix problems and to understand, in aggregate, how the app is used.

Purchases

If you buy Additiva Premium (a monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase), the payment is handled by the App Store or Google Play. RevenueCat, our purchase-management provider, receives the purchase record and the store receipt against an anonymous app user ID, so it can confirm that your Premium is active and restore it on a new device. We and RevenueCat never see your payment details.

Ads in the free version

The free version shows a banner ad from Google AdMob at the bottom of the search and additive screens. Premium removes it, and for a Premium user the ad software is never started.

• Consent first. Before the first ad, the app asks Google’s User Messaging Platform whether consent is needed where you are (for example in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland) and, if so, shows Google’s consent form. No ad is requested until that is settled. The consent platform receives your IP address, from which Google derives your region, and basic usage and diagnostic data, and it stores your choice on the device. You can change your choice at any time in Settings → Ad privacy choices, when your region provides for it.
• What AdMob receives when it serves a banner: your IP address and the approximate location derived from it, device and app information, interactions with the ad, diagnostic data, and a device identifier (on Android, the app set ID). Whether ads are personalised depends on the choices you made in the consent form and on your device settings.
• No advertising ID. The app does not read your device’s advertising identifier: on Android the permission is removed, and on iPhone the app never asks to track you.

AdMob and the consent platform are governed by Google’s privacy policy at policies.google.com/privacy and by How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

Google ML Kit on Android

ML Kit reads label text on the device and does not send your images anywhere. Like Google’s other software kits, it sends Google its own usage and diagnostic information about how the text recogniser is performing. It contains no image and no text from your labels.

What we do not collect

• Your searches, or the additives you open
• Camera frames, label photos or the text read from them
• Your name, email address or any contact information
• Your diet, religion, allergies or health information
• Your precise location
• Your contacts, calendar or photo library
• Your device’s advertising identifier

Legal bases (EEA, UK and Switzerland)

• Usage statistics and crash reports: our legitimate interest in keeping the app working and improving it.
• Purchases: performing the contract you enter when you buy Premium.
• Ads: your consent where the law requires it, collected through Google’s consent form, which you can change in Settings at any time.

Our providers may process data in the United States and other countries. They do so under the safeguards their own terms describe, such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

Your choices and data deletion

There is no account, and we keep no profile about you on any server of our own.

• Uninstalling the app removes everything it stored on your device.
• Buying Premium removes the ads and stops the ad software from running.
• In the free version, Settings → Ad privacy choices reopens the consent form where your region provides for it. You can also limit ad personalisation in your device settings.
• Usage statistics and crash reports are tied to random IDs rather than to you, so we cannot find them by name. To ask about a purchase record or to exercise any other data right (access, deletion, objection), email privacy@swtlm.com and we will reply within 30 days.

Children

Additiva is a general-audience app for shoppers. It is not directed at children under 13 (16 in the EU and the UK), and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has used the app and we hold something we should not, write to privacy@swtlm.com and we will delete it.

This website

Everything above is about the app. This page is part of apps.swtlm.com, and that website uses Google Analytics to count visits: pages viewed, session count and referral source. Analytics cookies (_ga, _ga_*) are set only after you accept the cookie banner, and nothing is loaded before you do.

apps.swtlm.com is one website: this page and every app page on it share a single analytics property and a single consent choice, so accepting or declining once applies everywhere on the domain. That is the analytics only. This privacy policy covers Additiva and its pages, and nothing else. Every other app on apps.swtlm.com has its own policy, because every app handles different data. You can withdraw consent at any time by clearing this site’s local storage in your browser. The pages are hosted on Amazon Web Services (S3 and CloudFront), which keeps standard access logs (IP address, time, requested page).

Service providers

Changes

If this policy changes, we will update the date above and publish the new version at this address.

Contact

Privacy questions and data-rights requests: privacy@swtlm.com. Everything else: info@swtlm.com.

TLM Software Design, Inc., 27280 Haggerty Road, Ste C-6, Farmington Hills, MI 48331, USA.