Your ball stays
on your Mac.

No account or telemetry

Tether does not create an account, send analytics or display advertising. The one thing that leaves your Mac is your weekly board entry, which is a rally count and a made-up name. That is on by default and you can opt out of it in the app's settings.

Local settings only

Your selected ball, physics settings and lifetime bounce count are stored locally using macOS preferences.

Window geometry

When “Land on windows” is enabled, Tether reads the position and size of visible windows so the ball can use stationary windows as surfaces. Window titles and contents are not collected or stored.

Screen sharing

When “Invisible on screen share” is enabled, Tether asks macOS to exclude its overlay and settings panel from supported captures. Tether does not inspect or record your screen.

The weekly board

The board is opt out: it is on when you install Tether, and you can turn it off whenever you like. It is the only thing that makes Tether send anything about how you play. What goes up is your best rally of the week, the two-word name the app made up for you, the week number, and a random identifier created on your Mac. That identifier exists so your entry can be replaced each time you beat it rather than piling up, and it is not derived from your Mac, your Apple ID or anything about you. No account, no email, and nothing that could identify you.

To opt out, turn off the Weekly board switch in the app's Desktop settings, or press Leave the board on its Board tab. Leaving stops everything being sent, forgets the identifier and rolls you a new name, and your entry for the current week ages out when the week does.

The board also shows a two-letter country code beside each name. Tether does not look up, store or send your location: the code is worked out by the web host from the network connection the score arrives on, in the same way any website can tell roughly where a visitor is. The address it is worked out from is not recorded, and the code is never more precise than the country.

The name is picked from a fixed list of words. You cannot type one, so no personal information can be put on the board by accident or on purpose.

Nothing else is sent: not your settings, not your lifetime count, not when you play or for how long. Each week's board is a set of scores and made-up names, and it is public by design.

Optional feedback submissions

If you deliberately submit the feature-request form, its category, message and any email address you choose to provide are sent through Formspree to PaperCloud Studios. This information is used only to read and respond to your request or improve Tether. Nothing is submitted in the background, and the form is not used for tracking, advertising or analytics.

This website

playtether.app counts page views using Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies, does not follow you between sites and does not collect personal information. It tells us how many people visited a page, nothing about who they are. The Tether app itself sends nothing but its weekly board entry.

Ideas and feedback

Use the Tether feedback form to request a feature or report a problem.