Thread Privacy Policy

The short version

Thread has no accounts, no backend, no analytics, and no third-party services. Your voice, the transcripts it produces, and the notes Thread organizes from those transcripts never leave your iPhone. Everything happens on-device, using frameworks that Apple ships as part of iOS.

What Thread does

When you tap the microphone in Thread:

• Recording. Thread captures audio from your iPhone’s microphone using Apple’s AVFoundation framework. The audio stays in memory only and is never written to a file.
• Transcription. Thread converts that audio into text using Apple’s SFSpeechRecognizer, configured with requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true so Apple’s framework is forced to transcribe locally rather than route audio to Apple’s servers. If your iPhone cannot transcribe on-device for any reason, Thread refuses to record rather than fall back to cloud transcription.
• Organizing. Thread uses Apple’s on-device FoundationModels framework — Apple Intelligence’s local language model — to turn the transcript into a structured note with a title, a summary, and labeled sections. This processing happens entirely on your iPhone.
• Saving. Thread saves the organized note — title and content text — to Core Data, in the app’s private sandbox on your device. The raw transcript is discarded; only the AI-organized text is kept.

What Thread does not do

Thread does not:

• Send your voice, transcripts, or notes anywhere off your iPhone.
• Use any third-party AI provider. Thread does not call OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, or any other AI service. Speech recognition and note structuring are handled exclusively by Apple’s on-device iOS frameworks.
• Require an account, a sign-in, or any personal information.
• Include analytics, crash-reporting, advertising, or marketing SDKs of any kind. No Firebase, no Crashlytics, no Mixpanel, nothing of the sort.
• Run a backend or contact a server. Thread makes no network requests of its own.
• Sync to iCloud or any cloud service.
• Track you across apps or share data with anyone.
• Use cookies, advertising identifiers, or persistent device identifiers.
• Run in the background or process your data when the app isn’t open.

The single outbound action Thread can take is opening this privacy policy or your iPhone’s Settings app when you tap the corresponding button. In both cases Thread hands the URL to iOS, which opens it in Safari or the system Settings — Thread itself makes no network call.

Permissions Thread asks for

Thread requests two iOS permissions, both only at the moment you first try to record:

• Microphone access, so the app can hear you.
• Speech recognition, so Apple’s on-device speech framework can run on the audio.

You can revoke either permission at any time in your iPhone’s Settings app. If you do, Thread keeps working; you simply won’t be able to record new notes until you re-enable them.

What’s stored on your iPhone

Thread keeps three things in your iPhone’s private app sandbox:

• Your notes — title, organized content, and timestamps — in a local Core Data store.
• Three small numbers in iOS’s UserDefaults: whether you’ve finished onboarding, the total number of notes you have ever created, and the total number of seconds you have ever spent recording. None of these include any text from your notes.
• Standard iOS app data such as your in-app preferences.

When you delete a note in Thread, it is removed from the local store. When you delete the Thread app, iOS removes the entire sandbox — your notes, the counters, all of it. There is nothing left on a server because no server exists.

Children’s privacy

Thread is rated 4+ in the App Store. It does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, regardless of age, because it does not knowingly collect personal information at all. The notes you record are stored locally on your iPhone and are not transmitted to us or anyone else.

Changes to this policy

This policy will change only when Thread changes. If a future version of Thread adds any feature that transmits your data off your iPhone — for any reason, including cloud sync, account creation, third-party AI, analytics, or anything else — we will:

1. Update this policy before the feature ships.
2. Show you an in-app explanation of what is changing and why.
3. Require your explicit consent before any data leaves your device.

The current version of Thread does none of this, and any change to that promise will be a deliberate one you actively agree to.

Contact

Thread is built by Jackson Shell, operating as VJP Development (a sole proprietorship). If you have questions about this policy, email vjpdevelopment@gmail.com.