Just yesterday, Aviate went into an invite-only beta in which we actually talked about it a lot on the Android Headlines show last night. It’s a pretty cool launcher that basically aims to be the Google Now of launchers. I’ve had it for a few hours now and really am loving how great it is. That and the card UI is one of my favorite features of any app or launcher.
However, today it came to the attention of many people that Aviate stores your data in plain text, so just about anyone can see your data. That’s a huge security flaw right? Well here’s some good news. Paul, who is the co-founder of Aviate has responded to the issue and basically said they are working on a fix immediately. Which is great to see. Here’s the full letter:
Arvid,
Welcome to the Aviate Community! My name is Paul and I’m a Co-Founder of Aviate. I would personally like to thank you for being a part of our alpha community. Sorry for not responding sooner, we’re working hard to make Aviate as awesome as possible.
Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the privacy concerns you have. Privacy is very important to us and it is great to hear the specific requests from you.
As you probably know we use the app data to organize your collections and predict what spaces to show you. We need to send it to our servers so that we can use our algorithms to predict what your context is. That being said it always important to be clear with the users.
Thanks again for letting us know. I’ve shared these requests with our team.
Please let me know if you have any other questions / concerns.
Best,
Paul
Co-Founder @ Aviate
Many have decided to uninstall until the issue is fixed, but that won’t work either. Since your data will still remain on their server even if you uninstall or remove the app. So it’s best to either not use it or just keep using it until it’s fixed. Hopefully it won’t take too long.