Unreeled

Privacy policy

Last updated 11 October 2026

What Unreeled does

Unreeled counts the short videos you watch in Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Snapchat Spotlight and Facebook Reels, shows you the count while you scroll, and stops the feed when you reach the limit you set. It is made by one person for people who want to keep their social apps and lose the endless scroll.

What is stored, and where

• Your settings: the limits, quiet hours and preferences you choose.
• Daily totals per app: how many short videos you watched, for how many minutes, how many times Unreeled stopped you, and how many sessions you had. Totals are kept for the last 31 days and then deleted.

All of this is stored only on your phone, in the app's private storage. Deleting the app deletes it. There is no backup to any server of ours.

Android: the accessibility service

On Android, Unreeled uses Android's accessibility service to do its job. This is the only way an app can notice what another app is showing. Here is exactly what it does with that access:

• It looks at the screen only to recognise whether a short-video viewer (Reels, Shorts, the TikTok feed, Spotlight) is open, and whether you swiped to a new video. For that it reads the structure of the screen (element names and the texts of the video title or author) inside Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook.
• It notices when you leave those apps, so it can stop counting. It does not read the content of any other app.
• It draws the counter, the stop card and the small cover over the feed's button.
• It never records, stores or sends what is on your screen. The only things written down are the daily totals above.
• It never reads passwords, messages or anything you type.

Unreeled is not an assistive technology for people with disabilities; it uses the accessibility service as a digital-wellbeing tool, and asks you to turn it on yourself in Android settings after explaining this.

iPhone: Screen Time and the Lite versions

• Screen Time (strict mode): if you choose it, Unreeled asks Apple's Screen Time to shield the apps you pick. Apple gives Unreeled opaque tokens for those apps; Unreeled never learns which apps you picked, and no Screen Time data is read.
• Shortcuts automation (gentle mode): a Shortcuts automation you create yourself sends you from the real app to Unreeled's Lite version. Unreeled only records the time the automation last ran, to show you the setup is working.
• Lite versions: these load instagram.com, m.youtube.com or tiktok.com inside Unreeled. Those websites see you exactly as a web browser would; their own privacy policies apply to what you do there. Unreeled adds a small script that watches the page address and the video player to count what you watch; it does not read or send anything else. Your logins stay in the on-device web view.

Notifications

If you turn on the Sunday recap, Unreeled shows one local notification a week with your totals. It is created on your phone; no notification service of ours is involved.

What Unreeled does not do

• No accounts, no sign-in, no email collection.
• No analytics, crash reporting, advertising or tracking libraries.
• No network requests from Unreeled itself. The only network traffic is the websites the Lite versions load.
• No selling or sharing of data; there is no data to sell.

Children

Unreeled is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal data from anyone.

Your choices

You can turn the accessibility service off in Android settings at any time, remove the Screen Time shield or the Shortcuts automation on iPhone, and delete all data by uninstalling the app.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is published at this address with a new date. The promise at the top will not change.

Contact

Questions: CONTACT_EMAIL