Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 12, 2026 · Shellular

Overview

Shellular ("we", "our", "us") is a remote development tool that connects your mobile device directly to your own machine. We are committed to your privacy. This policy explains what data we collect (very little), how it is used, and your rights.

Short version: We never sell your data, and we never see the contents of your terminal, files, or AI prompts since it's all end-to-end encrypted. To run Shellular we do process an account identifier and a small amount of connection and product-usage metadata, described below.

Information We Do Not Collect

We do not collect:

  • The contents of your filesystem, terminal sessions, or AI prompts.
  • Precise device location, contacts, photos, or any other sensitive device data.
  • Your data for sale or for advertising — we never sell or rent your information.

Signing in to Shellular does create an account, so we process the account identifier and any details provided by your sign-in method (for example, an email address). We use this only to authenticate you.

Information That May Be Processed Transiently

When you use Shellular, traffic between the Shellular mobile app and the CLI on your machine is relayed through our servers at server.shellular.dev (and legacy server api.shellular.dev). This relay operates as a pass-through only:

  • All relay traffic is end-to-end encrypted using libsodium. The relay server cannot read the content of any message.
  • The pairing key is exchanged out-of-band via a QR code displayed in your terminal and scanned by the app — the server never sees your pairing key.
  • We may retain standard server logs (IP addresses, timestamps, byte counts) for up to 30 days solely for abuse prevention and infrastructure monitoring. These logs are not shared with third parties.

Local Data & Device Permissions

The Shellular CLI runs on your own machine and accesses only the directory you explicitly specify with the --dir flag (defaulting to your home directory). Path-traversal outside that root is rejected. The CLI connects outbound only — it opens no listening ports on your machine.

The Shellular mobile app stores your pairing key and session state locally on your device using the platform's secure storage. This data never leaves your device except as part of the encrypted relay traffic described above.

Analytics

To understand how many people use Shellular and how it is performing, we capture a small set of product-usage events using PostHog, our analytics provider. Importantly, PostHog runs only on our relay server — it is not embedded in the Shellular app or CLI. There is no analytics or tracking SDK in the software on your device or machine; the events are derived server-side from connection metadata and sent to PostHog's US infrastructure. We do not use advertising networks, and PostHog session replay is not enabled.

The events record connection and platform metadata only, such as:

  • A pseudonymous account identifier, plus stable device and host identifiers, used to count distinct and daily-active users.
  • Platform (iOS, Android, web), and the app or CLI version you are running.
  • Whether the app is running on an emulator, and your host operating system.
  • The timestamp of the connection.

We never send the contents of your terminal sessions, filesystem, or AI prompts to PostHog. Because this analytics is captured server-side to keep our usage metrics accurate, there is currently no in-app opt-out.

Forks and self-hosted deployments of the relay can run without analytics entirely — it is active only when we configure an analytics key on our production servers. Our relay server is open source, so you can review exactly what we capture in the analytics code.

Third-Party Services

We use PostHog (US) as our analytics processor for the product-usage events described in Section 05. PostHog processes this data on our behalf and does not use it for its own purposes.

Shellular can optionally route AI prompts to third-party services such as OpenCode, Anthropic Claude, GitHub Copilot, or OpenAI Codex depending on what is installed on your machine. These requests originate from the CLI on your machine and are governed by the respective provider's privacy policies. Shellular does not proxy or log these prompts.

Children's Privacy

Shellular is a developer tool not directed at children under 13 (or the applicable local age threshold). We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has provided personal data to us, please contact us and we will delete it promptly.

Data Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect our relay infrastructure. Because all relay traffic is end-to-end encrypted, even a full compromise of the relay server would not expose your terminal sessions, files, or AI conversations.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The effective date at the top of this page will be updated accordingly. Continued use of Shellular after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

Contact Us

Questions or concerns about this policy? Reach us at team@shellular.dev.