Your games stay
on your device.

The short version: NeoBox runs entirely on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. It has no servers, no accounts of its own, no analytics, and no tracking. The only thing it ever shares is your play stats on Game Center — and only if you turn that on.

What NeoBox stores on your device

NeoBox keeps its data in its own app storage — ~/Library/Containers/com.harisamin.NeoBox/ on a Mac, and NeoBox’s app container on iPhone and iPad (the parts you manage yourself appear in the Files app under On My iPhone / On My iPad › NeoBox):

• Your library database (a SQLite file listing the ROMs you've imported).
• Converted .neo ROM files derived from your originals.
• Save states, screenshots, and per-game memory cards you create during play.
• Box art downloaded for the games in your library.
• App preferences (your settings and per-game overrides).

Every one of these stays on your device. NeoBox never uploads any of them anywhere. On iPhone and iPad they are included in your device’s own backups, the same as any other app’s data.

Game Center (opt-in)

NeoBox can post play stats to Game Center leaderboards and achievements: hours played, credits inserted, arcade plays, and how many titles you’ve explored. It is off until you say yes. NeoBox asks once, with a Share Play Stats? prompt, and does nothing if you choose Not Now.

• What is sent: those scores and achievement progress, and nothing else — no ROMs, no save data, no library contents, no device identifiers.
• Where it goes: to Apple’s Game Center, under your Game Center identity, where leaderboards show it publicly next to your Game Center name. It is not sent to us; we have no server to receive it.
• What it’s used for: the leaderboards and achievements, only. Never advertising, never tracking.
• Turning it off: Settings › Share Play Stats on iPhone and iPad, or Preferences › Game Center on a Mac. Nothing more is sent from that moment. Scores already posted are held by Apple under Game Center’s own terms.

On the App Store’s privacy label this appears as Gameplay Content, linked to your identity, used for app functionality, not used for tracking.

What NeoBox does not do

• No analytics or telemetry SDKs.
• No advertising. No ad networks. No remarketing pixels.
• No NeoBox accounts and no cloud sync. (Game Center sign-in is Apple’s, and optional.)
• No collection of personal information by us, of any kind.

Network requests the app makes

Apart from Game Center, NeoBox talks to the network for two things, both public and neither involving us:

• Box art. Cover images are downloaded from the public libretro-thumbnails collection on GitHub. Each request names the game whose cover it fetches, so GitHub can see which titles are being looked up, along with standard request data such as your IP address.
• Game descriptions (Mac only). Short summaries in the Mac library are fetched from Wikipedia’s public API by game title, with the same kind of standard request data.

Links you click inside the app open in your web browser as usual.

What about ROMs?

NeoBox is an emulator frontend. You provide your own Neo Geo ROMs and BIOS files; NeoBox does not ship with any, and it does not download any. Your ROM files are read where you keep them and are never uploaded; we have no way of knowing which ones you own. ROM metadata used to populate the library (titles, years, manufacturers, genres) is bundled into the app itself, derived from MAME's publicly-published hash/neogeo.xml.

Crash reports

If NeoBox crashes and you have "Share with App Developers" turned on — on a Mac in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, on iPhone and iPad in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements — Apple may send an anonymized crash report to us through Apple's diagnostics pipeline. This is Apple's standard developer workflow; the reports do not contain personal information or anything from your files. You can turn this off at any time.

Children

NeoBox’s App Store age rating reflects the original Neo Geo games, which include fantasy violence. The app collects no information from any user of any age; Game Center stats are only shared if the player opts in, subject to Apple’s own Game Center and Screen Time controls.

Third-party services (website only)

This section is about the marketing website at neo-box.app, not the app. The NeoBox app itself contains no analytics SDKs of any kind.

Google Fonts. The site loads fonts from fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com. Google receives standard HTTP request data (IP, user-agent) when those fonts load.

Google Analytics 4. The site uses Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to count page views and broad navigation patterns. We configure GA with allow_google_signals: false and allow_ad_personalization_signals: false, which disables cross-device tracking via signed-in Google accounts and prevents data from being shared with Google Ads. We also count a few clicks ourselves: App Store links, game and press kit downloads, support email links, and whether a video was started or watched to the end. Google's standard data practices apply per their privacy policy. No personally identifying information is collected by us.

GitHub Pages. The website is hosted on GitHub Pages. GitHub may log standard HTTP request data per their own privacy statement.

Changes to this policy

If the policy changes, the new version will be posted at this URL with the change date noted below. Material changes will also be called out in the app's release notes.

Contact

Questions about privacy or anything else: support@neo-box.app.