What stays on your Mac
Your tiles, their artwork, your scenes and the list of paired remotes are stored in your Mac's Application Support folder. They are not uploaded anywhere. Removing the app's data removes all of it.
How the phone and the Mac talk
The remote finds your Mac with Bonjour on your local network, or over Bluetooth LE, and then opens a direct connection to it. Nothing is routed through the internet.
The first time a phone connects, the Mac shows a 6-digit code. The code is mixed into the key exchange, so a device that does not know it cannot complete pairing. From then on, messages are encrypted with ChaCha20-Poly1305 using keys agreed with X25519. Each side keeps its own long-term key, and you can remove any paired remote in Settings.
When the Mac uses the internet
Kickback itself only goes online to fetch pictures for tiles: the icon and poster of a site you add as a link, and site icons shown in the app switcher. Those requests go straight from your Mac to that site and are cached locally.
While Show What's New is on (Settings → Top Shelf), the Mac also fetches public show listings and pictures from TVmaze, and Apple's public music and movie charts, once a day. The requests are the same for every Mac in your region, whatever is on your Home screen: they carry no account, no list of your apps and nothing about what you watch. A music tile's shelf shows what that app is playing on your Mac, which needs no request at all. Turn Show What's New off and none of these requests are made.
Opening a tile opens that app or website, which then follows its own privacy policy, as it would if you had opened it yourself.
Permissions, and why
- Local Network and Bluetooth, on both devices: so the phone and the Mac can find each other.
- Accessibility, on the Mac: to deliver the keyboard, trackpad and media keys you press on your phone, and to move windows.
- Photos, on the Mac, only if you choose an album for the screensaver: to show it. Photos never leave your Mac; your phone sees only the album's name.
- Automation, on the Mac, asked once per browser: to switch to a tab that is already open instead of opening a duplicate. Private windows are skipped.
- Microphone and Speech Recognition, on the phone: only while you hold the mic button. Speech is turned into text by your phone's built-in recognition, under Apple's or Google's terms.
Apple Intelligence
Ask, scene drafts, Organize Tiles and Smart Clipboard run on your Mac using Apple Intelligence. What you say or paste is not sent to us or to a third-party AI service. If Apple Intelligence is off or unavailable, these features hide themselves and the rest of the app works as before.
Diagnostics reports
When you ask for help, Kickback can copy a diagnostics report: versions, settings, permission states, counts and the current session's log, with names, titles, links and addresses left out. It goes to your clipboard and nowhere else. You decide whether to share it. GitHub issues are public, so look a report over before you post it in one.
Analytics and tracking
The apps contain no analytics, advertising or tracking code.
Questions
Open an issue on GitHub.