Last updated: 6 September 2026
PocketGPG is developed by an independent developer. This policy explains what data the app uses and what happens to it.
The short version: PocketGPG encrypts files with a passphrase using symmetric OpenPGP encryption, entirely on your device. It has no internet permission at all, so it cannot send anything anywhere even if it wanted to.
You choose which files the app can see, one at a time, through Android's own document picker. The app never browses your storage on its own and never receives blanket access to it. Files are read, encrypted or decrypted, and written back to the folder you chose - all on the device. Nothing is uploaded, copied elsewhere, or retained by the app after the job finishes.
Your passphrase is used on the device to derive the encryption key, and is held in memory only for as long as the operation takes. It is never written to disk, never stored in the app's settings, and never transmitted. There is no recovery mechanism and no back door - if you forget the passphrase, neither I nor anyone else can open your files.
The app has a Share button, and it is worth being clear about what that does. PocketGPG does not send anything itself - it hands the chosen file to Android, which shows you the share sheet and grants the app you pick (WhatsApp, Gmail, Bluetooth, Nearby Share, your file manager) temporary read access to that one file. That app then sends it, using its own network permission and under its own privacy policy.
The same applies to the links in the About screen: they ask Android to open a web address in your browser, rather than fetching anything themselves.
Because PocketGPG holds no INTERNET permission, it cannot
open a network connection even in principle - Android enforces this at
the operating-system level. Anything that leaves your phone leaves
because you handed it to another app deliberately.
PocketGPG uses symmetric encryption - the kind GnuPG
performs with gpg --symmetric. There are no public or private
keys and no keyring: one passphrase both locks and unlocks the file, and
whoever you send the file to needs that same passphrase to open it. How you
pass the passphrase on is up to you, and the app plays no part in it.
The passphrase is turned into an encryption key on your device using OpenPGP's salted, iterated string-to-key function (SHA-256, at the highest iteration count the format allows), and the file is then encrypted with the cipher you pick - AES-256 by default. Every file also carries an integrity check, so tampering is detected when it is decrypted.
The work is done by the Bouncy
Castle OpenPGP implementation bundled inside the app. The resulting
.gpg files are ordinary OpenPGP messages and can be opened with
gpg -d or any other OpenPGP tool. No key, passphrase or file
ever leaves your device as part of this.
If you turn on shredding, the app overwrites the original file's bytes before deleting it. You should know the limit of this: on the flash storage phones use, the controller's wear levelling may write those passes to fresh memory cells and leave the original cells intact until they are eventually reused. Shredding makes casual recovery hard. It is not a guarantee against forensic recovery, and the app says so in-app too.
This app is not directed at children and is not designed to collect information from them.
If this policy changes, an updated version will be published at this same address with a revised date above.
For questions about this policy, contact: maxcartermarshall@gmail.com