Last updated: 14 August 2026
SmartCart has no accounts, no analytics and no ads. Your shopping list is stored on your phone and is not uploaded. Two things in the app send requests from your phone to a supermarket: product photos, and the check that asks which nearby stores have an item. Both are described below.
SmartCart compares non-member shelf prices at Woolworths, Coles and ALDI in Australia. You build a shopping list on your phone and the app shows what that list costs at each store.
Everything you enter in SmartCart (your shopping list, the items you add, the quantities you set) is stored on your phone and is not uploaded. There is no sign-up and there are no accounts. The app does not ask for your name or your email address, and it does not read the phone's location. The one thing it does ask for is a postcode, it is optional, and what it is used for is described below.
To show prices, the app downloads a public price snapshot over https. The snapshot contains product names, prices and store information, nothing personal. The download carries no account details and no identifiers.
Prices in the snapshot are refreshed regularly, and each price in the app shows its age. Woolworths and Coles prices each come from one specific store, named in the app by that retailer's own store number, and ALDI publishes one national price list. Price history accrues in the snapshot so the app can show whether a special is genuinely low. All of that data is about products.
The app shows a photo on each product. The photos are not in the snapshot. They are loaded from image servers run by Woolworths, Coles and ALDI, one request per picture, straight from your phone. Each request identifies the product, and the server answering it can see the IP address it came from. Scrolling a list of products sends a series of those requests.
Photos are on when you install the app. The switch that turns them off is in the menu beside the refresh button. With photos off, no request of this kind is made, and nothing else changes: every price, every price age and every comparison works the same either way.
The price snapshot cannot say what is on a shelf today, so the app can ask Woolworths. This happens only when you tap the check on an item, for that one item, and only once you have entered a postcode in settings.
A check makes three requests to woolworths.com.au from your phone, a few seconds apart, which is why it takes a moment. The first reads Woolworths' robots.txt, the file a website publishes to say what may be fetched from it, and the check stops there if that file says this is off limits. The second loads the home page, which is what starts the anonymous session the third one needs. The third carries the product's Woolworths product code and the postcode you entered. Woolworths answers with up to five stores near that postcode and what its own system says about each one.
The answer is held in memory while the app is running, for at most half a day, and it is never written to your phone or sent anywhere else. The postcode itself is stored on your phone until you clear it, which you can do from the same settings menu.
Of the things you enter into the app, the postcode and the product code are the only ones these requests carry. Your shopping list does not go with them. The requests also carry what an ordinary browser request carries: a browser user agent string, the address of the Woolworths product page the code belongs to, and the session cookies Woolworths sets on the home page. Those cookies are Woolworths' own and they tie the three requests of one check together. The app holds them in memory and drops them when the check finishes, so the next check starts a new session. The server answering the requests can see the IP address they came from. If you never enter a postcode, no request of this kind is made.
The app contains no analytics and no advertising. It uses no tracking software, no advertising identifiers and no third-party analytics or crash-reporting service. The price snapshot download, the photo requests and the store check described above are the only network traffic the app makes.
Nothing about you is held on a server, so there is nothing to ask us to delete. Uninstalling the app removes your shopping list and your postcode from your phone.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be published at the same address as this one, with a new "last updated" date.
Questions about this policy: cgdct97@gmail.com