Apara
Privacy Policy.

The short version

To use Apara you sign in with your email address. The sign-in service records that address, an identifier derived from your Mac, and what is needed to keep your access working and to stop one free trial being used again and again. The games and programs you run, your saves, your files and what you play stay on your Mac.

Apara has no advertising, no analytics service and no crash-reporting service, and it ships with compatibility reports switched off (and not yet active). This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and carries no advertising or third-party tracking. We do not sell or share personal information, and we never have.

You can delete your account yourself, in Apara under Settings › Account › Delete account, or by writing to us. The sections below say exactly what is kept and for how long.

Who is responsible for your data

Apara and apara.dev are published by Yogvid Wankhede, an individual based in the United States, who is the controller of any personal data described here. There is no company behind the project at this time. Privacy questions and requests go to hello@apara.dev.

What the sign-in service collects

Apara’s sign-in and access service runs on Cloudflare at account.apara.dev. When you sign in and while you use Apara it holds:

• Your email address, so we can send you a sign-in code and identify your account.
• Your Mac, as a one-way fingerprint derived from its hardware identifier (not the identifier itself), a public key generated for it, the name you gave the Mac (shortened to 64 characters), and when it was last seen. This ties your access to the Mac it is used on and lets you see and remove your Macs.
• Your sign-in sessions and codes, kept as one-way hashes rather than in the clear.
• Your plan and trial state: whether you are on a trial, a beta term or a paid plan, and when it ends. Paid plans are not available yet; when they are, payment will be taken by a payment provider we will name here, and we will not hold your card details.
• A one-way fingerprint of your email and of your Mac when a free trial starts, so the same person cannot start a new trial each time. We keep this after you delete your account, for that purpose only.
• The country your connections appear to come from, taken from the connection by Cloudflare, and a note when an account appears to be used from many countries in a short time. This is used only to protect accounts from being shared or taken over.
• Your email choices, if you set any (see below), and the date and wording you agreed to.
• When you accepted these documents: Apara keeps the date and version on your Mac.

Your IP address is used by our service only briefly, to limit repeated attempts; we do not store it, apart from as a one-way hash in short-lived limit records that are deleted automatically within about a day. Apple’s DeviceCheck is used to tell whether a Mac has already used a free trial; the check sends Apple a token for your Mac and we store only a trial-used flag.

What Apara does not collect

The following are deliberately absent from everything Apara sends: the names of programs you run, file paths, file names, your games, saves and screenshots, anything you type, and your browsing. Apara has no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting service and no advertising identifier.

Optional compatibility reports, and exactly what they will contain

Compatibility reports (telemetry) are off by default and not yet active. Once they exist you will be able to turn them on in Settings, and off again at any time. While on, a report may be produced after a program runs, containing only:

• an identifier for the program build and a hash of the runtime used
• which graphics route was chosen
• whether the run succeeded
• your Mac’s chip family, a broad memory class, and the major macOS version
• how long the session lasted, as a coarse bucket — under 10 seconds, under a minute, under ten minutes, under an hour, or over an hour
• a failure signature, when a run failed

Session length is bucketed on purpose. An exact figure would say something about your evening; a bucket says only whether the program was usable.

Compatibility reports are not active yet and nothing is sent today. When they are, they will carry no account, no device identifier and no name, so they cannot be traced back to you, and we will say so here and in Apara before anything is sent. See data deletion.

Because you switch telemetry on yourself, your consent is the basis for it; switching it off withdraws that consent for every report after that moment.

Program icons and cover art stay on your machine

When Apara shows an icon for a program, it reads that icon out of the program file already on your disk. When you add cover art, Apara reads the file you choose. Nothing is fetched from a storefront and nothing is uploaded. Apara’s artwork store contains no network client at all.

When Apara uses the network, and who else sees your data

Apara connects to the network to:

• Sign you in and check your access with our service (account.apara.dev), described above. Sign-in emails are sent by our email provider, Resend, which receives your email address and the message.
• Check for updates at updates.apara.dev when Apara opens and every few hours, unless you turn this off. The request names Apara and its version, as any download does. Apara does not send system profile information with it. Updates are hosted on Cloudflare R2.
• Beta testers: get Apple’s Direct3D from us, if they choose to. Apara asks our service, signed as your Mac; the service checks that your account is a tester and sends the file from private storage on Cloudflare. We do not keep a record of who downloaded it, though Cloudflare processes the request as it does any other.
• Download what a program needs. Store installers come from the store’s own servers (Steam, Epic Games, GOG, EA, Ubisoft, Battle.net, Rockstar and similar), and components such as the .NET runtime, Visual C++ and DirectX come from Microsoft and other publishers’ servers. Those servers see your IP address and what you download, under their own privacy policies. Programs you run may contact their own servers too; that is between you and them.

Our service is hosted on Cloudflare (Workers, D1 database and R2 storage), which processes technical request data such as IP address as any web host does. Apple’s DeviceCheck is used as described above. We do not sell or share your data with anyone else.

Every component Apara downloads is fetched over HTTPS and checked against a pinned SHA-256 hash before use; a file that does not match is refused, never run.

Apara Help

By default Apara Help answers from its built-in guide, with no model involved. If you choose to turn on Apple Intelligence for Help (in Apara’s Settings), Help also uses the model that macOS runs on your Mac. Apple stores and runs that model, not Apara, and it takes several gigabytes if it is not already on your Mac. Your questions and Help’s answers are not sent to us or to anyone else by Apara.

To answer a question about a program that is not working, Help reads that program’s last launch result and the end of its log, with your name and folder paths removed first, and the model uses it for that answer only.

Data stored on your Mac

Apara stores your library, your per-program settings, imported cover art, downloaded runtime components, safety snapshots of your environments and logs in your user Library folder, and your sign-in session and access key in your Mac’s Keychain. This data never leaves your machine unless you move it there yourself. Removing Apara does not remove it; you can delete it — see data deletion.

This website

apara.dev is a static site. It has no accounts, no forms that submit to our servers, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising and no embedded third-party content. Fonts and scripts are served from apara.dev itself, so loading a page does not tell any other company that you visited.

The site is hosted and delivered by Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare necessarily processes the technical details of each request — your IP address, browser user agent, the page requested and the time — to deliver the page and protect the site from abuse. Those records are held by Cloudflare under its own privacy policy; we do not combine them with anything or use them to identify visitors.

Links to other sites — GitHub, Discord, social networks, the App Store — take you to services with their own privacy policies. Nothing is sent to them until you follow the link.

If you write to us

If you email hello@apara.dev or support@apara.dev, for example to become a tester, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to write. We use it only to reply and to follow up on what you asked about, we keep it only as long as that conversation is useful, and we delete it on request. Email is hosted by Apple (iCloud Mail).

Email from us

Sign-in codes are sent because you asked to sign in. Product news and release emails are separate: both are off unless you switch them on in Apara under Settings › Account, each can be switched off the same way or from the link in any email, and we record when you chose and the wording you saw.

How long we keep data

• Your account, Macs, sessions, plan and email choices are kept while you have an account and deleted when you delete it. Deleting is refused while a paid subscription is active, until it is cancelled.
• Rate-limit records (one-way hashes) are deleted automatically within about a day.
• Trial records (one-way fingerprints of email and Mac) are kept after deletion so a free trial cannot be repeated.
• An audit log of administrative actions on accounts (for example a plan change or an email correction, with the account involved) is kept after deletion, to keep accounts secure and to answer disputes. It can contain a previous email address or a Mac’s name.
• Expired sign-in codes and sessions stop working at once but are removed when the account is deleted, not on a schedule.

If you want any of this removed sooner or want to see what we hold about you, write to hello@apara.dev.

How we protect data

Collection is kept to what the sign-in service needs, identifiers are one-way hashes where a clear value is not needed, and everything is protected in transit by HTTPS, which this site and our service enforce for every request. See the security page for how Apara protects your Mac and how to report a vulnerability.

Your rights

Depending on where you live — including under the GDPR and UK GDPR, and under California’s CCPA/CPRA and other US state privacy laws — you may have the right to know what personal data we hold about you, to get a copy, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to or restrict its use, and to withdraw consent. You also have the right not to be discriminated against for using any of these rights.

To use any of them, write to hello@apara.dev. We will answer within 30 days. In practice this means the details of your account and any email conversation. If you are in the EU or UK and are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to your local data-protection authority.

We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not use personal data for automated decision-making or profiling.

International visitors

The project is run from the United States. If you use Apara or contact us from elsewhere, your data is handled in the United States and by the providers named above, who may process it in other countries, and only for the purposes described here.

Children

Apara and this website are not directed at children under 13 (or under 16 in the EU and UK). Apara asks you to confirm your age or a parent’s agreement before it runs, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has sent us personal data, write to us and we will delete it.

Apara Mac Extender

Apara Mac Extender, a separate iPhone and Mac app, has its own privacy policy.

Changes, and how to reach us

When the application or this site changes in a way that affects your data, this page changes with it and the effective date above moves. For privacy questions, write to hello@apara.dev.

Apara is not affiliated with Apple, CodeWeavers, the Wine project, or any game publisher or storefront.