Privacy Policy

Who this is from

Metrics Nest is published by Ricardo Cerqueira. Questions about anything on this page go to hello@metricsnest.app.

What the app reads, and why

Apple Health

With your permission, Metrics Nest reads health and fitness data from the Health app on your iPhone. It uses this for one purpose: to show you your own data — the dashboard you build, the detail pages, the Balance score, your goals and your badges.

Depending on what you allow, that can include:

• Activity — steps, walking and running distance, flights climbed, energy burned
• Workouts, and heart rate recorded during them
• Heart — heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability
• Sleep analysis, including sleep stages
• Nutrition — energy, protein, carbohydrate, fat and water consumed
• Body measurements — weight, body mass index, body fat percentage, lean mass, height
• Vitals and mobility — respiratory rate, blood oxygen, blood pressure, walking steadiness and related measures, headphone audio exposure

You choose which of these to allow, in the Health permission sheet, and you can change your mind at any time. Metrics Nest reads all of it and changes or deletes none of it.

There are two things it can write, each behind its own switch, and both are things you recorded in the app rather than anything it read from somewhere else.

The first is a workout you recorded here, added to Health so that it shows up in Fitness and counts towards your rings. What gets written is the workout envelope alone: its kind, when it started, and how long it ran. Not your sets, not your weights, and not the heart rate the app recorded. The app offers it the first time you save a workout, and the switch lives in Settings under “Privacy & backup”.

The second is the food and water you log — its calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat and volume, under the name you gave it. The app asks the first time you log anything, and the same Settings section has the switch. Turning it on covers what you log from that moment on; nothing you logged before it is sent. Corrections and deletions follow — fix a figure or delete an entry here and Health is changed to match, because a copy that only ever grew would leave Health holding meals you had already corrected.

Both are off until you say so, and iOS asks you as well. Neither writes anything the app read from another source: not your steps, not your heart rate, not your weight. Leave both switches off and Metrics Nest never writes to Health at all.

The food log, the camera and the microphone

What you log as food is written by you and is held on your phone. Nothing else has ever held it: the daily totals the app can read from Health are sums with the meals already thrown away, so your log exists in one place and is included in the backup for that reason. If you turn on the Health switch described above, a copy of the figures also goes to Apple Health on this phone — still yours, still on the device, and never to us.

Looking a food up is the one part that uses the internet. When you scan a packet, the barcode is sent to Open Food Facts, an open database, which answers with the manufacturer’s published figures. When you type a name into the food field, those words are sent to the same database once you have typed at least three characters. That is all that is sent: no account, no identifier, no cookie, and never anything from your log or your health data. The request is unauthenticated, and Open Food Facts’ own privacy policy governs what it does with it. If you never scan and never search, the app never contacts it.

The product names, brands and figures that come back are © Open Food Facts contributors, made available under the Open Database Licence and the Database Contents Licence. Metrics Nest shows them with that credit, keeps a copy of the last few hundred on your phone so the same packet is not looked up twice, and sends nothing back to the database.

The camera runs only while the scanner is open, and only to read a barcode. No picture is taken, stored or sent — the frames are examined for a code and discarded. The microphone runs only while you hold the dictation button. Speech is turned into text by Apple’s recogniser on the device: the app requires the offline recogniser and refuses to dictate at all where it is unavailable, rather than falling back to a version that would send your voice to a server. No recording is kept.

Location, and where a run happened

If you record a run, a walk or a ride, the app follows your position so it can draw the route and work out your distance and pace. It does that only between the moment you press Start and the moment you press Stop. Nothing is recorded before or after, and nothing is recorded when you are not in a workout. Location continues while the screen is locked — that is the only reason the app asks for background access, and it stops the moment the workout does.

The route itself stays on your phone. It is drawn there, and it goes into your backup only while you leave Routes switched on under Settings › Privacy & backup › Backup, where it is called out as the most personal thing in the file.

One thing does leave, and it is worth being exact about. To put a run on the map of places you have trained, the app needs the name of the city — so it sends the single coordinate the run started from to Apple’s own geocoder, once per workout, and keeps the name that comes back. Not the country, not the region, not a second copy of the position. The rest of the route is never sent, no other coordinate is ever sent, and if you never record a route nothing is looked up at all. That lookup is handled by Apple’s system framework on your behalf and is covered by Apple’s privacy policy; it does not reach us, because there is no us for it to reach.

Bluetooth heart rate monitors

The app connects to standard Bluetooth heart rate monitors to show live beats per minute while you record a workout. Bluetooth is used for that and nothing else — no location is derived from it, and no scan results are transmitted anywhere. A saved workout keeps one average heart rate per elapsed minute, on your device.

Where your data lives

On your phone. Readings, workouts, goals, badges and your dashboard layout are stored in the app’s own storage on the device. Metrics Nest has no backend and no database: nothing you record is sent to us, because there is no us to send it to. None of it is ever used for advertising, marketing, or sold or shared with data brokers.

The backup, which is in your iCloud and not ours

What you record in the app would otherwise exist on one phone and be lost with it, so the app keeps a backup, and that backup is on when you install it. Each time you close the app, if anything has changed, it writes a single file to Metrics Nest’s own folder in your iCloud Drive — your Apple account, reached with your Apple ID.

That file never touches a Metrics Nest server, because there is no Metrics Nest server. This is not a policy we are promising to keep; it is a thing the app cannot do. There is no account to create, nothing to sign in to, and nowhere for your training to be sent. We cannot read the backup, we cannot lose it in a breach, and we cannot be made to hand it over — we do not have it. It is in your iCloud, it is yours, and what Apple does with what is in your iCloud is covered by Apple’s Privacy Policy.

It carries only what Apple does not already hold. That is the rule the file is built to, and it is why the file is small: your steps, heart rate, sleep and body measurements came from Apple Health, they are still in Apple Health, and Apple already backs them up — so this app does not copy them anywhere. What it does carry is the half that exists nowhere else: the workouts you recorded here and the sets and weights inside them, your custom workouts, goals, badges, your dashboard layout and your preferences.

You can switch the backup off, or narrow what it carries — including leaving out the GPS route of a run — under Settings › Privacy & backup › Backup in the app. The file is yours to read or to delete in the Files app at any time, and deleting it is final in the way deleting something from your own iCloud is: nobody else has a copy.

The only thing anyone else can see: Game Center

Game Center is Apple’s own service, and the app uses it whenever your iPhone is signed into it: on launch the app signs in quietly with the account your phone already holds, and when you open the Challenges page it submits your score for each weekly challenge, so that you and the friends you challenge can see the same board. If your phone is not signed into Game Center, nothing is submitted and the boards show only you. That means three numbers, one per challenge, each for the current Monday-to-Sunday week:

• The kilometres you walked or ran
• The flights of stairs you climbed
• The minutes of training you recorded

These are held by Apple on its Game Center leaderboards, associated with your Game Center player identity, and visible to the Game Center friends you share a board with. A score of zero is never submitted. No other data is sent — no individual readings, no workouts, no sleep, no body measurements, no nutrition. Metrics Nest never sees your email address or your real name through Game Center.

Apple’s handling of Game Center data is covered by Apple’s Privacy Policy. To stop submitting, disconnect Game Center in the app, or sign out of Game Center in iOS Settings.

Paying for the app

Purchases are made through the App Store, so Apple takes the payment and holds the record of it. We never receive your card details, your billing address or your name, and no payment information is stored on your device by the app or sent anywhere by it. What the app is told is whether a purchase is currently active — nothing about who made it.

Buying the app changes nothing on this page. There is still no account to create, no server behind it, and no reading that leaves your phone; a receipt is not a profile, and paying does not start one. Apple’s handling of the transaction is covered by Apple’s Privacy Policy.

Analytics and tracking

Metrics Nest contains no crash reporting, no advertising SDKs and no cross-app tracking. It does not track you across other apps or websites, and it shows no advertisements. There is no advertising identifier in use. The one analytics service it uses is described next.

Product analytics

As you use it, Metrics Nest sends one kind of event to PostHog, our analytics provider: the name of a screen you opened, with the app version. That is the whole of what it collects; the only other thing it ever sends is a feedback form you have filled in yourself, described under the next heading. The name is the app’s own route rather than the address you were at — the exercise page is recorded as the exercise page, never which exercise — so the events cannot describe what you were looking at, only that a screen of that kind was opened. No properties, values or readings are attached to them.

Nothing read from the Health app is sent to PostHog under any circumstances: no steps, no heart rate, no sleep, no weight, and no score derived from any of them, rounded or otherwise. Neither are your workouts, your sets, your routes, your goals or your badges. There is no account, name or email address in the app to send. We ask PostHog not to derive a location from the connection.

The events are linked to a random identifier generated for your installation, so that several screens in a row count as one visit. It is not derived from anything about you or your device. The data is processed by PostHog on our behalf, and is not sold, shared for advertising, or used to track you across other apps or websites. You can turn this off in Settings → Privacy & backup → Anonymous usage stats, which stops it at once and discards that identifier.

Feedback you send us

Settings → Tell us offers two forms — report a problem, and share an idea. They are the one place in the app where something you have written is sent to us, and nothing is sent from them unless you fill one in and tap the button. Neither form appears on its own, and the app never prompts you for a rating or a review.

A submission carries the part of the app you picked from the list, the message you typed, and the app version. Nothing else is attached to it: not the screen you were on, not your readings, workouts, meals, goals or badges, and not anything about your device. The message is the one field whose contents we cannot describe in advance, because it is yours to write — it reaches us as you typed it, and the form says so above the button.

The submissions reach us through PostHog, in the same EU project as the screen counts above and under the same random installation identifier, so they are no more linked to you than a page view is. If you have turned Anonymous usage stats off, the form does not send anything at all: the button opens your mail app with what you have written instead, for you to send or discard.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, the app schedules them on your device — a goal reached, a badge unlocked, a physiological signal you asked it to watch. These are produced and delivered locally by your phone. No push server is involved and no notification content leaves the device.

Your choices

Deleting the app does not remove scores already on a Game Center leaderboard; those are held by Apple and reset when the week they belong to ends. It also does not touch anything in the Health app, which was never ours to delete. Nor does it withdraw feedback you had already sent us: a submission is not held on your phone, and it is not linked to a name or an address we could look it up by, so write to hello@metricsnest.app if you want one removed and can tell us enough to find it.

Children

Metrics Nest is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If the app starts handling data differently, this page changes before the version that does so is released, and the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

hello@metricsnest.app