Privacy and your phone

QuickText connects to your own phone over your own network. Your contacts, your messages and the replies you receive stay on your PC: none of it is uploaded, and none of it reaches us. This page explains, in plain words, what the app reads from your phone and what it cannot reach at all.

What QuickText asks your phone for #

When it connects, the app tells your phone exactly which kinds of data it is prepared to receive: text messages, and answers about contacts. Nothing else is requested, and the KDE Connect app on the phone does not send what was not asked for.

So QuickText has no access to your notifications, your files, your photos, your clipboard, your call log, your location or your battery status, even though the KDE Connect app itself can do some of those things with other software on other computers.

Replies: what is kept and what is dropped #

While QuickText is connected, it asks your phone to keep it informed about text messages, which is what makes the Replies page work. Your phone decides what to send, so texts that have nothing to do with QuickText do arrive at your PC. What happens next is the part that matters:

• A message is kept only if it is a reply to you, meaning it comes from a number this PC texted before the message arrived.
• Everything else is dropped as it is examined: never saved, never shown to you, never written to a log file, never sent anywhere. That covers messages from numbers you never texted, group conversations and drafts.
• When a reply does arrive, QuickText asks that one conversation for up to ten earlier messages, so you see the exchange rather than a fragment. Those pass the same rule.
• You can switch the whole thing off under Settings > Replies. Then every incoming text is dropped without QuickText looking at who sent it.

Contacts: only when you ask #

Your address book is read only when you click Import from phone on the Contacts page, and only after you confirm it twice on the phone. The cards that arrive are shown to you in the import window first, and QuickText keeps only name, up to three numbers, one email, company, job title, city, birthday and note. Photos and everything else are ignored. See Import contacts from your phone.

What is stored on your PC #

Everything lives in a folder called QuickText SMS inside your Windows user folder: your contacts, messages, templates, sending history, the replies you kept, your notes, your block list, your settings and license key, a record of each paired phone, and daily backup copies of the database.

It is protected by your Windows account like your other documents, and it is deliberately kept out of any cloud-synced folder. Uninstalling the app leaves the folder in place, so a reinstall picks up where you left off. To erase everything, use Start fresh under Settings, or delete the folder.

The people you message #

The numbers you import and the replies you receive are personal data about other people, held on your computer and under your control. Sending to people who agreed to hear from you, and honouring their opt-outs, is your part as the sender.

QuickText helps with the second half: a reply of STOP blocks that number automatically and skips it from that moment on, even mid-send, and any message, reply, contact or the whole history can be deleted whenever you like. See Handle opt-outs.