AVA
Ava is a film-emulation camera app for Android, package com.avya.camera,
developed by Tejalogs. This policy covers the Ava Android app and
nothing else. It describes what the app does with your data, in enough detail that
you can check it against the app itself.
The short version. Ava has no accounts, no servers and no analytics, and it sends nothing off your phone — it does not hold Android's internet permission, so it cannot upload anything. Two things are worth knowing anyway. Photos and clips stay in Ava unless you choose to copy them to your device's normal photo gallery, and once a copy is there, any cloud photo backup you already use will upload it the same way it uploads everything else you shoot. And the place name Ava prints under each photo is part of the film stock's fiction, not a reading of where you are.
Nothing. Ava does not hold the Android INTERNET permission,
so the app's own process cannot open a network connection. There are no accounts, no
servers, no analytics, no crash-reporting service, no advertising network, and no Firebase.
Two honest footnotes to that. Ava does hold ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, a permission
added by one of the Android camera libraries it is built on; Google Play will show it in the
app's permission list. The image library that displays your diary uses it to check whether
the device is online. It reads a yes-or-no answer and sends nothing, and without the internet
permission it could not send anything if it tried. Separately, tapping a link inside the app —
this page, or a source or licence on the Credits page at the foot of the diary — opens it in
your browser; your browser then makes that request, not Ava.
Ava keeps data in four places inside its own private storage, plus your gallery when you choose to save there.
Captions are the only thing here you type; everything else in that list is your photographs, which are personal in themselves. Ava never writes a caption for you, and nothing analyses one or sends it anywhere on its own. A caption is shown in your diary and included as text when you share.
Ava copies a photo or clip into your device's shared photo library only when you ask it to. The Gallery switch at the top of the diary is off unless you turn it on. The first time you take a photo while the switch is off, Ava asks once whether to keep a copy of every photo. Keep copies turns the switch on and also copies the photo the question is showing; Not now leaves the switch off, and Ava does not ask again. If you go back without answering, it asks again after your next photo. On Android 9 and earlier, Keep copies first asks for the storage permission below: the photo is copied only if you allow it, and if you decline, the switch goes back off and nothing is copied. While it is on, every new photo and clip is copied there as it is taken. With it off, you can still copy any single photo or clip with Save in the photo viewer. Turning the switch on or off does not copy or remove anything you have already taken.
Versions of Ava before 2.0.3 tried to copy every photo and clip to the gallery automatically. On Android 9 and earlier that needed the storage permission below, which versions before 2.0 never asked for, so some older photos were never copied. Updating stops automatic copies; copies already made stay in your gallery until you delete them. In the viewer, a photo that shows Save has no copy in your gallery. The viewer offers Save again for any whose copy you have since deleted, including one waiting in your gallery's trash. On Android 9 and earlier it can tell only while Ava has the storage permission; without it, a photo whose copy you deleted keeps showing Saved. To tell, Ava looks up only the copies it made itself, by their own reference; it does not read the rest of your library.
On Android 10 and later the copy goes into a folder named Ava — under Pictures
for photos, Movies for clips. On Android 9 and earlier Ava does not set a folder, so the
copy lands wherever your device files it. Each copy is named for the app and the moment it
was taken — Ava_ followed by that time in milliseconds (for a clip, the moment it started recording).
That copy is an ordinary picture in your photo library. Any app you have given access to your media can see it, including its filename. If you have a cloud photo backup switched on, that service will back it up like any other photo you take. Ava itself uploads nothing — but this is the point where your photos become reachable by software other than Ava, so it is the most important sentence on this page.
The copy is best-effort. If your device refuses the write — most often on Android 9 and earlier, when the storage permission below has been declined — a photo taken with the switch on stays in Ava's diary without an error, and a Save you tapped tells you it could not be done. Either way the photo exists in Ava's diary and not in your gallery.
Until a photo or clip has a gallery copy, Ava's diary holds the only copy. Ava keeps no backup of its own and is excluded from Android's backup and phone-to-phone transfer, so uninstalling Ava, clearing its storage or moving to a new phone loses it. Turning the Gallery switch on copies only what you take from then on; save earlier photos one at a time from the viewer. If an automatic copy fails while the switch is on, Ava says so.
Google Play lists every permission an app holds, including ones added by the libraries it is built from. Here is the complete list, and what each is actually for.
| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Camera | To show the viewfinder and capture photos and video. Requested when you tap Load on the first page, or with Turn on camera on the "Camera is off" screen if you declined earlier (if Android will no longer ask, that screen sends you to Settings). |
| Microphone | To record sound into a CINE clip. See below. |
| Vibrate | Haptic feedback only: the shutter, the dial and wheel detents, focus lock, switching between photo and CINE, starting and stopping a clip, changing film, and the end of a roll. Nothing else uses it. |
| Storage Android 9 and below only |
To write a gallery copy on older Android versions. Asked for when you turn the Gallery switch on, when you tap Keep copies on Ava's one-time gallery question, or when you tap Save; if you say no, the switch stays off and nothing is copied. If you later take it away in Android's settings, the switch shows off and nothing is copied; Ava asks when it starts, and if you say no the switch turns off so it stops asking. Newer versions need no permission for this. On those older versions Android grants read access along with write, so the same permission would also let Ava read shared storage; Ava uses it only to check that copies it made itself are still there, and never reads or browses the rest of your photo library. |
| Network state | Added by an Android camera library, used by the image loader to check whether the device is online. Ava cannot use the network. |
| An internal app permission | Added by an AndroidX library so that only Ava's own code can talk to itself. It grants no access to anything on your device. |
Ava declares no location permission, no contacts, no notifications, and no advertising identifier. On Android 10 and later it has no permission to read your existing photos; on Android 9 and below, see Storage above.
Ava asks for the microphone the moment you switch to CINE mode, before you record anything — that is earlier than you might expect, and you may see the request even if the camera itself is unavailable. It asks a second time if you tap record while the microphone is still ungranted and CINE's sound is on. Two refusals is Android's threshold for hiding a request permanently; after that CINE keeps working and records silent. The permission is used in exactly one place: attaching sound to a clip as it starts recording. There is no background listening and no other audio capture anywhere in the app.
Three things worth knowing. Tapping record before you answer the request starts a silent clip rather than no clip. Once you have granted the microphone, CINE clips record sound unless you turn CINE's Sound switch off (in CINE it takes the flash button's place); with it off, clips record with no audio and tapping record does not ask for the microphone. The switch is not your sounds setting, which only controls Ava's own sound effects, and it is not saved: it goes back to on the next time Ava starts fresh. And clips stop automatically at about fifteen seconds. Recorded audio travels inside the clip, including into a gallery copy if you save one. If you decline the microphone, CINE still works and records silent.
Ava never accesses your location. It holds no location permission, calls no location or geocoding service, and writes no GPS tag into any photo or clip.
The place name shown under a photo in the diary — VARANASI, DELHI, ROOFTOP — is a fixed label belonging to the film stock you shot with. It is part of the app's fiction. It is the same for everyone using that stock, it is not derived from your device, and it is stored only in Ava's own database. It is never written into the image file and never included when you share.
A photo Ava saves is re-encoded from the image itself, so most of the metadata your phone's
camera recorded is not carried over. In its place Ava stamps an invented camera identity: a
make of AVA, a model of CR-206, and its own software name. It also
writes up to eight exposure figures — aperture as both an f-number and an APEX value,
sensitivity, exposure time, exposure compensation, focal length both actual and
35mm-equivalent, and a lens name. Where your phone's camera reports them, the f-number,
sensitivity, exposure time and actual focal length are copied from the camera's own record of
the shot, and the APEX value and lens name are worked out from that f-number. Everything else
comes from the readout Ava saves with the photo and shows under it in the viewer, and some of those figures are characteristics of the film
stock rather than measurements of the scene. If the Mist filter was on, Ava also writes the
word Mist into the photo's comment field, so you can tell later which photos were
taken through it. Mist starts on for the selfie camera and off for the back camera, so selfies
carry this word unless you turn Mist off.
Each photo also records the date and time it was taken, in your phone's local time, with its offset from UTC, which shows the time zone you were in. These travel with any copy you save to your gallery and with any photo you share. No location tag is written. Clips are not stamped with any of this. They carry what your device's video recorder writes into them, which does not include location, and Ava changes one thing afterwards: the tag that says which way up the clip plays, so a clip shot sideways plays the right way up. The picture and sound are copied as they are.
When you share a photo or clip, Ava hands the app you choose a read-only handle to that one
file, plus your caption if you wrote one. Every share also appends the text
#AvaCamera, whether or not you wrote a caption. Once the file reaches the app you
picked, that app's own privacy policy governs what happens to it. Ava has no part in it and
no way to reach it afterwards.
No other app can reach Ava's private storage. A share grants access to the single file you selected and to nothing else — not to your other photos, and not to Ava's database.
Ava keeps what you make indefinitely, until you delete it. There is no expiry, no automatic clean-up and no account to close. The one exception is installing an older version of Ava than the one you have: the diary index is rebuilt from scratch and your existing entries stop appearing, though the image files stay in Ava's storage until you uninstall.
Deleting a memory deletes Ava's own copy and, if Ava made one, the copy in your gallery, and then removes the entry from your diary. If Ava cannot delete its own copy, the entry stays in your diary and Ava tells you so — nothing is stranded somewhere you can no longer see it. If it is the gallery copy that will not go, the entry is removed and Ava tells you to delete the leftover in your gallery app. There is no delete-everything button; memories are deleted one at a time.
Uninstalling Ava, or clearing its storage in Android's settings, removes everything in the four private locations listed above — your diary, its database and its settings. Photos and clips you never copied to your gallery exist only there, so they go too. It does not remove the copies in your gallery, which are ordinary photos in your library and remain after the app is gone.
To decide how large a photo it can process, Ava reads how much memory your phone has and how large an image its graphics hardware can handle. It also reads your system animation setting so it can respect "remove animations". These are read while the app runs, are used only for that purpose and are not stored. The camera library Ava is built on also checks your phone's make and model against its own list of known hardware quirks. None of these are identifiers: Ava reads no device ID, no advertising ID, and no hardware serial number of any kind.
While Ava is on your screen (the camera, the diary or any of its other pages), it reads your phone's motion sensor to tell which way up you are holding it, so a photo or clip taken sideways is saved the right way up even with auto-rotate off. This needs no permission; the reading stays in memory, is used only to set which way up a photo or clip is saved, and is never stored. It stops when Ava goes to the background.
On the selfie camera, when there is plenty of light, Ava asks the camera to use its own face detection to set the exposure, so a face against a bright window is not left dark. The camera does the detecting, and while it does, it also reports where it found a face with each frame. Ava ignores that report: it does not read, analyse or store any face, recognises no one, and writes nothing about a face into your photos. A tap on the viewfinder meters where you tapped instead.
Data-protection law gives you rights over personal data a company holds about you — to see it, correct it, take a copy, have it erased, or object to its use.
The developer of Ava never receives any of your data, so there is nothing held to disclose, correct, export or erase. In practice you exercise these rights directly on your phone: your photos and captions are files and a database on your own device, you can read and change them in the app, you can copy them out with Save or through the share sheet, and you can erase them by deleting a memory, which removes Ava's copy and any gallery copy it made. Uninstalling removes only Ava's own copies; the gallery copies stay, and neither step reaches a copy a cloud backup has already uploaded or a file you have shared. Ava does not sell or share personal information, and there is no profiling, no automated decision-making and no advertising. If you are in a region with a data-protection authority, you retain the right to complain to it.
Ava is a general-audience camera app. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone — there is nothing for the developer to collect. If you are below the age of digital consent where you live, please use Ava with a parent or guardian.
This policy may be updated as the app changes. The effective date at the top of the page reflects the current version. Material changes will be reflected here before or alongside the release that makes them true.
For privacy questions about Ava, email contact@trysecondlook.com.