Privacy
What we don't collect
Sconce has no accounts and no sign-in, and it carries no analytics of ours — no crash-reporting, advertising or tracking SDK of its own. Your playlists, your settings, and the picture copies Sconce makes for casting stay in private on-device storage and go when you uninstall it. We operate no server that Sconce sends your media to. The one Zone7 page involved at all is the Cast receiver — the TV screen your television loads when you cast; like any web page it appears in our web logs, described below.
Network use
The only times Sconce touches the network are the store's billing for the one-time purchase — Google Play's on Android, Apple's on iPhone — and casting. When you cast, three things happen: your TV loads Sconce's TV screen from sconce.zone7studios.com over the internet, your phone serves the photos and videos you picked straight to your TV over your own Wi-Fi, and Google's Cast framework does its own device discovery. Your photos and videos are never uploaded to us or to anyone.
Two details that make that concrete. The photos and videos are served by a small web server that runs inside the app on your phone, reachable only at your phone's own address on your own Wi-Fi, and only while a show is running — that is what "straight from this phone to your TV" means literally. And your television fetching our TV screen leaves an ordinary web-log entry, the same as any visit to this site; it carries the TV's address on your home network's public connection, and nothing about what you cast.
The Cast framework is Google's code, and it is not silent
Casting uses Google's Cast framework — a Google component bundled inside the app that, on Android, works through Google Play services; on iPhone it ships inside the app in full. Two things follow from that, and we would rather write them down than have you find them. On Android it starts with the app on any phone that has Google Play services, before you have cast anything; on iPhone it starts looking for devices only when you first tap Cast. And it carries Google's own client analytics and upload component: Google's diagnostics about Google's SDK — generic discovery events, session management events, device information and information about the app using it — sent to Google under Google's privacy policy. Google's own documentation for that SDK says neither the developer nor the user can opt out of that collection or delete it, so there is no switch the framework lets us offer you on Android, and it is not something we will make an absolute claim about on Google's behalf on either phone. It never carries your photos or videos. What goes to your TV is the media you picked, over your own Wi-Fi, and nothing from Sconce reaches Zone7 at any point. That is why this page says no analytics of ours, rather than making an absolute claim on Google's behalf.
Recent versions of Google's iPhone Cast SDK also show their own screen inviting you to read and accept Google's Cast terms and privacy policy. It is Google's screen and Google's text, shown inside Sconce; if it appears on your phone, that is what it is.
Your photos and videos
Photos and videos arrive through the system pickers, which hand the app exactly what you selected and nothing else. For photos, Sconce makes a smaller copy in its own private storage so it can be sent to the TV quickly and turned the right way up first; the original stays where it was. Videos are read from where they already live, and are streamed to your TV as they play. Removing an item from a playlist removes only Sconce's own copy.
Permissions
On Android, Sconce asks you two things, and each one only once. The first time you cast, Android asks about notifications, so you can pause or stop the show from your lock screen — say no and the show still runs. If you ever tap “Cast a whole album”, it asks to read that album; picking photos one by one never does. On iPhone there is exactly one system question, and you trigger it: the first time you tap Cast, Apple asks whether Sconce may find devices on your local network — that is how it finds your Chromecast. Sconce never asks for your camera, microphone, location or contacts.
Google Play's store listing has a separate section headed “This app has access to”. That lists install-time entries declared in the app's manifest: they are granted when the app is installed and never prompt you. Sconce's are:
- Full network access and view network connections — serving your media to your own TV on your own Wi-Fi, and the bundled Cast component described above.
- View Wi-Fi connections — so the app can tell you which network you are on when your TV can't reach your phone, which is the single most common reason a cast fails.
- Prevent phone from sleeping — held only while video bytes are actually on their way to your TV, and released again as soon as they stop. A photo show holds nothing.
- A foreground service for media playback, and its notification — the one you can pause or stop the show from.
- An in-app billing entry, for the one-time purchase.
None of these read, collect or transmit anything personal. On iPhone the App Store shows no equivalent list; Sconce declares local-network (Bonjour) use for casting only.
Purchases
The one-time purchase is handled entirely by the store you bought it from — Google Play's billing on Android, Apple's App Store on iPhone. We never see your payment details. Google's handling is covered by Google's privacy policy, Apple's by Apple's privacy policy. Sconce keeps only the fact that it is unlocked, on the device, and asks the store — not us — when you restore it on another one.
This website
No accounts, no sign-ups, and no advertising or tracking SDKs of our own. Page loads are counted anonymously — the published counter stores no IP addresses and no identifiers.
Our web server keeps a short-lived request log — the page requested, the time, the result, the browser's user-agent string, and the IP address the request came from. We use it to keep the site running and to look into abuse such as scraping or flooding. It is not used for advertising, profiling or analytics, is not linked to any account, and is deleted after 30 days. Your television's request for the Cast receiver page lands in the same log, and is treated the same way.
The site is served through Cloudflare, which is covered by its own privacy policy, not this one.
Children
Sconce is a general-audience app. It collects nothing from anyone, including children.
Changes
Material changes appear on this page with a new date.
Contact
Published by Zone7 Studios Pty Ltd (ABN 36 700 457 147), a company registered in Australia.