Privacy Policy
Effective September 30, 2026
Northern Sky keeps what you write on your phone, and nowhere else. The app counts two things about itself, that it was opened and that a morning was finished, and never what you wrote. Nothing is sold, nothing is shown to advertisers.
Northern Sky is made by Brian Meise, one person. This policy says what the app and this website collect, where it goes, who else handles it, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read, not skimmed; if anything in it is unclear, write to northernskyapp@gmail.com.
What stays on your phone
Your entries. Each morning you write a commitment, answer whether you kept yesterday's, and write something you're thankful for. Those words, the yes or no, and the date they belong to are the app's whole content. They are saved on your phone and never sent to us: there is no account, no server, and no copy anywhere but the device you wrote them on. Your phone's own backup carries them to a new phone the way it carries everything else.
Your settings. The reminder time you pick and the praise word you choose stay on your phone. Reminders are local notifications scheduled by the app itself; no push service is involved, and the reminder text never leaves the device.
The app works fully offline, and a morning with no connection is still a morning.
What the app counts
We want to know whether people use Northern Sky, so the app reports two things to an analytics service: that it was opened, and that a morning was finished. Each report carries an anonymous identifier made from your device, hashed so that it cannot be turned back into anything about you, along with the kind of phone, its iOS version, the app's version, and your language and time zone. It never carries a commitment, an answer, or a gratitude, and never your name or email, because the app does not have them.
That is the list. There are no photos, no location, no contacts, no health data, and no advertising identifier.
Who else handles it
We keep the list of companies short and use each one for one job.
- TelemetryDeck receives the two counts described above and shows us the totals: how many people opened the app today, how many finished a morning this month. It is built to hold no personal data, and it does not. TelemetryDeck's privacy policy.
- Apple distributes the app through the App Store and, if you have chosen to share analytics with developers in your iPhone's settings, tells us in aggregate how many people installed it. Apple's privacy policy.
- Supabase holds the launch list: the email addresses people gave us on this website's front page before Northern Sky came out, and nothing else. Supabase's privacy policy.
- An email service sends the occasional note we write about Northern Sky, to people who gave us their address for that. We use Resend for this. Resend's privacy policy.
None of them are allowed to use your data for their own purposes. Nobody else gets it: no advertisers, no data brokers, no "partners".
The app never asks for your email, and since Northern Sky came out, neither does this website. If you gave us your address here before then, it is used to tell you Northern Sky is out and, occasionally, what has changed since. Every note has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing is honoured.
What we look at
We cannot look at your entries, because we do not have them. We look at the two counts: how many people opened the app, how many finished a morning. We do not read gratitude journals, train anything on them, or use them to decide what to show you, and the app is built so that we could not.
Your choices
- Export. Settings has a button that gives you every entry as a file you own.
- Delete. Deleting the app deletes every entry with it. There is nothing to delete on our side.
- Unsubscribe from any email with the link at the bottom of it, or by writing to us.
- Ask. You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it corrected, or ask for it deleted, at the address below. We answer every message.
How long we keep it
Your entries are yours and on your phone; we keep none. The analytics counts are kept by TelemetryDeck for a year. Email addresses on the launch list are deleted when you unsubscribe.
Children
Northern Sky is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
This website
The page you are reading is served by GitHub Pages, which, like any web host, sees the IP address of each request. The fonts come from Google Fonts, which sees the same. We count visits with GoatCounter, which stores no cookies and no personal data, only that a page was viewed or the App Store link was tapped, and roughly where from. The App Store link takes you to Apple. This site asks you for nothing; the front page's email form, which fed the launch list described above, came down when the app came out.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect, and the date at the top will move. Small wording fixes just update the date.
Contact
Brian Meise
northernskyapp@gmail.com