Belong United Kingdom, Privacy Policy
Belong UK runs on your device. That is true on both phones. What you enter about your residence, your record and your progress stays on your phone. We do not collect it, we cannot see it, and it is never sent to us or to anyone else.
Who we are
Belong UK is made by Belong Europe ApS, a company registered in Copenhagen, Denmark, CVR number 46649044. You can reach us at hello@belongeurope.com.
What you enter and where it lives
The month you became resident, your ILR and marital status, the trips you log or plan ahead, your English test and Life in the UK progress, the day you filed your application and the updates you log about it, the details of any second person you add, and anything else you enter are stored only on your phone, in the app’s own storage. They are not uploaded, backed up to us, or shared with any third party. If you delete the app, that data goes with it.
The name and the photo you can add for yourself on the You tab are stored the same way: the name in the app’s own storage, the photo scaled down and saved as one file in the app’s private storage on your phone. Neither is uploaded, synced or shared, and removing them, or deleting the app, deletes them.
Your What if scenarios are not stored at all. The sandbox runs on a copy of your situation held in memory while the sheet is open, and it is discarded when you close it.
What we collect
Nothing. Belong UK has no accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking and no third-party software development kits that collect data about you. We do not know who you are, whether you opened the app today, or what you entered.
That holds on both phones. Neither the iPhone app nor the Android app has an account: there is nothing to sign in to, nothing to link and no email address for us to hold. The Android app is unlocked by your Google Play subscription, and that question is asked and answered between the app and Google Play on your phone. No server of ours is involved in that decision.
News
The News segment, which sits in the Practice tab alongside Practice, Chapters and Progress, fetches two public, official feeds from GOV.UK (www.gov.uk): the "Entering and staying in the UK" news feed and the UK Visas and Immigration updates feed. Apart from your store subscription, which Apple or Google handles, and any official page you choose to open in the in-app browser, it is the only part of either app that reaches the network. It happens when you open the News segment, when you pull to refresh, and, only if you turn news notifications on, occasionally in the background.
The request carries no account, no identifier and nothing you entered in the app. Like any web request, GOV.UK’s servers see your IP address and standard connection details; their handling of it is governed by GOV.UK’s own privacy notice. The fetched headlines are cached on your device so the segment works offline. If you never open News and never enable its notifications, the app fetches no news at all. What remains is only the store’s subscription handling and any official page you choose to open yourself.
A second person on your phone
On the iPhone you can add a second adult, such as a partner, on the You tab, and the app keeps a count for them alongside yours. What you enter about them, their name, their answers to the setup questions, the trips logged for them and any filing you record for them, is stored only on your phone, in the same place as your own entries, and is never sent to us or to anyone else. Practice, documents, reminders and the copy of figures the widgets read hold your own entries only and never theirs. Removing a person deletes their entries from the phone; deleting the app deletes them with everything else.
After you apply
If you tell the app that you have applied, the day you filed, the reference from the Home Office’s acknowledgement if you choose to enter it, and the updates you log from its letters, each with its date, its kind and any note you write, are stored only on your phone. None of it is sent to us, and the reference in particular is never transmitted anywhere: the app cannot look your case up and does not try. The link to the GOV.UK page opens in the in-app browser as an ordinary web request, exactly like any other link in the app, and carries nothing you entered. Removing the filing deletes all of it from the phone.
Booking the test, and the guides
The Practice tab says how the Life in the UK test is booked and lists no sittings, because there is no national calendar: the test is booked online at a test centre. That note, and the guides in the Guides segment, ship inside the app. Showing them makes no network request, and the day each was read from GOV.UK is printed on the guide itself. Which guides you have opened is a setting stored on your phone only.
Practice
The Life in the UK questions in the Practice tab come with the app rather than from a server, and on both phones practising works fully offline.
Your answers, your scores, your mistakes deck, the schedule that decides when a question comes back, your progress through the chapters, your run of days and the sitting date you can add are written to your own device and never sent anywhere. Nothing about how you practise reaches us, and no authority sees any of it.
Opening the official GOV.UK test page loads it from GOV.UK’s own site, in an in-app browser on the iPhone and on Android, and none of your practice history goes with it.
Passport
The facts on the Passport tab (validity, fee, where to apply, dual citizenship and the notes on the British passport’s design) ship with the app and are shown without any network request. If you add your name or a photo on the You tab, the Passport tab displays them; they are the same name and photo described above, and nothing else is collected. Opening the issuing authority’s page loads it from the authority’s own site, in an in-app browser on the iPhone and on Android, and none of your data goes with it.
Documents you attach
On the Path tab you can attach a document to a requirement (a language certificate, a residence permit, a payslip, a test result) with a name and, if you want, an expiry date. The file stays on this phone and we never receive it.
On iPhone, documents are written inside the app’s own storage with iOS file protection switched on, so the system keeps them encrypted and unreadable while your iPhone is locked. The name and the expiry date you give a document are kept alongside it, in the same place. Files up to 15 MB are accepted; anything larger is refused with a plain error rather than trimmed. If you set an expiry date and turn milestone alerts on, the name you gave the document is used as the title of that alert, and like any notification it can appear on your lock screen. That is worth knowing when you name something sensitive. Only that name leaves the vault; the file itself never does.
On Android, they are written inside the app’s own private storage, which Android keeps encrypted under your device credential and unreadable until the phone has been unlocked once after a restart. No other app can read them. The same 15 MB limit applies. They are excluded from cloud backup and from device transfer, so they cannot be copied onto a new phone during its setup either. If you set an expiry date and turn alerts on, the name you gave the document is used as the title of that alert and is handed to the system’s own scheduler until it fires, so that name waits outside the app’s storage. That is worth knowing when you name something sensitive: only the name ever leaves, never the file.
On both phones, removing a document deletes the file, and deleting the app deletes all of them. They are never uploaded, we never see them, and we keep no copy anywhere else. Attaching copies the file into the app: the photo or file you picked stays where it was, in your photo library or in Files, and remains your own copy.
One thing worth knowing: on iPhone these files are deliberately kept out of your iPhone backup. If you back your device up to iCloud or to a computer, your documents are not part of that backup, so they cannot reach another phone that way. The cost is worth stating plainly: restoring a new phone from a backup, or setting one up from your old one, will not bring your documents back, and you attach them again. That is the version of this we can stand behind. Papers this sensitive should not travel further than the phone you chose to put them on. Keep your own copies of anything you cannot easily get again, and attach only what you actually need.
Reminders and alerts
Alerts for the dates in What’s coming, and on the iPhone the daily practice reminder, are local notifications, and they are off until you turn them on. Your phone schedules them from information already on it, so they use no server of ours, no push service and no device token. Nothing about them reaches us: not that you switched them on, not when one fires, not whether you opened it. The settings are stored on your device.
News notifications are the exception, because checking for new stories needs the GOV.UK request described above.
What a notification says is worth knowing, because like any notification it can appear on your lock screen. A Daily 5 reminder quotes one of the questions in that day’s round; the reminders are scheduled up to two weeks ahead from what is on your phone, and a day’s reminder is withdrawn once that day’s round is done. An alert for a date in What’s coming carries the title of that date, which for a trip includes the destination you named, so name a trip with that in mind. A news alert carries the headline. An alert for a reply window you logged carries the date of the letter and the note you wrote when you logged it, so write that note with the lock screen in mind. On the iPhone, tapping any of them opens the screen it names inside the app, and nothing about the tap leaves your phone.
On Android, the kinds of alert sit in their own notification channels, so you can mute one in Android Settings without losing the others, and nothing is posted at all unless Android’s notification permission is granted. Every scheduler checks that permission again immediately before posting, so turning notifications off in Settings takes effect whether or not the app hears about it.
Subscriptions and payments
Belong UK Pro is an optional auto-renewable subscription at 29.99 GBP per year, with a 7-day free trial.
On the iPhone, payment is handled entirely by Apple through your Apple Account. On Android it is handled entirely by Google through Google Play. We never see your card, your billing address or your name. Each store reports sales to us only in aggregate, as numbers, with no way to identify individual subscribers, and each store’s own privacy policy governs that transaction.
Because neither app has an account, a subscription bought in one store is not visible to the other: it unlocks the app you bought it in, on the store account you bought it with.
Widgets
On the iPhone you can add Belong UK widgets to your home screen and to the Lock Screen: where you stand, your days abroad, Today’s five and the newest GOV.UK update. A widget shows what the app already holds, run through the same rules, and nothing else. The app keeps a copy of the figures the widgets need in a container Apple sets aside on your device for the app and its widgets, so a widget can read it without the app running. That copy does not leave your phone, and no server of ours is involved in drawing a widget. Whatever a widget shows is visible to anyone who can see your home screen or Lock Screen, so remove the widget if that matters to you. The widgets show figures only while your subscription is active and show nothing until your situation is set up, and the news widget makes no request of its own: it shows the item the app last fetched.
Appearance
The iPhone app has a single look, so there is nothing to store. On Android, your choice of the Midnight or Mediterranean look is a setting stored on your device. It is not a profile and it is not sent anywhere.
Diagnostics
If you have turned on Apple’s optional analytics sharing in iOS Settings, Apple may send us crash and performance reports in a form that does not identify you. We use them only to find and fix problems. You can turn this off at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements.
Android works the same way. If you have turned on Google’s optional usage and diagnostics sharing, Google may show us crash and performance reports in the Play Console, again in a form that does not identify you, and again used only to find and fix problems. You can turn it off in your phone’s Settings, under Google, in Usage & diagnostics.
We add no crash reporting of our own to either app.
Your data and your rights
Because your data never reaches us, there is no account for us to export, correct or delete. You already hold all of it, and deleting the app deletes it. Under the GDPR you keep your rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection against any personal data a company actually holds about you. If you believe we have mishandled personal data, you can contact us first, and you have the right to complain to your supervisory authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk, or, since we are established in Denmark, the Danish Datatilsynet at datatilsynet.dk.
Children
Belong UK is made for adults navigating their own immigration and nationality path. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
Changes to this policy
If we change how the app handles data, we will update this page and its effective date, and we will say so in the app when the change is material. In particular, this page is updated before any feature that makes a network request ships.
Contact
Questions about this policy: hello@belongeurope.com.