Privacy Policy
By Heart for iPhone · Last updated 8 September 2026
By Heart does not have an account, a server, or a copy of anything you write. Your highlights, notes, kept verses, memorisation progress and reading streaks are stored on your device and, if you are signed in to iCloud, backed up to your own private iCloud so they survive a lost phone. That is Apple's storage, tied to your Apple Account. We cannot read any of it — there is no server of ours for it to pass through.
The whole Bible — all eleven translations, the cross-references and the Strong's lexicon — is installed with the app. Reading, studying and memorising work with the network switched off, and they make no network requests when it is switched on.
What we collect
Nothing. By Heart has no analytics, no crash reporting of its own, no telemetry, no account system and no server. We do not know who you are, what you read, what you highlighted or whether you opened the app today.
Advertising in the Games tab
The Games tab shows rewarded video ads, supplied by Google AdMob. They are the only part of the app that touches the network, and they never appear on a screen showing Scripture, study material or memorisation.
When you play a game, Google's advertising SDK may collect the following. We do not receive any of it; it goes to Google, and their privacy policy governs it.
| Data | Used for |
|---|---|
| Device identifier | Serving and measuring ads, limiting how often you see the same one, and fraud prevention |
| Advertising data | Which ads were shown and interacted with |
| Approximate location, estimated from IP address | Serving region-appropriate ads and meeting local legal requirements |
| Performance and crash data | Diagnosing problems in the advertising SDK |
Ads are non-personalised. Every request the app makes is flagged for non-personalised advertising, and By Heart never asks for permission to track you across other apps and websites — so it has no access to the identifier iOS uses for that, and your ad is chosen from context rather than from a profile of you.
Ad content is limited to the "general audiences" rating, the most restrictive setting Google offers.
Buying By Heart Plus removes the ads entirely.
Purchases
Subscriptions and one-off purchases are handled by Apple. We never see your card, your name or your Apple Account. The app asks iOS one question — whether this device has an active By Heart Plus entitlement — and iOS answers yes or no. Nothing about a purchase is sent anywhere else.
Notifications
If you turn on the daily verse reminder, the notification is scheduled by iOS on your device at the time you choose. No server sends it, and no one is told that you enabled it.
iCloud
If you are signed in to iCloud, what you write in By Heart — highlights, notes, kept verses, memorisation progress, reading streaks — is stored in the app's private CloudKit database. That means Apple's servers, inside your own Apple Account, encrypted, and reachable only by you on your own devices. We have no access to it, no console for it, and no copy of it.
Nothing else syncs. What you read, search for, or listen to is not recorded anywhere, on the device or off it.
If you are not signed in to iCloud, the app stores everything locally and tells you so in Settings. It keeps working either way.
Your data leaving the device
Apart from that iCloud backup, the only way anything you create leaves your phone is if you do it yourself: sharing a verse image, or copying a verse to paste somewhere. Both are your action, into an app you chose.
Children
By Heart does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age. Because there is no account and no profile, there is nothing for a child to hand over. Advertising is restricted to the general-audiences content rating.
Your rights
Rights of access, correction, deletion and portability apply to data a company holds about you. We hold none. Everything By Heart knows about you is on your device or in your own iCloud: deleting the app removes the local copy, and Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Storage removes the iCloud one. We have no copy to delete on our side, because we never had one.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what leaves your device, the change will be described here with a new date, and the app update that introduces it will say so in its release notes.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or about the app: 2hendrixxx@gmail.com