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Where your data lives

Your data, where it lives, how it's protected. Local-first storage, optional encrypted backup to your own Drive, biometric lock, and a server posture that holds zero user data — only ticker prices.
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Quick start

FirePath is built around one principle: your financial data belongs to you and stays with you. No account needed, no cloud required, no third party involved in the default flow.

  • Local-first — every asset, liability, income, expense, and snapshot lives in a database on your phone. Uninstall the app, the data's gone. Install on a new phone, it starts empty.
  • No account required — you never create a FirePath account, never give us an email, never sign in. The app just runs.
  • Optional Google Drive backup (premium) — if you want off-device backup, FirePath writes daily encrypted snapshots to your Drive. You own the file.
  • Biometric lock — fingerprint or face unlock, with auto-relock after 5 minutes of inactivity.
  • Server-side — we run a tiny pricing server that caches ticker prices so the app doesn't hit the upstream provider directly. Zero user identity, zero financial data on our servers.

The rest of this guide is for users who want to tune the screen. If you're happy with the defaults, you can stop here — everything below is optional customisation.

Going deeper

What's on your device

Everything you enter in FirePath lives on your phone, inside the app's private data area. Android enforces that no other app can read this folder — not antivirus apps, not file managers, nothing. Uninstalling FirePath deletes the folder and the database with it.

Modern Android phones encrypt all app data on the device by default, so your FirePath data is protected the same way your photos and messages are.

What's in your Google Drive (premium, opt-in)

Google Drive App Data area showing hidden FirePath backup
① Drive → Settings → Manage apps. ② Hidden backup file, only FirePath can read.

If you enable auto-backup, FirePath writes a daily snapshot of your database to a hidden folder in your Google Drive called App Data. This is a sandboxed area that's invisible in your main Drive view — only FirePath can read or write there.

The snapshot file is encrypted with a key derived from your Google account. Even if somebody gained access to the raw Drive file, they couldn't decrypt it without your Google credentials. FirePath has no "master key" that could unlock anyone's backup.

Woohoo Software cannot read your backup. We don't hold the decryption key, we can't request it from Google, and we don't have any other way to access your Drive account. The backup is genuinely yours.

What's on our server

FirePath runs a small server. Here's the complete list of what it stores:

  • Ticker prices — the latest price for every ticker any user has looked up. Pure public market data, cached so your phone doesn't hit the upstream price provider directly.
  • Currency exchange rates — AUD/USD/EUR/GBP conversion rates, refreshed daily. Public data.
  • Which tickers got requested today — helps the server know which prices to refresh next. No user identifiers attached.

What it never sees: your name, email, holdings, quantities, balances, net worth, owners, or backup data. There's no FirePath account to sign into — because there's nothing to sign into. The app asks for the price of a ticker and gets a number back. That's the whole conversation.

Biometric app lock

Biometric lock toggle in FirePath Settings
① Biometric lock toggle near the top of Settings. ② When on, Android's fingerprint / face unlock prompt gates the app on launch and after 5 minutes in the background.

Settings → Security → Require biometric unlock. When on, opening the app shows a fingerprint/face prompt before anything else. Android handles the biometric check itself — FirePath never sees your fingerprint or a fingerprint hash, just a pass/fail from the OS.

Auto-relock after 5 minutes. If you background the app and come back more than 5 minutes later, you need to unlock again. Within 5 minutes, you're already unlocked — tapping a notification or switching apps briefly doesn't force a re-prompt. This threshold is fixed, not configurable; it's chosen to be long enough that normal app-switching isn't annoying but short enough that a lost phone doesn't stay unlocked all day.

Fallback: if biometrics fail (wet fingers, face mask, wrong finger), Android falls back to your device PIN/pattern. FirePath doesn't have its own separate PIN — relying on Android's means you get the phone's lockout behaviour (5 failed attempts = phone locks) without us re-implementing it badly.

Wipe all data

Delete all data confirmation dialog
① Permanent, no-undo wipe. ② Confirm dialog prevents fat-fingering.

Settings → About → Delete all data clears every table in the local database: assets, liabilities, income, expenses, snapshots, owners, settings, everything. The app then restarts empty, as if freshly installed. This is permanent and non-recoverable — no trash, no undo — so there's a confirmation dialog.

If auto-backup is enabled and you've been backing up, the daily snapshot in Drive is not automatically deleted by this action. That's intentional: "wipe local" shouldn't accidentally destroy your off-site backup. To delete the Drive backup as well, toggle auto-backup off first, then delete the file manually from Drive → Settings → App Settings → FirePath → Delete app data.

Uninstalling

Uninstalling FirePath from Android deletes the app and all of its local data completely. If you had auto-backup enabled, the last snapshot still sits in your Drive App Data area — reinstall and sign in and it offers to restore. Don't want that? Delete the Drive file via the Drive web interface (Settings → Manage apps → FirePath → Delete hidden app data).

The one-line summary

If you forget everything else: your financial data is on your phone, optionally also in your Google Drive, and never on our servers. We see tickers and IPs, nothing else.

Make it yours — Settings that affect this screen

  • Biometric app lock — Settings → Security.
  • Auto-backup — Settings → Premium → Auto-backup (Google sign-in required).
  • Wipe all data — Settings → About → Delete all data. Permanent, no undo.

Questions or feedback? Email us at woohoosoftware@gmail.com