Trimbitas

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 August 2026

Trimbitas is an internet radio player for Android. This policy describes what it does with your information. The short version is that it collects nothing about you: no accounts, no advertising, no analytics, no tracking. Trimbitas does now run one server of its own — a mirror of the public station directory — and exactly what that records is set out below.

What Trimbitas collects

Nothing, unless you choose to send a crash report.

Trimbitas has no accounts and no sign-in. It contains no analytics, no advertising, no telemetry and no third-party tracking libraries of any kind. The developer receives no information about you, your device or what you listen to.

There is one deliberate exception, and it is entirely in your hands. If the app closes unexpectedly, it saves a description of the error to your own device. The next time you open Trimbitas it shows you that report in full and asks what to do with it. Choosing to send it opens your email app with the report as the message, so it is sent by you, from your address, only if you press send — and you can read every line first, or discard it instead. Either way the report is then deleted from your device.

A crash report contains the error, the app version, your Android version and your device model. It contains nothing about what you listen to, nothing from your favourites or history, and nothing that identifies you.

What Trimbitas stores on your device

The following are kept on your device only:

Favourite stations you have saved.
Recently played stations, so you can find your way back to one.
Stations you add by URL, including any name you give them.
Songs you have saved while they were playing.
Your settings — theme, Wi-Fi-only playback, sleep-timer fade length, and whether track titles are shown.
A cache of station directory results, so browsing works without re-fetching and degrades gracefully when the network does.
A crash report, only if the app closed unexpectedly, and only until you send or discard it.

This data lives in Trimbitas's private app storage. Uninstalling the app deletes all of it.

Trimbitas can export your favourites and saved songs to a file, and import them back. That happens only when you ask for it, the file goes where you choose, and nothing is uploaded.

Connections Trimbitas makes

Trimbitas is a radio player, so it must talk to the internet. It connects to:

Trimbitas's own directory mirror (directory.trimbitas.app) — a copy of the public station directory, run by the developer and asked first. It exists because the public directory has for some time resolved to a single volunteer-run server, which has failed under load with nothing to fall back to. The mirror runs the same open-source software and carries the same public station data.

Searches you make reach this server, in the same way they previously reached Radio Browser directly. Its access log is written without the address the request came from, so what was searched for is not recorded against anyone. If the mirror is unreachable, Trimbitas falls back automatically to the public Radio Browser servers — it is deliberately never a single point of failure.
Radio Browser (api.radio-browser.info) — the community-maintained directory the mirror copies from, and the fallback when the mirror cannot be reached. When you start playing a station from the directory, that play is reported to Radio Browser as an anonymous station identifier. This is how their popularity rankings stay useful, and it continues to happen through the mirror rather than being absorbed by it. The report contains the station's identifier and nothing about you. Their site is radio-browser.info.
Radio station stream servers — whichever station you choose to play. These are operated by the individual broadcasters, not by Trimbitas.
Station artwork hosts — station logos are loaded from the addresses the station listed in the directory.

As with visiting any website, the operators of those servers can see the IP address your request came from, because that is inherent in how internet connections work. Trimbitas does not send them anything else that identifies you. It does send a User-Agent naming the app and its version, which is a courtesy to Radio Browser so they can identify traffic from the app and get in touch if it misbehaves.

Trimbitas does not share your data with these third parties, because it has none to share.

Cleartext (non-HTTPS) connections

Many internet radio streams — including major public broadcasters — are still served over plain http:// from long-lived legacy servers. Trimbitas permits these connections, because refusing them would make a large share of the world's radio silently unplayable.

What this means for you: on an untrusted network, someone positioned between you and the station could in principle observe which station you are streaming, or substitute different audio. This is the same exposure as listening to broadcast radio. No credentials and no personal data are ever sent over these connections. Both the directory mirror and the Radio Browser API are always contacted over HTTPS.

Permissions

Trimbitas requests the minimum set it can function with:

Permission	Why
`INTERNET`	To fetch the station directory and play streams.
`ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE`	To know when the network dropped, so it can stop retrying and resume when it returns.
`FOREGROUND_SERVICE` `FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK`	To keep playing while the app is in the background, which Android requires a foreground service for.
`WAKE_LOCK`	Held only while audio is actually playing, so the stream is not cut off when the screen sleeps.
`POST_NOTIFICATIONS`	To show the playback notification with its controls. Playback works without it; you only lose the notification.

Trimbitas requests no access to location, contacts, phone state, microphone, camera, or your files. It remains fully functional for playback with every runtime permission denied.

Children

Trimbitas is a general-audience application and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children. The station directory is community-maintained and its contents are not curated by Trimbitas.

Your rights

Trimbitas holds no account and no profile for you on any server, so there is nothing to disclose, correct, export or delete on request. All data the app creates is on your device and under your control: clear it from Android's app settings, or uninstall the app to remove it entirely.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this address with a revised date above. Material changes will be noted in the app's release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about privacy in Trimbitas: andreitv@gmail.com