1The short version
- Everything you log stays on your phone. There is no account, no server holding it, and no sync.
- Anonymous usage statistics are off unless you switch them on, and they never contain anything you wrote.
- Nothing is sold, shared for advertising, or used to build a profile of you.
- If you subscribe, Apple takes the payment and a receipt is checked against an anonymous identifier. Nothing you wrote is part of that.
- This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.
Everything below is the detail behind those five lines. If any of it turns out to disagree with what the app does, the app’s behaviour is the bug and I want to hear about it: hello@trysonarapp.com.
2What stays on your phone
The app stores what you tell it in a database inside its own private storage on your device. That includes your daily check-ins and urge levels, the trigger tags you pick, any notes you write, the slips you log and their amounts, the reasons you wrote for stopping, the monthly figure and currency you gave, your payday settings, the date you started, and your language and appearance preferences.
None of it is transmitted. There is no account to attach it to, no server that receives it, and no sync. I have no access to it and no way to request it.
There is also no backup. If you lose the phone, replace it, or delete the app, that history is gone and cannot be recovered, not by you and not by me. You can also delete all of it deliberately at any time: Settings → Delete everything, which is immediate and cannot be undone.
3Anonymous usage statistics
These are on by default, and the app does not ask. I would rather say that plainly than bury it: their only purpose is telling me which parts of the app get used, so the next thing built is the right one, and an app whose problem is people leaving in the first week cannot learn that from data nobody switched on.
One message is sent per event. Each message contains: the name of the event, from a fixed published list; a small number of counts, true-or-false flags and fixed values attached to it, such as whether a check-in recorded a clean day or how many trigger tags were selected; the app version; the operating-system name and version; your device language; whether the build is a development build; a timestamp; and one random identifier.
That identifier is invented at random on your phone the first time anything is sent, and kept until the app is deleted. It means the events from one installation can be counted as one person rather than as a crowd of strangers, which is the difference between knowing whether a change helped and knowing nothing. It is derived from nothing: not your device, not your Apple Account, not an advertising identifier, and there is no account identifier because there are no accounts. It cannot be joined to another app’s data or to you, and it dies with the installation.
What is never sent, ever: your notes, your reasons, the amounts you log, your urge levels, which triggers you pick, your payday, your start date, your monthly figure, or anything else you typed. The rule is counts, flags and fixed values only. It is enforced in the app’s source rather than by policy: one file lists every event and every property permitted, and nothing outside it can be transmitted.
These messages are processed on my behalf by Aptabase, an analytics provider, on servers in the European Union. As with any internet request, it arrives from your IP address, and an approximate country can be derived from that; the IP address is not part of the message and is not stored by me. Aptabase acts as a processor and may not use the data for its own purposes.
How to stop them: there is no switch for this in the app at the moment, and I am not going to describe that as anything other than a gap. Deleting the app stops it permanently. Settings → Delete everything discards the random identifier as well as your data, so nothing sent after that point can be joined to anything sent before it. And you can object by writing to hello@trysonarapp.com, which I will act on.
4This website
This site is a few static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and embeds no third-party scripts, fonts or trackers. The working demonstration of the app on the home page is made of ordinary page controls and nothing else: choosing a night or a screen only changes what is drawn, nothing is submitted anywhere, and nothing is remembered between visits. There is nothing here for this site to collect about you.
It is hosted by Vercel, which processes ordinary web-server request logs, including IP addresses, to serve pages and absorb attacks. I do not use those logs to identify anyone.
5What never happens
- No selling or renting of data, in any form.
- No advertising, no ad networks, no advertising identifiers, and no sharing for advertising.
- No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs. The app talks to exactly two outside services, both named above: the statistics provider, only if you switch statistics on, and the receipt checker, only if you buy something. Neither receives anything you wrote.
- No profiling, no automated decisions about you, and no attempt to work out who you are.
- No social login, no contact-list access, no location access, no health-data access.
6Your rights
Under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation you have rights of access, correction, erasure, restriction, objection and portability over personal data held about you.
For what the app stores, those rights are satisfied on the device itself, because that is the only place it exists: you already have full access to it in the app, and Settings → Delete everything is an immediate and complete erasure. There is nothing for me to send you and nothing for me to delete, because I never had it.
For the statistics, the honest position is that the random identifier is the only thing tying a set of events together, and I have no way of knowing which one is yours. If you send it to me I can delete what it points at; without it I cannot find your events to give you or to erase, which is a consequence of collecting nothing that identifies you rather than a way of avoiding the request.
For the anonymous statistics, the lawful basis I rely on is legitimate interest: understanding which parts of the app are used, so that the app gets better at the thing it exists for. The data is deliberately kept to counts, flags and fixed values, contains nothing you wrote, and is not used to build a profile, to advertise, or to make any decision about you. You have the right to object to this at any time under Article 21, and the paragraph above says how.
If you want to raise something regardless, or you disagree with any of the above, write to hello@trysonarapp.com. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.
7Children
This app is for adults. It is not directed at children, and it does not knowingly collect anything from them.
8Changes to this policy
If what the app collects changes, this page changes in the same release rather than afterwards, and the date at the top moves. A privacy claim that is nearly true is worse than one that is precise.
9Who is responsible
The data controller is Sonar. Contact: hello@trysonarapp.com.