Privacy Policy

1.Who is responsible for your data

Precede is published by the PRECEDE app team ("we", "us"). We are responsible for the limited personal data described in section 4 — which, as that section explains, amounts to the emails people choose to send us.

For everything the app stores on your iPhone, you remain in control: that data never reaches us, and we have no technical means of accessing it.

You can reach us at support@precedeapp.com for any question about this policy or your data.

2.What Precede stores on your device

The app is local-first. Everything in the table below is written to storage on your iPhone using Apple's standard app-data mechanisms, and stays inside the app's own container.

Some of this is shared with Precede's background extension through a private Apple App Group, so that your selection can be restored when a break ends even if the app is closed. That sharing happens entirely on your device.

If your iPhone is set to back up to iCloud or to a computer, this data may be included in that backup. That backup is Apple's system and yours — it is governed by Apple's terms, not ours, and we cannot read it.

3.Screen Time and the apps you choose

Precede uses Apple's Family Controls and Managed Settings frameworks to pause the apps, categories, and websites you select. This requires your explicit permission, which iOS asks for directly and which you can revoke at any time in Settings → Screen Time.

When you choose distractions, iOS presents Apple's own Family Activity picker. Apple deliberately does not tell the app what you picked. What Precede receives back is a set of opaque tokens — identifiers that mean something to iOS and nothing to anyone else. Precede stores those tokens and hands them back to iOS to apply the pause.

The practical consequence: we do not know, and cannot find out, which apps you have selected. Nor can the app itself. We do not log, decode, fingerprint, or transmit them.

Precede does not read your Screen Time usage statistics, your device activity reports, or which apps you actually open.

4.What we actually receive

There is exactly one route by which personal data reaches us, and you control it: you emailing us.

If you write to support@precedeapp.com, we receive your email address, whatever you put in the message, and any attachment you send. We use that solely to answer you and, where relevant, to fix the problem you reported.

Our support email is hosted by IONOS SE, which handles it on our behalf and under our instructions.

If you download or buy Precede from the App Store, Apple processes that transaction and may share aggregate statistics with us. That processing is Apple's, under Apple's privacy policy. We do not receive your name, address, or payment details from Apple.

5.What Precede does not do

As of the effective date above, and verified against the app's source code:

• Precede contains no analytics, crash-reporting, advertising, or attribution software.
• Precede makes no network requests. The app has no code that contacts a server, ours or anyone else's.
• There is no account system, no login, no cloud sync, and no backend.
• We do not build profiles, and no automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects takes place.
• We do not sell, rent, or share personal data with anyone for their own purposes.

6.Why we are allowed to process it

Where data protection law requires a basis for processing personal data, ours are:

• Answering your support email — our legitimate interest in replying to people who contact us and in fixing defects in our product. You started the conversation.
• Screen Time permission — your consent, given to iOS through the system prompt and withdrawable at any time in Settings. This data is processed on your device, not by us.
• Keeping records the law requires us to keep — for example, correspondence relating to a transaction.

We do not rely on consent for anything else, because we do not collect anything else.

7.How long things are kept

Deleting Precede from your iPhone removes its tasks, history, settings, and stored selection along with it. There is no server-side copy, so there is nothing left behind to request the deletion of.

8.Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how it is processed, and to receive a copy in a portable format. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time without affecting what was lawful beforehand.

In practice, the only personal data we hold about anyone is support correspondence. Write to support@precedeapp.com and we will respond promptly, and within any deadline the law sets.

For the data on your phone, you don't need to ask us — you already have direct control. Delete individual tasks in the app, or delete the app to remove everything at once.

If you believe we have handled your data improperly, you may complain to your local data protection authority. We would rather you told us first, so we can put it right.

9.Third parties and international transfers

Because the app transmits nothing, there is no routine international transfer of your app data — it does not leave your device. The companies listed above operate internationally, and where personal data reaches them we rely on the safeguards required by applicable law.

This website

precedeapp.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts. It loads one web font from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's servers and Google receives your IP address in the process. Our hosting provider processes standard request logs to deliver the site and defend against attacks.

10.Children

Precede is designed for a general audience and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children — in practice, we collect almost nothing from anyone.

If Precede is installed on a device managed through Family Sharing, Screen Time permissions may need to be approved by the family organizer. Apple's parental controls take precedence over anything the app does.

11.Security

Data on your iPhone is protected by iOS itself: app sandboxing, the device passcode, and Apple's file-level encryption. Keeping your device updated and passcode-protected is the most effective safeguard, and it's one only you can apply.

Because we store no user database, there is no central store of your tasks or selections that could be breached. That is a deliberate design choice, not an accident of scale.

12.Changes to this policy

If we change how Precede handles data, we will update this page and move the effective date at the top. Where a change is significant — anything that begins collecting data that wasn't collected before — we will publish the updated policy and the matching App Store privacy labels before the version that makes the change is released.

13.Contact

Questions about this policy, or about your data:

The PRECEDE app team
support@precedeapp.com

See also the terms of use and the support page.