Privacy Policy

Last updated: 21 September 2026

UNVELL Inc. (“we”) develops and operates the game Balloon Journey Japan (the “Game”) for iOS and Android. This policy explains what the Game and this website collect, why, and what we do not collect.

1. No sign-up, no personal account

The Game does not ask for a name, an email address, a password or a social login. On first launch it creates a random identifier for you as a player, and your balloon hangs under it. That identifier is how our servers recognise your game, and it is not derived from anything about you or your device.

2. What we hold on our servers

The balloon keeps flying while the app is closed, which means the flight is simulated on our servers rather than on your phone. To do that we store, against the random identifier above:

• Game state — the balloon’s position, altitude and track inside the game world, its fuel, the mission you accepted, the records and badges you have earned, the appearance you chose, and the greetings you have received.
• Your player name and your balloon’s name — both are assembled from words the Game offers you, not typed by you (see section 4).

3. Anonymous play statistics

The Game reports how it is being played, so that we can find problems and improve it. What it sends is three kinds of event — the app was opened, the app was closed, you checked in — together with summary values such as how long the session lasted, what the device can do, and which quality setting was in use. None of it is ever used for advertising.

These statistics are not linked to the identifier above, or to anything else about your account. They carry only a separate identifier the device generated for itself, and they are sent to an endpoint that has no authentication, so the server cannot tell which player any of it belongs to. They contain no coordinates either — mixing your balloon’s position in would be enough to join the two back together.

4. What we do not collect

• Your real-world location. The Game never requests location permission. The coordinates it works with are your balloon’s position inside the game world, which has nothing to do with where you are.
• Advertising identifiers. No IDFA, no advertising SDK, no cross-app tracking, and no sale of data to advertisers.
• Anything you write for other players to see. The Game has no chat, and names and greetings are chosen from fixed lists, so nothing you write is ever visible to another player — there are no posts for us to moderate and nothing for anyone to report. The one place you can type at all is the optional feedback survey in section 5.
• Contacts, photos, microphone or camera access.

5. The optional feedback survey

The Game can ask how you are getting on. You can open it yourself from the ≡ menu under Feedback, and it also appears once on its own after you have been flying for a while. It is a single question — are you enjoying the journey? — followed by eight things to rate as good or not (controls, visuals, fun and so on; rate only the ones you want to) and one free-text box. Answering is optional and you can close it at any point.

This is the only place in the Game where you can type. What you write is stored against the random identifier in section 1 and is read only by us, so that we can make the Game better. It is never shown to other players, never published, and never passed to anyone else. It is erased together with everything else when you delete your account (section 11).

Please do not put your name, your contact details or any other personal information into that box. If you need a reply from us, use the contact form instead.

6. Notifications (optional)

The Game can tell you when something happens on your journey while the app is closed — you ran out of fuel and came down, you landed on a mountain, the sea recovered you, a greeting arrived, you reached a destination, and so on. Whether you get them is your choice, made on your device’s own permission prompt.

Only for a device on which you allow notifications, we store the notification token that the device’s operating system issues (the address that lets a notification reach that device), along with the kind of device (iOS or Android) and the language to write the notification in. Unlike the statistics in section 3, the token is stored against the random identifier in section 1 — that is how we know whose journey an event belongs to and which device to tell. That is all it is used for: not for advertising, and not for tracking you across apps.

Notifications are delivered through the push service of your device’s operating system (on iOS, Apple Push Notification service). What a notification says is limited to events in the game world, place names, and greetings and names chosen from the Game’s fixed lists. Notifications waiting to go out are held on our servers briefly, and removed within a few days of being sent.

You can turn notifications off at any time in your device’s settings. In the Game, ≡ → Settings → Notifications shows whether they are on and takes you straight there. The token is erased along with everything else when you delete your account (section 11), and the token of a device that no longer has the Game is removed as soon as the push service tells us it is no longer valid.

7. What other players can see

Other players see your balloon where it is in the game world, how you have decorated it, and the preset name it carries. Nothing else about you is visible to them, and there is no way for another player to send you anything other than the fixed interactions the Game offers.

8. This website

If you use the contact form or the mailing list we receive what you type into it — your email address, and for the contact form your name and message — and use it only to reply to you or to send the release announcements you asked for. Every mailing list message carries an unsubscribe link.

This site also uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages people read, so that we know which parts of the site are worth writing more of. It sets cookies in your browser (names beginning _ga) to tell one visit from the next, and it sends Google your IP address, the pages you view and general details of your browser and device. We use it for measurement only: it is not connected to any advertising product, we do not use it to build a profile of you, and we never link it to anything you send us through the forms above.

You can turn it off. Blocking cookies for this site, or installing Google’s opt-out browser add-on, stops the measurement — and nothing on this site behaves differently when you do. Google’s own handling of the data is described in its privacy policy.

The Game itself sets no cookies — it is an app, not a browser, and the analytics described here run on this website only.

9. Service providers

We use hosting and email delivery providers to run the game servers and to send the messages described above, and the push service of your device’s operating system to deliver notifications (section 6). They process data only on our instructions. We do not sell your information to anyone.

10. Moving to a new device

Because there is no account and no password, moving your balloon to a new device is done with a short transfer code issued by the Game. Anyone holding that code can claim the balloon, so treat it like a password and do not share it.

11. Retention and deletion

Game state is kept while the balloon is in use.

You can delete everything from inside the app, at any time. Open the ≡ menu and choose Delete account; the Game asks you to confirm twice, and then removes from our servers your balloon and the journey it is on, everywhere you have been, the badges and records you collected, the greetings you received, your notification tokens (section 6), and any feedback survey answers you gave (section 5). Deletion is permanent and none of it can be restored. Afterwards you can start again from the sign-up screen.

The anonymous play statistics in section 3 remain. They carry only the number the device made for itself, so not even we can tell which of those records were yours, which means there is nothing there for us to pick out and delete.

If you can no longer reach the app — because you deleted it, for example — or if you want a contact-form message deleted, ask us through the contact form.

12. Children

The Game is not designed to collect personal information from anyone, including children. It has no chat, no advertising, and no way to send text to another player. The feedback survey in section 5 is optional and asks you not to include personal information. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information through the contact form or that survey, please tell us and we will delete it.

13. Changes

We may update this policy. Where a change is significant we will say so on this page and in the Game.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy are welcome through the contact form.