Privacy Policy

Last updated: 3 September 2026

Astiko is an open-source Android app for bus arrivals, full-day timetables and live bus maps in 26 Greek cities. It has no account system, no ads, no analytics and no server of its own. The app talks directly to the transit operators whose data it shows, and it builds the Thessaloniki stop catalog from the official GTFS feed published on Greece's open-data portal. Everything else stays on your phone. This page names the services involved and says exactly what each one receives.

Data stored on your device

The app keeps three kinds of data in its private storage:

• Favorites: stops and lines you have starred.
• Settings: language, theme, map style and the city you use.
• The offline cache: stops, timetables and line data for each city you open, including the Thessaloniki stop catalog built from the GTFS feed, so the app works without a connection.

None of this is uploaded anywhere. The offline cache is rebuilt automatically when you have a connection, and it is left out of Android backup on purpose, because it can grow past Google's 25 MB total backup cap.

If you have Android backup enabled, your favorites and settings are part of the encrypted backup Google manages for you. That copy lives in your Google account and the app never sees it. You can turn backup off in the Android settings if you prefer.

Uninstall the app or clear its data and the local files are deleted. On reinstall, Android may restore favorites and settings from a Google backup.

Your location

Location is optional. Without it you can pick a city by hand, browse every line and use favorites. Grant it and two things become possible:

• "Stops near you" lists the stops within walking distance.
• When you first open the app, it suggests the city you are in by measuring the distance to the 26 city centers.

Only one of these ever involves a network request with your coordinates. The nearby-stops lookup in Athens (telematics.oasa.gr) and Thessaloniki (oseth.com.gr) sends your latitude and longitude as part of the query, because that is the only way those two operators find the nearest stops. For the 24 CityBus cities the app downloads the city's stop list and calculates the nearest ones on the device, so nothing is sent to the provider.

The city suggestion is computed on the device. Your location is never stored by the app and there is no location history.

Requests the app makes

Every request goes straight to one of these services.

• OASA (telematics.oasa.gr): Stops, arrivals, line routes and live bus positions for Athens. Nearby-stops requests include your coordinates.
• OSETh (oseth.com.gr): Arrivals, timetables, line routes, live bus positions and the nearby-stops lookup for Thessaloniki. Nearby-stops requests include your coordinates. If the data.gov.gr feed is unavailable, the stop list is fetched from here as a fallback.
• data.gov.gr (data.gov.gr): Greece's open-data portal. For Thessaloniki, the app downloads the official GTFS feed published there (CC BY 4.0) and builds the stop catalog on your device. It checks the portal's public API at most once a day for a newer feed and downloads the new zip only when one appears, roughly every two weeks. These are plain public-dataset requests: no location, no account, no identifiers.
• CityBus (rest.citybus.gr plus the 24 city sites): Stops, arrivals, lines and bus positions for the other cities. The app also loads one public page on each city's site to read the access token the platform API expects. The token is not tied to any user.
• OpenFreeMap (tiles.openfreemap.org): Map tiles for the live maps. OpenFreeMap states that it keeps no user accounts, no cookies and no IP addresses in its logs. The map data is from OpenStreetMap.

Each of these services sees your IP address, the same as any web request, plus the stop or line you asked about. For the two nearby-stops calls above, that also means your coordinates. No device identifiers, no account names, nothing else. The three transit APIs are unofficial and run by the operators, not by the Astiko maintainers.

The app ships no analytics, no advertising SDKs and no crash reporters.

Permissions

• Location (fine and coarse): Used only for "stops near you" and the city suggestion. Without it the app still works.
• Internet: Fetches live arrivals, timetables and map tiles.
• Network state: Tells the app when you are offline so it can serve cached data.

Deleting your data

App data is exclusively on your device, and clearing the app's data or uninstalling it removes that. There is no server-side copy to ask about, because there is no server. If favorites or settings come back after reinstalling, that is Android restoring them from a Google backup, which you can disable in the Android settings.

Questions

The app is open source. If you want to see exactly what it sends, read the code or file an issue at github.com/uw0s/Astiko.

Changes to this policy

When the app changes what it sends, this page changes too. The address stays the same, so check the date at the top.