The short version. London Tube AI is free, has no accounts and no sign-up, and sells nothing. We operate no server that receives or stores your data. Your journeys, favourites and history stay on your phone.
Analytics and crash reporting are switched off by default — nothing is collected unless you turn it on. The app contains no advertising and no tracking SDKs. We do not sell your data and we never share it with data brokers.
To work, the app sends your coordinates to Transport for London, Open-Meteo and Google Maps at the moment a feature needs them. None of them receive your name or a record of your movements.
London Tube AI is published by TubeAI Labs, a developer based in the United Kingdom. For the purposes of UK data protection law, TubeAI Labs is the data controller for this app.
Contact: londontubenavigator@gmail.com
London Tube AI is an independent app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Transport for London, the Mayor of London, the Greater London Authority, or any transport operator.
If you grant location permission, the app uses your approximate and precise location to:
Location permission is optional. If you decline it you can still plan journeys by typing station names, check line status, and use every other part of the app.
During a live journey the app runs a foreground service with location access, so it can keep counting stops while your screen is off or you are using another app. It runs only while a journey is active, it displays a persistent notification for the entire time it is running, and you can stop it at any point. The app does not request background location permission and cannot access your location when no journey is running.
We never store your location, because we have nowhere to store it.
These are switched off by default. Nothing is collected unless you turn them on in the app's privacy settings, and you can turn them off again at any time.
When you enable them, Firebase collects screen views, feature usage, route planning events, crash logs, diagnostics, app performance metrics, and a randomly generated app instance identifier. They do not collect your name, email address, phone number, or contacts.
The app offers an optional Personalisation setting that learns your regular journeys in order to suggest better routes and surface your usual commute more quickly.
This runs entirely on your device. Your journey patterns are analysed locally and are never uploaded, transmitted, or shared with us or anyone else. Nothing about your commute leaves your phone.
Because it involves no sharing, Personalisation is on by default. You can turn it off at any time in the app's privacy settings, and clearing app storage deletes everything it has learned.
There are none. London Tube AI is free, contains no advertising, and has no subscriptions, no in-app purchases and no paid tier. We hold no merchant account and we never receive payment information of any kind.
Journey search history, saved routes, favourite stations, route preferences, notification settings, cached timetable data and theme choice are stored locally using Android's DataStore and a Room database, inside the app's private storage. None of it is uploaded. Clearing the app's storage or uninstalling deletes it permanently.
These are the services the app sends data to. Some of them bring additional Google components with them, which are listed underneath.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Transport for London | Your coordinates when you search for nearby stops; the stations you are travelling between when you plan a journey | To return nearby stops, routes, live arrivals and line status |
| Open-Meteo | Your coordinates when weather is shown | To return the forecast for that location |
| Google Maps Platform | Location and device data needed to render the map | To display the map and your position on it |
| Bus Open Data Service (Department for Transport) | A rounded box covering the area of map currently on screen, snapped to roughly a 700 m grid — not your position, and no device or account identifier | To return live bus positions while the bus layer is switched on |
| Google Play In-App Review | Whether your Play account is eligible to leave a review | To show Google's own rating prompt inside the app |
| Google Firebase | Usage events, crash logs, diagnostics, app instance ID — only if you switch them on | To diagnose crashes and understand which features are used |
A note on the bus layer. Live bus positions come from the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service. To ask for them, the app sends the area of map you are looking at — not where you are. That area is rounded to a grid of roughly 700 metres before it is sent, so it does not describe your position even approximately, and it is sent only while the bus layer is on and the map is visible. If you never turn the bus layer on, nothing is sent to this service at all.
Firebase Installations, Firebase Sessions, Firebase Remote Config and Google's data-transport service are components that ship as part of Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics and Performance Monitoring. We name them because each has its own network endpoint, even though none is a separate product decision on our part.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Firebase Installations | Creates the randomly generated app instance identifier that Crashlytics and Performance Monitoring rely on |
| Firebase Sessions | Groups activity into sessions for crash and performance reporting |
| Firebase Remote Config | Arrives as a dependency of Performance Monitoring. The app itself never calls it |
| Google data transport | The upload channel that Crashlytics and Analytics payloads travel over |
Android's backup service can copy app data to your Google account. We exclude everything that describes your travel or your settings — your journey history, your home and work stations, your privacy choices and any journey in progress. What remains eligible for backup is non-personal cached timetable and line-status data.
These services receive coordinates and technical data only. They do not receive your name, your email address, or any stored history of your movements from us.
We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. The app contains no advertising SDK and no third-party tracking SDK of any kind.
| Purpose | Legal basis (UK GDPR Article 6) |
|---|---|
| Planning journeys and showing transport information | Performance of a contract — providing the service you asked for |
| Using your location for nearby stops, the map, live journeys and weather | Consent, given through the Android location permission and withdrawable at any time in your device settings |
| Analytics, crash reporting and performance monitoring | Consent, given through the in-app privacy settings and withdrawable at any time |
| Personalisation of route suggestions | Consent, given through the in-app setting and withdrawable at any time |
You have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how it is used, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time.
Because we hold no accounts and operate no servers, we hold almost no personal data about you. Most of what the app knows lives only on your phone, where you control it directly — clearing app storage or uninstalling exercises your right to erasure immediately and completely. For anything held by the third-party services in Section 3, you can exercise your rights with them directly using the links above, or contact us and we will help.
To make a request, email londontubenavigator@gmail.com or use the Data Deletion Request page. We will respond within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.
Everything stored on your device stays on your device and is never transferred anywhere. Analytics events, if you enable them, are sent as they happen and are described in the analytics section above.
Transport for London processes data in the United Kingdom. Google and Open-Meteo may process data outside the UK, including in the United States, under the safeguards set out in their own privacy policies, which are linked in Section 3.
London Tube AI is intended for users aged 13 and over. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.
We may update this policy. Material changes will be posted here with a revised "Last updated" date, and where a change affects how your data is used we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Where a change requires your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it.
Questions about this policy: londontubenavigator@gmail.com