What leaves your phone, and what never does

The short version

• There are no accounts. We don’t know who you are.
• Your recipes, photos and videos live on your phone and in your own cloud account. We have no copy and cannot read them.
• Two things leave your phone, and only when you ask: a recipe you are reading in, and a recipe you share by link. The link is encrypted on your phone; we cannot open it.
• No advertising, no tracking, no third-party analytics kits, and we never sell or share personal data.

The rest of this page says the same thing in full.

Who we are

Mawmaw’s is made by Clear Blue Design LLC, a Louisiana limited liability company (“we”, “us”). This policy covers the Mawmaw’s app for iPhone and Android and the website at mawmawsrecipes.com, including the pages that show a shared recipe. For anything about it, write to hello@mawmawsrecipes.com.

No accounts

The app has no sign-in, no passwords and no user accounts. We do not ask for your name, your email address or anything else about you. Nothing in the app or on this site identifies you to us.

Your recipes, photos and videos

Everything you keep in Mawmaw’s stays on your phone and in your own cloud account:

• On iPhone, in your iCloud private database, which syncs your recipes between your devices, plus a visible backups folder named “Mawmaw’s” in your iCloud Drive, with one file per recipe.
• On Android, the words of every recipe (not its photos or videos) are in your phone’s own backup to your Google account, with nothing to set up: Android backs them up about once a day and brings them back when you install the app again or set up a new phone. Google keeps that backup end-to-end encrypted with your phone’s screen lock when you have one. If you choose Back up to Google Drive, a copy of every recipe with its photos and videos is also kept in a hidden folder of your Google Drive that only Mawmaw’s can see; it brings everything back on a new phone and keeps your Android phones in step. The app asks Google for that folder and nothing else in your Drive.

These are your accounts with Apple or Google, under their terms, and we have no access to them. We have no copy of your recipes, photos or videos and cannot read them.

Deleting a recipe in the app removes it from your phone and from your cloud (on Android, its copy stays in your Drive folder’s Recently Deleted for 30 days, then goes). Settings › Your Recipes › Erase All Data removes everything the app holds on your phone, and your backups too if you choose. Deleting the app from your phone leaves your cloud copies where they are, in your own account, so you can get them back by installing the app again.

Reading a new recipe

When you add a recipe, the photos, PDF pages, text or link you chose are sent over an encrypted connection to our servers, which run on Google Cloud and Firebase in the United States. Our server passes that content to an AI provider, currently OpenAI through its API, to turn it into a recipe. Under OpenAI’s API terms, content sent this way is not used to train its models. If you add a recipe by link, our server fetches the web page, not your phone, and passes what it finds along in the same way.

We do not keep the content after the reply. What we keep is a request log per installation: the time, the kind of request, the app version, the model used, token counts and cost, and whether it succeeded. It holds no recipe content and no photos. We keep it only as long as needed to run and protect the service, including to apply fair-use limits and to find out why something failed.

Cover art

When a recipe has no photo, the app can ask our server to paint a cover for it. Only the recipe’s title and summary are sent, as text; no photos, amounts or steps. The picture is labelled as made by AI in the app, and you can replace it with a photo of your own at any time.

The installation ID and app attestation

Each request to our servers carries a random installation ID. It is generated on your phone, is not linked to you or to anything about you, and is used for fair-use limits and to prevent abuse. Each request is also confirmed to come from the real app by Apple’s App Attest on iPhone or Google Play Integrity on Android, and Firebase App Check (device attestation, which carries no personal data). On Android, the installation ID and the key that signs the recipes you share are also kept in Google’s Block Store, in your Google account, so a new phone keeps them; we have no access to it. We keep these records only as long as needed to run and protect the service.

Sharing a recipe

As a link. A link is end-to-end encrypted. The recipe, its photos and videos and the name you chose to share under are encrypted on your phone with AES-256-GCM before anything is sent. The key is only in the link you send, after the #, and never reaches us. The encrypted copy is stored on Firebase Storage until you stop sharing or delete the recipe; we cannot open it, and neither can anyone without the link. Someone who opens your link downloads the encrypted copy, and the web page or the app decrypts it on their side with the key from the link. The web page carries no analytics and no third-party code.

As a picture. A card image goes through whatever app you choose to send it with (AirDrop, Messages, Mail or any other), under that app’s terms. It never passes through our servers. The same goes for the .mawmaw files you export yourself (Export All in Settings): they go only where you save or send them.

A recipe you receive carries the names its sharers chose to share under, so the app can say who shared it with you and who first did.

Opening a shared recipe before you have the app. On a phone, the shared-recipe page’s button to get the app also copies that recipe’s link to your clipboard. The first time you open Mawmaw’s after installing it, the app looks once for that link there (your iPhone asks you first) and opens the recipe. It never looks again, and nothing on your clipboard leaves your phone.

What the app asks your phone for

Each permission is asked when the feature needs it and used only for that feature:

• Camera: photographing recipe cards and pages, and photos and videos of your cooking.
• Microphone: the sound in videos you record.
• Photo library: only the photos and videos you pick.
• Notifications and alarms: timers, and a note when a recipe has finished reading in.
• Google Drive (Android): only if you choose Back up to Google Drive, and only the app’s own hidden folder in it.
• Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight and Visual Intelligence: Apple’s on-device frameworks. Your recipes are indexed on your phone so Spotlight can find them; that index stays on your phone.

What we don’t do

No advertising. No tracking. No third-party analytics kits. We do not sell personal data and we do not share it, except with the service providers below, who process it only to provide their service to us:

Children

Mawmaw’s is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from them. As there are no accounts, there is nothing for a child to sign up for.

Your choices

Everything above is under your control in the app: what you add, what you share, when a link stops, what is deleted. Permissions can be changed in your phone’s settings at any time. For anything else, write to hello@mawmawsrecipes.com.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version is posted here with its date.