Privacy policy

01

What the app stores

On your devices and in iCloud: your rooms and chores, when each was done and by whom, the names of the people in your home (household members you typed in, and people who joined from their own Apple Account), checklists and checklist progress, optional notes and photos you attach to chores, and vacation periods.

Settings such as quiet days, the hour your day ends, the cards you put away and the name you go by follow your Apple Account through iCloud (section 02). The daily summary's switch and hour stay on each device.

This data lives in the app's own storage and is included in your normal device backups and Apple's phone-to-phone transfer, under the protections those already have.

02

iCloud: your own home, and a shared one

Dustly syncs through your own iCloud, using Apple's CloudKit. A home you have not shared sits in CloudKit's private database: readable only by you, signed in with your Apple Account, on your own devices.

Dustly 1.3 and later. You can invite someone into your home (section 03). A shared home stays in the owner's iCloud and is shared, through CloudKit sharing, with the people the owner invites. Your own choices (quiet days, when your day ends, the cards and nudges you put away, “Show more” for the day, your answer to “I was away”, whether setup is done, the name you go by, and when each of your devices was last opened) travel between your own devices through iCloud key-value storage, a small store that belongs to your Apple Account. Nobody you share a home with can read it.

Apple does not expose the contents of any of this to us: we cannot see, retrieve or delete these records, and there is no server of ours involved at all. Apple is the processor here, under Apple's privacy policy.

To turn sync off, switch off Dustly under iOS Settings → your name → iCloud → Apps Using iCloud. The app keeps working on the device; sharing and joining a home need iCloud.

03

Sharing a home

Dustly 1.3 and later. A shared home is one home with several people in it, kept in the owner's iCloud, with a copy on each member's devices. Everyone in it can read and change everything in it: rooms, chores, notes, photos, checklists, the history, who ticked off what and when, and the names of the people in the home. Nobody outside the home can.

Invitations. An invitation is a link that works once and for seven days: whoever opens it first joins, whichever Apple Account they use. Treat it like a key. Send it only to the person you mean it for, and cancel an unused one in Settings → Household. If you tap “Copy the link”, it stays on that device's clipboard for ten minutes and is not passed on to your other devices.

Names. Each person goes by a name in the home, and everyone in the home sees it. The household list also shows the name on the Apple Account behind it when that is different, and a person you invite sees the name on your Apple Account before they join. These names travel through Apple's iCloud sharing; we never receive them.

What stays your own. Your reminders, quiet days, the hour your day ends and the other choices in section 02 are not shared with the home.

Plus. When someone in a shared home buys Dustly Plus, the home records until when it runs, whether it is a subscription or a lifetime purchase, and which member bought it, so that everyone in the home gets Plus. No payment details are involved. If that person leaves, the home stops counting their purchase.

Leaving and taking someone out. A member can leave in Settings → Household, which removes the shared home from their devices and takes them out of the share. The owner can take a member out from the household list. Either way, what that person ticked off stays in the home's history, so the chores' clocks stay right, but their place in the household list goes.

04

No network, no third parties

Dustly's own code contains no networking. The only things that ever leave your device are the iCloud sync and sharing above, carried by Apple's CloudKit, and the link between your iPhone and your Apple Watch (section 06). The app makes no requests to our servers (we run none for it) or anyone else's. It opens a web page or the App Store only when you tap a link, such as the rating page, your subscription settings, the terms or this policy.

• No analytics or usage tracking
• No crash-reporting, advertising or other third-party SDKs
• No tracking of any kind, so no tracking-permission prompt
• No account: nothing to sign up for, and no email address or password asked for. If you share a home, Dustly asks what name the others should see you by.

05

Permissions

Dustly asks for no access to your location, contacts, camera, microphone or photo library. When you attach a photo to a chore, you pick it in Apple's photo picker, which runs outside the app: Dustly receives only the single image you chose, never access to your library. It resizes and re-saves that image, so details stored in the original file, such as where it was taken, are not kept.

The only system permission it asks for is notifications, and only if you keep the daily summary on.

06

Notifications, widgets, Siri and Apple Watch

Notifications. The daily summary is scheduled and delivered entirely on your device as a local notification: at most one a day, naming one small chore from your home. It never leaves your phone. The app's background “remote notification” capability exists only so iCloud can quietly tell the app that data changed on another of your devices, or in a home you share. It is not marketing push, and there is none. Background refresh only keeps the summary up to date on the device.

Widgets, Live Activities and Control Center. The home-screen widgets read the same on-device storage as the app, shared through an App Group, and ticking a chore on a widget happens on the device too. The Small Steps timer on your Lock Screen is a Live Activity that the app starts and updates on the device, with no push service involved. The Control Center control opens Dustly on one small step. You can turn Live Activities off under iOS Settings → Dustly.

Siri, Shortcuts and Spotlight (1.3 and later). Dustly gives Spotlight and Siri the names of your chores and rooms on the device, so you can find a chore or say “Mark the dishes done in Dustly”. Dustly sends those names nowhere; what Siri and Spotlight do with what you say or type is covered by Apple's privacy policy. Dustly's Siri answers need the device to be unlocked.

Apple Watch (1.3 and later). The watch app and its complications get your home from your iPhone over Apple's link between the two devices, and send ticks back the same way. The watch app has no iCloud access and makes no network requests of its own.

07

Purchases, feedback and what Apple sees

Dustly Plus is sold through Apple's App Store. Apple processes the payment and Dustly never sees your payment details; the app checks whether you have Plus through Apple's StoreKit on the device. If the app asks for a rating, it uses Apple's own review prompt, which tells us nothing about you.

Settings → Send feedback opens an email to dustly@frekvens.ai in your mail app, with the app version, the iOS version and the device model (for example “iPhone 18 Pro”) at the bottom, and nothing about you or your home. You can change or delete any of it, and nothing is sent unless you send it. We receive what you send, your email address included, and use it to answer you.

Because the app is distributed through the App Store, Apple handles downloads and payments and may show us aggregated, anonymised statistics, such as download counts by country. That is Apple's collection, under Apple's privacy policy, and it never includes anything you put into Dustly.

08

Deleting your data

Settings → Start over inside the app erases the rooms, chores with their history, steps and photos, checklist runs, your own checklists and the people added by name in the home on screen, on your devices and in iCloud. In a shared home it does this for everyone in the home, and guests are not offered it. People who joined from their own Apple Account stay members. It also erases your own choices from section 02 on all your devices; the name the others see you by stays. Deleting the app removes its data from that device, and the copy in your own iCloud can be removed under iOS Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage.

One more copy: the first time Dustly 1.3 opens a home that came from an earlier version, it keeps a safety copy of that home on the device, as a way back if the update failed. That copy is never synced or sent anywhere. Start over does not erase it; deleting the app does.

Since we hold no copy of your data, a data-access or erasure request to us has a simple, honest answer: the set of data we hold about you is empty, apart from any email you have sent us. What other people in a shared home hold is theirs to delete.

09

Children

Dustly is a household utility for a general audience and is not directed at children. It collects no data from anyone, children included.

10

Changes and contact

If Dustly ever gains a feature that changes this policy, the policy is updated here first, with a new revision date, before the feature ships. The claims above hold for the version of the app that links to this page; parts marked 1.3 apply from that version.

Questions about privacy: dustly@frekvens.ai