Inner Thread is designed to keep your writing on your device. This policy explains exactly what data the app handles and what leaves your phone.
What stays on your device
Your journal entries, photos attached to entries, your mood and energy selections, and the search index over your entries are stored only in the app's local sandbox on your iPhone or iPad. They are not uploaded to our servers. Apple's standard iCloud Backup, if you have it enabled, may include this sandbox along with your other app data — that backup goes to your iCloud account, not to us.
What is sent off-device, only when you use a feature that requires it
Voice transcription (Deepgram). When you record a voice note in the Journal or Ask tabs, the audio is sent to our backend, which forwards it to Deepgram (https://deepgram.com) to convert speech to text. The audio and transcript are not retained beyond the request.
Letters chat (Anthropic Claude). When you write a message in the Letters tab, your message and the entries the device judged most relevant to it (selected by your phone's local search) are sent to our backend, which forwards them to Anthropic (https://anthropic.com) to generate the reply. The reply is streamed back to your phone.
Listen playback (Google Cloud Text-to-Speech). When you tap Play on a journal entry in the Listen tab, the text of that entry is sent to our backend, which forwards it to Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech) to render a natural-sounding audio clip using a WaveNet voice. The generated audio is cached on your device after the first play so repeated plays do not re-send the text. Audio and text are not retained beyond the request.
None of these providers — Deepgram, Anthropic, or Google Cloud — use your writing to train AI models, per their published API terms.
Account information
We use Supabase for sign-in and session management. Your email address and authentication tokens are stored on Supabase's infrastructure. We do NOT store your journal entries, photos, mood data, or transcripts on our servers or in Supabase.
Subscriptions
Inner Thread Premium is sold via Apple's In-App Purchase system. We do not see your payment information; Apple handles billing and shares only the subscription status with us.
Your choices
Delete account: Settings → Delete account permanently erases your local entries and photos, signs you out, and removes your account record.
Export: Settings → Export prepares a copy of your local data.
Stop using AI features: skip the Letters tab to avoid sending data to Anthropic; type instead of using voice to avoid sending audio to Deepgram; skip the Listen tab to avoid sending entry text to Google Cloud.