Simpl Courses
What Simpl can see, and what it can’t.
Simpl redraws your school’s Canvas on your own device. Here is exactly what that means for your account, your data and your quizzes.
Last updated October 25, 2026. The privacy policy has the formal version.
Simpl can
- See what you can see in Canvas: your courses, work, grades and messages, through Canvas’s own student API, signed in as you.
- Do what you could do in Canvas: hand in, mark done, reply, star a course. Nothing a student can’t.
- Keep a copy on your device so screens open at once. In the Mac and Windows apps it’s encrypted, with the key in your Keychain or behind Windows Hello.
Simpl can’t, and doesn’t
- Make you sign up. There is no Simpl account.
- Send your courses to us. We run no server that holds your data.
- Track you. No analytics, no ads, no trackers. The iPhone app even blocks Canvas’s own analytics scripts.
- See what your teachers see. It has your access, nothing more.
Your password
You type your password on your school’s own sign-in page. The browser extensions never see it.
The Mac, Windows and iPhone apps can remember your sign-in so you stay logged in. It stays on your device, in the Keychain on a Mac or iPhone and behind Windows Hello on Windows, and is never sent to us.
What else reaches the internet
Besides your school’s Canvas or Brightspace, only these, and each says what it is:
- Updates, from simplcourses.com and GitHub for the Mac, Windows and Safari apps, or from the Chrome Web Store.
- Wikipedia, in search. Search shows Wikipedia articles too, so what you type in search is sent to Wikipedia. The switch in the search box turns it off.
- Tools that come from their makers, only when you open them: the calculator from GeoGebra, the graphing calculator from Desmos. The file converter uses CloudConvert only if you give it your own key.
- A bug report, only when you press Send on the report page.
- Simpl Community, only when you open it or share a theme. A shared theme (its name, the name you sign it with, its colour and its pictures) is kept on simplcourses.com, and shows to everyone only once we’ve looked at it. Nothing about you, your school or your courses goes with it.
- Hand in from your phone. In the Mac and Windows apps the photo goes from your phone to your computer over your own Wi-Fi. In the browser, your phone opens the assignment in Canvas and hands in there.
Quizzes and updates
Simpl never reloads a quiz you’re taking, and Canvas saves each answer as you go.
The Mac and Windows apps hold an update while a quiz or a Knewton Alta assignment is open, and an update that comes by itself installs in the background without pulling Simpl to the front.
One exception: a critical update, which we send only to fix something serious, installs at once, even during a quiz. Your answers are already saved with Canvas, so you pick up where you were.
Turning it off
A small switch sits at the top right of every Canvas page. One click shows plain Canvas, on the exact page you were on. Click again to bring Simpl back. If Simpl ever can’t draw a page, it shows Canvas’s own page instead.
The code is public
Anyone can read exactly what Simpl does: the code is on GitHub. Found something wrong? Report it.
Removing Simpl
Settings → Data & about → Reset everything erases what Simpl kept. Then delete the app or remove the extension. Your Canvas account, grades and work are never touched.