Privacy Policy

The promise, in five sentences

These are the exact sentences the app shows on its Privacy screen (Settings → Privacy).

• Your recipes, ingredients and list live in a database on this phone.
• When you give it a link, the app downloads that page, once, and nothing else.
• Photos are read on this phone and never stored.
• On devices with Apple Intelligence, the app may use Apple's on-device model to read ingredient lines. No cloud AI, ever.
• No account, no analytics, no crash reporter, no third-party code.

What we collect

Nothing. Recipe to Grocery List has no analytics, no advertising SDKs, no crash reporting that leaves the device, and no third-party trackers. We do not collect a name, an email, an advertising identifier, or any usage data. There is no sign-up and no login because there is no account. The App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected, and the app's bundled privacy manifest says the same.

Where your data lives

Everything you save — recipes, their ingredient lines, the ingredient names the app learns from you, your grocery list and its check-marks, manual items, and your settings (theme, first-run flag) — is stored on your iPhone in the app's own private sandbox: a single SQLite database plus the standard app preferences. It is never uploaded anywhere by the app.

The app also has an App Group container, and it is used for one thing only: the Share Extension's inbox. When you share a link or some text to the app from another app, the extension writes it into a small file in that container, where it waits until you open Recipe to Grocery List. The app reads the file, removes what it took, and opens the Add screen with what you shared filled in; a shared link is not fetched until you tap. The database itself is not in the App Group; the extension cannot read your recipes or your list.

Standard iOS device backups (iCloud Backup or an encrypted local backup) may include the app's data, the same as any other app's local data. That backup is governed by Apple's privacy terms and your device settings, not by us; we never transmit your recipes to our own servers because we don't have any.

The one network request

When you give it a link, the app downloads that page, once, and nothing else.

In detail: the app makes a single https request for the exact address you gave it (plain http links are refused). It follows at most five redirects, only to other https addresses. It sends no cookies and stores none, runs no JavaScript, and never fetches the page's images, scripts or stylesheets. It gives up after 15 seconds or 3 MB. It does not retry unless you tap again. The page is read once for its ingredient list and then discarded; the app keeps only the ingredient lines, the recipe's title and yield if the page stated them, and the final address so you can find the recipe again. The page itself is never stored.

Pasting text and photographing a page involve no network request at all.

Photos and the camera

The Photo path can read the ingredients off a photographed cookbook page, entirely on your device (Apple's Vision framework). It runs only when you choose it. Picking an existing photo uses the out-of-process iOS picker, which needs no photo-library permission; using the camera instead asks for camera permission in context, and the reason shown is the true one: to read ingredients off a page. The image is processed in memory and is never stored by the app, never added to your library by the app, and never uploaded. Recognized text goes through the same confirm-before-save flow as pasted text.

On-device parsing

Turning an ingredient line into a quantity, a unit and a name is done by deterministic code on your device. On iPhones where Apple Intelligence is available and enabled, the app may additionally use Apple's on-device Foundation Models to tidy the parse and suggest which pantry item a line means. That processing runs entirely on your iPhone using Apple's built-in system model: no text is sent to us, to Apple's servers by the app, or to any third party. There is no cloud AI of any kind, not even as an option. The model only proposes — nothing is saved until you confirm it, and it never writes to the database. If Apple Intelligence is unavailable or turned off, the app simply uses its deterministic parser and a few more rows may need a tap; nothing else changes.

What Recipe to Grocery List does not do

• No accounts, no servers, no cloud sync operated by us.
• No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporter, no advertising, no ad identifiers, no ATT prompt, no third-party SDKs.
• No selling or sharing of data: there is no data leaving the device to sell.
• No request to any address other than the one you gave it (and the https redirects it sends you through, five at most), and none at all unless you did.

Children's privacy

The app collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be published here and the date above will be revised.

Contact

Questions about privacy or the app: luke@lukefwalton.com, or a GitHub Issue.

Personal project by Luke F. Walton, not a Surmado product.