Crash reports, bug reports and diagnostics

Motion can send me three kinds of report. None of them says who you are. Here's exactly what's in each.

4 min readMotion

What never goes

Your name, your account, your Steam or Hub identity, your licence, or anything that links a report to a purchase.
An id for your computer. Diagnostics carry a random one that's replaced every 30 days, only so a day's numbers count once.
Your IP address. The Hub doesn't keep it, and its logs leave these reports out. It only uses a scrambled version of it for a few minutes, so nobody can flood it. The hosting companies in front of the Hub (Cloudflare and Fly) can see and log the address of each connection, as they do for any website.
Memory dumps. Not even small ones.
Your user name, folders or scene names. They're taken out of everything before it's shown to you: your home folder becomes ~, and a scene's name becomes scene.

Everything is kept on Motion's own Hub, nowhere else. Every report is deleted after 90 days.

Crash reports

When Studio, the app or a wallpaper closes unexpectedly, a small window asks whether to send a report. On Android it's a notification, Send a report?, and a crash on the watch is offered by Motion on your phone, the next time the two are in reach. You see all of it first (See what's sent), and nothing goes unless you say so, or you've chosen Always send, without asking (in Settings, Send crash reports without asking).

A crash report holds:

which program it was and its version;
your system's name and version (Windows 11, 10.0.22631), and your graphics card and its driver;
where in Motion's code it crashed (the list of functions it was in), and its error message;
the last 100 lines of Motion's own log;
what you were doing, if you write it;
the scene's recipe: see below.

Bug reports

Report a bug is in Studio's Help menu, and in Settings › Privacy and reports in both the app and Studio. It sends what you write, the same system details, the last 100 lines of Motion's own log, and the scene's recipe. You can also add a picture of Motion's window, only Motion's, and you see it before it goes.

The scene's recipe

A crash often lives in the scene, so a report carries enough of it to make the crash happen again, without your things in it:

every layer, effect, keyframe and setting;
your pictures, sounds and videos only as their shapes: their size, length and format, never the files;
your words replaced by filler of the same length (Happy birthday becomes Xxxxx xxxxxxxx);
the scene's name as scene, with its description, tags and author left out;
the scene's scripts and shaders, shown plainly, with a tickbox to leave them out;
where it was: the scene's time and frame, the canvas and screen sizes, and in Studio the kind of layer being edited and the last few commands used (their names, never what you typed).

A scene that's public already, from the Hub or my examples, goes only as its id.

For a scene of your own, there's one more tickbox: The whole scene (its pictures, sounds and files). It's off unless you tick it. A whole scene can be up to 50 MB, and it's deleted after 90 days like the rest.

Diagnostics

Help improve Motion is off unless you turn it on, in the first-run screens or in Settings › Privacy and reports, in the app or in Studio: one switch for both. Turning it off deletes everything waiting to be sent, at once.

When it's on, Motion sends one small batch a day of counts:

Motion's version, and your system's name and the first number of its version (Windows 11 and 10, not 10.0.22631);
how long frames take to draw, by kind of scene;
your graphics card's maker (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel...), not the model;
how often each kind of layer, effect and feature is used, as numbers only, never names, files or what's in them;
how long Studio and the app take to start;

Motion for Android and the watch send no diagnostics. On Android, Privacy and reports in Settings has Always send crash reports, without asking. Motion Full is bought and checked through Google Play, and Google's Play Billing library, inside the app, sends Google its own diagnostics of how its calls to Google Play went, which Google keeps under its own privacy policy.

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Last changed 2 November 2026. Something wrong here? Tell us.