The short version. The places you mark never leave your
phone. We hold your account, your friend list, and one status word per person.
Only friends you accepted can see it. No ads, no analytics, nothing sold.
Your places stay on your device
The places you mark — their coordinates and their size — are
stored only on your phone. We could not change this quietly:
our server has no endpoint that takes a latitude or longitude, so there is
nowhere for them to arrive.
When you cross the edge of one, your phone sends the status word for that
place. Nothing else. We keep no location history.
A places backup file is written by you, to a place you pick. We never see it.
What we store
Your account
- Display name, and the email your sign-in provider gave us. With Sign in
with Apple that may be Apple's relay address, not your real one.
- A 6-character friend code, and your profile picture if you set one.
- The date the account was created.
How you sign in
- Which provider (Apple or Google) and that provider's account id. We
never see a password.
- For Apple, a token used only to cancel the grant when you delete your
account.
- A session per signed-in device. Unused for 90 days, it is deleted.
- For each signed-in phone: its model name and platform (“iPhone 15
Pro”, iOS), and which phone you chose to decide your status. Not the
name you gave your phone — iOS does not hand that out.
Your status
- The current word, whether it was set automatically or by hand, and when
it changed. There is no archive — a new status replaces the old one.
Friends and settings
- Who you are friends with, unanswered requests, and your circles.
- Your alert choices and quiet hours, and your device's offset from UTC so
those hours mean the right thing. An offset in minutes, not a location.
Notifications and safety
- A push token per device, removed when you sign out or when Apple says it
is dead.
- Accounts you blocked. The other person is never told.
- Reports you filed or that were filed about you. A report keeps the
reported name and picture as they were then, because both can be
changed and the evidence would otherwise be gone.
Feedback you send us
- Your message, and your screenshot if you attached one. Screenshots go to
private storage with no public address, because a screenshot of this app
shows your friends and their zone names.
- App version, platform and theme, so a bug report is answerable.
Location permission
Dowui asks for "While Using the App" first, then "Always". It needs Always
because arriving and leaving happen with the app closed.
It watches circular regions. It never turns on continuous tracking, and it
does not declare a background location mode.
Who can see your status
Only friends you accepted. No public profile, no feed, no discovery.
Removing a friend or blocking someone ends it at once, both ways.
Services we use
- Apple and Google — sign-in.
- Supabase (Tokyo, Japan) — database, and storage
for pictures and feedback screenshots.
- Kamui — hosting for our server.
- Cloudflare — the edge in front of our server. It
sees the request and your IP address, not what is inside your account.
- Apple Push Notification service — alerts. To
deliver one, Apple's servers carry your friend's name and which kind of
place they reached.
- OpenStreetMap — map tiles for the place screens.
It sees the map squares your screen shows, which is the rough area around
the places you marked, plus your IP address. It never sees your account,
the exact spot, or the size you chose.
- Nominatim (OpenStreetMap) — turns a typed place
name into a spot on the map, only when you submit a search. It sees what
you typed and which languages you read, so the answers come back in your
language. It is never told where you are.
No analytics SDK, no ad SDK, no third-party tracking. Our privacy manifest
declares no tracking and no tracking domains. We do not sell personal data or
share it for advertising.
Deleting your account
Settings → Delete account removes your account and
everything above that belongs to it: sessions, push tokens, friendships, alert
rules and feedback. With Apple sign-in we also cancel the Apple grant.
Safety records stay: a report you filed, a report about you, and the fact
that someone blocked you. They keep the name and picture from that time.
Leaving and coming back does not clear them — if it did, a bad account
could wipe its own record and walk back to the people who blocked it.
It is immediate and cannot be undone. Ordinary server logs may hold
technical records such as IP addresses for a short time after.
Your rights
Change your name, picture and settings in the app at any time, and delete
everything with the button above. For a copy of your data, or any question
about this page, write to us.
Children
Dowui is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly make
accounts for them.
Changes
If this changes in a way that matters, we update the date at the top and
say so in the app.
Contact
[email protected]