Privacy policy

1. The principle

PayNote runs entirely on your phone. The app does not send your data anywhere — not to us, not to anyone else. Everything else on this page is only an explanation of that one sentence.

Concretely, PayNote has no account, no login, no identifier of its own attached to your phone, no analytics, and no advertising. It also sends no crash reports to any server.

2. What the two app stores were told

Every developer has to declare to Apple and Google what their app collects. We declared nothing, in both places:

• App Store — under App Privacy: No to the question of whether the app or its partners collect data from it.
• Google Play — under Data safety: No to the question of whether the app collects or shares user data.

The paid PRO plan does not change either answer. A declaration that does not match the app gets it pulled from the store, so this is not a promise made lightly.

3. Permissions the app asks for

• Camera — so it can see the QR code to read it. Saying no is fine: you then type the amount in by hand, like any other expense book.
• Network access — used for exactly two things: opening your banking app, and asking the store what PRO costs and whether you have bought it.
• In-app purchases — declared by the store's own billing library at install time; it is not a prompt you are shown.

Permissions PayNote deliberately never asks for: reading your SMS, reading your notifications, contacts, location, photo library. It does not need them to do its job, so it does not ask.

5. The two moments the app reaches outside

There are exactly two, and neither carries your data out.

1. Opening your banking app to pay

When you tap to pay, PayNote builds a special link and asks the operating system to open your banking app with it. PayNote connects to no server of VietQR's — it only assembles the address and hands it to your phone.

That link carries the payee's account number, bank code, amount and transfer message. All of it was read out of the QR code you just scanned, so all of it belongs to the person being paid. It carries nothing of yours: no name, no account number, no spending history.

The money is moved by your banking app, not by PayNote. We are never in the middle, never see your balance, and never learn whether the transfer went through — which is exactly why you tap to confirm it yourself.

2. Buying PRO

PayNote sells one thing: PRO, paid once, through Google Play's and the App Store's own payment systems. No Z-SOFT server is involved.

The app only asks the store two questions — “what does this cost?” and “has this person bought it?” — then writes the answer down as a “bought / not bought” mark on the phone, so it still knows you are PRO while offline. It sends nothing up.

We use no middleman service to manage those purchases, because adding one would add another party that can see our users.

The purchase itself is handled by Google and Apple using the account already on your phone. They keep that record, and it is their own rule that a developer does not declare data the store collects.

6. Backups are encrypted — here is exactly how much that means

When you export a backup, the file is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, a strong standard. But the key that decrypts it ships inside the app.

So: if the file ends up in someone else's hands, they cannot simply open and read it, not even sitting in a Google Drive folder or a chat thread. But it will not stop someone with the skill and the intent to take the app apart and lift the key out.

We would rather state that limit than let the word “encrypted” reassure you further than it should.

7. Deleting your data

There is nothing for you to ask us to delete, because we hold nothing.

Uninstalling the app takes the whole book on that phone with it. A backup file you exported sits wherever you put it, and only you can delete it.

8. Children

The app collects no data from anyone, so it collects none from children either. It contains no adult content, no gambling, no social network, and nothing users post for other users to see.

9. When this policy changes

If PayNote ever needs a network connection for a new reason, this page will be changed before that release ships, at the same time as the declarations on both stores. The date at the top of the page is the last time it changed.

10. Contact

Anything here you would like explained, write to support@z-cloud.com.vn.