Becoming — Privacy Policy

Effective: 8 September 2026

Becoming is built around one promise: what is said in a night stays in the room. Nothing you say is ever sent to us. This policy says exactly what that means, what does leave your phone, why, and what you can do about it.

Who we are

Otherdays Studio is the trading name of Lovish Saini, a sole trader based in the United Kingdom, who makes Becoming and is the controller of the personal data described here. You can reach us at lovish@otherdays.studio, or by post at 1 Brick Kiln Road, Manchester, M12 5XL, United Kingdom. Write to either address for anything in this policy.

The short version

• Your words, your nights, the people you add and your answers stay on your phone. We never receive them.
• We hold an account for you only if you sign in: an identifier from Apple, your email if you shared it, and your first name if Apple passed it on.
• We receive a small stream of anonymous usage and crash records so we know whether the app works. They carry a random per-install number, never your name or account.
• We receive Apple’s subscription records so we can see what sold and what lapsed. They are keyed to Apple’s transaction numbers, not to you.
• If you write to us from inside the app, we keep the note so we can reply.
• We do not sell personal data, we do not advertise, and there is no third-party analytics or tracking in the app.

What stays on your phone

Conversations. If you let Becoming listen, your words are turned into text on your phone, either by Apple’s speech recognition or by a speech model the app downloads once from Hugging Face. The model comes down; nothing goes up. Transcripts, the stories built from them, the people you add, your answers, favourites and taste settings are stored only on your phone. They are never uploaded to us, synced by us, or read by us or anyone else.

One exception, and it is Apple’s, not ours. Becoming asks iOS to transcribe on the device itself, and every recent iPhone can. On a device that cannot, iOS hands that audio to Apple’s speech recognition instead, under Apple’s privacy policy. It still never reaches us.

Voices. Audio becomes text and is then deleted. A segment still waiting to be transcribed, because a night was interrupted or the app was closed mid-question, is held on your phone so it can be finished later. It is deleted after 72 hours whether it was transcribed or not. That ceiling is deliberate: keeping your voice never outranks losing a sentence. No audio is ever uploaded to us, and we have no way to reach it.

Telling voices apart. At the start of a night that is being heard, each of you says a short line out loud. From those lines the app makes a rough sketch of each voice, on the phone, so it can tell who said what. The sketch lives in memory for that night only. It is not stored, not kept between nights, not sent anywhere, and it cannot be used to identify you outside the app.

Your age. Some decks are for adults only. If you open one, the app asks your date of birth and keeps only the date you turn 18, on your phone. The date of birth itself is not stored and nothing about it is sent to us.

Your copy. If you keep a copy of your nights (Settings → Keep a copy), the file is encrypted before it leaves the app and goes wherever you put it. The key that opens it lives in your iCloud Keychain, which Apple end-to-end encrypts, so the copy opens on your other devices. We never hold the key or the copy.

Keys and decks you own. Which decks you have unlocked, and how many keys you hold, are kept in your iCloud Keychain so they survive a reinstall and follow you to a new phone. That is Apple’s system, end-to-end encrypted, and we cannot read it.

What leaves your phone

This is the complete list.

Your account. When you sign in with Apple we receive the identifier Apple issues for Becoming, your email address if you chose to share it (or Apple’s relay address if you chose to hide it), and your first name if Apple passed it on, which it does once, at your first sign-in. These are stored with our authentication provider, Supabase, and used only to operate your account: to sign you in, to greet you by name, and to reply if you write to us. We never see your Apple password. You can use everything in Becoming without an account; the account exists so your purchases and, in future, your nights can follow you.

Purchases. Subscriptions and one-time purchases are sold and processed entirely by Apple. We never receive your payment details. Apple sends our server a notification whenever a subscription starts, renews, fails to renew, is refunded or lapses. Those records carry Apple’s transaction numbers and the product bought, not your name, email or account, and we have no way to join them to you. We keep them because they are how we know whether the app is working as a business. The app also tells our usage stream that a purchase completed and which product it was, under the same random install number as below.

Which screens you reached. Becoming records that certain moments happened: first open, onboarding finished, which door you took, a deck opened, a night started, the first question, a night finished, a story or transcript opened, the paywall seen, a purchase completed, a key spent. When a night finishes, that record also carries how long was spent on each question, which questions were passed on, which sat in silence, and how long the night ran, identified only by our own catalogue’s question number, never by the words asked or spoken. Each record is tagged with a random number generated when the app was installed, the app version and build, and your locale. Never your name, your account, or anything you said or wrote.

This is how we know whether the app works: whether people finish nights, which questions people tend to skip, where they stop. It goes to our own server, hosted by Supabase, not to an advertising network. Becoming contains no advertising, no third-party analytics kit, no attribution or ad tracking, and we do not share or sell any of it.

What it cannot see: any answer you gave, any word you said, any person you added, any story you made, or who among you passed on a question. That last fact stays on your phone, inside the night’s own record. What it can see is which of our catalogue’s questions a night touched, and for how long.

Whether the app is working. iOS tells us, at most once a day, if Becoming crashed or hung, and how long it took to launch. We get the shape of a crash: the kind of error, the app version, and a short termination reason. Never what was on screen or what was said. It carries the same random install number. This is Apple’s built-in MetricKit reporting, not a third-party crash tool.

Feedback you send. If you answer an in-app survey or write us a note, that text is stored on our server with the app version and your locale. If you are signed in, it is stored with your account identifier and email so we can reply. Notes are also forwarded to our team’s Slack workspace so we see them promptly.

The speech model. The first time Becoming needs its own speech model, your phone downloads it from Hugging Face. That is an ordinary file download: Hugging Face sees the request the way any web server sees a request, including your IP address, under Hugging Face’s privacy policy. Nothing of yours is sent with it.

Why we are allowed to

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the law asks us to say which legal basis we rely on.

• Your account, purchases, and replying to your feedback: performing our agreement with you (UK GDPR and GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
• Usage records and crash reports: our legitimate interest in knowing whether the app works and where it fails (Article 6(1)(f)). We have weighed this against your interests: the records carry no name or account, cannot be joined to you, and never contain anything said in a night. You can object at any time; see Your rights.
• Anything the law requires us to keep, such as records of what was sold: our legal obligations (Article 6(1)(c)).

We do not make automated decisions about you, and we do not profile you.

How long we keep it

• Account data: until you delete your account, or until we delete it because it has been unused for three years.
• Usage and crash records: no longer than two years from the day they were recorded.
• Subscription records from Apple: as long as tax and accounting law requires, which in the UK is six years.
• Feedback: until you ask us to delete it, or three years after you sent it, whichever is sooner.
• Everything on your phone: until you delete it, or delete the app.

Deleting your data

Delete account (Settings → Delete account) permanently deletes your account, including your identifier, email and first name, from our authentication provider, and erases every night, word, and person from your phone. There is no undo. Feedback you sent while signed in is kept as described above unless you ask us to remove it; write to us and we will.

You can also remove Becoming from your Apple Account at any time in your iPhone’s Settings, under your name → Sign in with Apple.

Deleting the app removes all on-device data, including any audio still waiting in the 72-hour queue. It does not delete your account; use Delete account first if you want that too.

The usage and crash records carry no account identifier, so they cannot be linked back to you or retrieved on request, by us or by anyone.

Who else sees it

We use a small number of service providers who process data on our instructions and are not allowed to use it for their own purposes:

• Apple: sign-in, purchases, speech recognition on devices that cannot do it locally, and crash reporting.
• Supabase: the servers that hold your account, feedback, and the usage and subscription records.
• Slack: where feedback and subscription notifications are forwarded so we see them.
• Hugging Face: the file host for the speech model.

We do not sell personal data, we do not share it for advertising, and we will not hand it to anyone else unless the law requires us to, or to protect the rights or safety of people using Becoming.

Where it is kept

Our servers may be outside the country you live in. Where your account or feedback data leaves the UK or the European Economic Area, we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses, or on an adequacy decision covering the country it goes to.

Children

Becoming is for adults. It is rated 18+ on the App Store and we do not knowingly hold an account or any data for anyone under 18. If you believe we do, write to us and we will delete it.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what data we hold about you, ask for it corrected, and ask for it deleted. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area you also have the right to restrict how we use your data, to receive the data you gave us in a portable form, to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and to withdraw any consent you have given. Write to lovish@otherdays.studio and we will answer within one month. We will not charge you and we will not treat you differently for asking.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK (ico.org.uk) or to the data protection authority where you live.

If you are a California resident: we do not sell or share your personal information, and never have. There is nothing here to opt out of. You have the rights to know, to delete, to correct, and to not be discriminated against for exercising them, and you can exercise them by writing to us.

Security

We use standard technical safeguards, encryption in transit and encryption at rest for anything held on our server, to protect the account, purchase and feedback data described above. No system is unbreakable, but there is very little here to protect: your words never reach us in the first place. If we ever learn of a breach that puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

Changes

If this policy changes, the update will be posted at this address with a new effective date, and if the change matters to you we will say so in the app. Because your words stay on your device, a change cannot retroactively reach data we never had.

Contact

Otherdays Studio, the trading name of Lovish Saini · lovish@otherdays.studio
1 Brick Kiln Road, Manchester, M12 5XL, United Kingdom