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Keep chats & accounts

By default every chat auto-deletes in about 10 days. If you want to keep a room longer, you can optionally sign in with Google and reserve it — but anonymous chat works with zero sign-in, and your account is never linked to who wrote which message. Accounts exist for one reason: persistence.

Why sign in (and why you usually don't need to)​

  • Anonymous by default. You never need an account to start, join, or use any AChat feature.
  • Sign in only to keep. A Google account lets you reserve chats so they survive past the 10-day delete.
  • No attribution. Your account stores only your uid, email, name, and photo. It is never linked to message authorship — signing in does not de-anonymize your messages.

Reservations​

When signed in, you can reserve a chat to extend its lifetime:

  • Reserve up to 100 chats.
  • A reserved chat gets a base retention of about 3 months, extendable up to about 1 year through achievements (see below).
  • Reservations are managed from your account / "kept" area; releasing a reservation lets the chat return to the normal expiry schedule.

A reserved chat's retention is implemented by extending its expiresAt, so it simply lives longer rather than being special-cased out of the deletion system. If you signed in with an email, AChat can send an optional reminder before a reserved chat is due to expire — see Notifications & email.

Achievements & referrals (honest framing)​

AChat includes lightweight gamification that can extend retention:

  • Achievements are tracked client-side with limited anti-cheat. They are a fun way to extend retention, not a hardened system.
  • Referrals are self-referable — the referral mechanic is intentionally low-stakes and not fraud-proof.

These exist to reward engagement, not to gate core functionality.

Account deletion​

Account deletion is built in and mandatory-grade:

  • In the app, go to Account → Delete account. You type-to-confirm, and AChat releases your reservations, deletes your profile, and deletes your Firebase Auth record (re-authenticating if required).
  • A public /delete-account page documents the same flow.

After deletion, your reserved chats return to the normal 10-day expiry.

Native Google sign-in (setup note)​

On the web, Google sign-in uses the Firebase Auth popup. On the Android app, it uses the native Google auth flow and lands the same Firebase user. Configuring native sign-in (OAuth client, signing-certificate fingerprints) is a one-time developer/operator setup step.