Privacy Policy

Last updated 15 September 2026. This describes the app as it is built today.

Who is responsible

Steady Next is an independent iOS app. Questions about this policy go to jaberelferkh@gmail.com, or through the support form.

What the app stores, and where

Everything below is stored on your device. None of it is transmitted unless this policy says otherwise.

Highly sensitive: encrypted on the device

• Journal entries, including any tags you create.
• The optional private note in a daily check-in.
• Notes you attach to a plan step.
• Everything in the toolkit: questions, checklists, dates, people by role, message drafts.
• Any reflection you asked for and chose to keep.

These are encrypted with AES-GCM using a 256-bit key generated on your device and held in the iOS keychain, marked so that it never enters an iCloud keychain and never migrates to another device. A copy of the database on its own cannot be read. Deleting everything destroys the key, so any remaining bytes become permanently unreadable.

Product state: stored in the clear, behind iOS file protection

• The onboarding answers you gave: stage, priorities, how much time feels realistic, support style, whether you want co-parenting content.
• A country code, only if you chose one, and only to pick which resources to show. Never anything more precise.
• Which plan steps you completed, skipped or moved.
• Your settings, including whether reflections are enabled and which policy version you agreed to.
• A random identifier generated on your device, used to keep your plan varied. It is never transmitted.

What the app has nowhere to put

Steady Next does not ask for, and has no field for: your legal name, a former partner’s name, children’s names or ages, custody arrangements, court orders, an exact separation date, an address, a phone number, or account numbers. The data model does not contain these, so they cannot be collected by accident.

The app requests no access to your contacts, photos, location, calendar, microphone, camera, health data, or any financial connection.

Optional reflections: the only thing that leaves your phone

Reflections are off by default and stay off until you turn them on. Turning them on is not permission to send anything: before every single request you see the exact text that would leave your device, laid out line by line, and you can strike out any line or cancel.

When you do send something, only the text you approved is transmitted, along with the type of request and the policy version. Your other entries, your check-in answers, your settings and any identifier are not included. The request goes to a Steady Next server, which passes it to a language-model provider and returns a structured reply. The text is not stored after the reply is returned and is not used to train a model.

Reflections are not available in the current version of the app. No reflection service is connected, the option is not shown, and nothing is transmitted. This section describes how reflections will work if they are added in a future update, and this policy will be updated before that happens.

The app also keeps a record of when you turned reflections on or off and which policy version was live at the time. That record contains no content. You can read it in Settings and delete it with everything else.

Safety checks

When you write a check-in note or ask for a reflection, the app looks at the text on your device to decide whether to step aside and offer human help instead of a plan. That check runs entirely on your phone, its result is not stored, and it is not transmitted. It is not reliable. Get help now is always available whether or not it triggers.

Subscriptions

Purchases are handled by Apple. Steady Next uses RevenueCat to ask whether your subscription is active. RevenueCat receives an anonymous identifier generated for your install, plus purchase and renewal events from Apple. It does not receive anything you wrote, your onboarding answers, or any name or email address.

Apple’s own handling of your purchase is governed by Apple’s privacy policy, not this one. A subscription is visible in the purchase history of the Apple Account that paid for it, and Apple may email a receipt. Steady Next cannot change that, which is why everything safety-related works without a subscription.

Analytics and crash reporting

The app ships with analytics switched off and no analytics provider configured. Nothing is sent. The code contains an analytics layer so that one could be added later; if it ever is, this policy will be updated first and it will only ever carry a fixed list of controlled values: which onboarding step was completed, whether a purchase succeeded or failed, which authored content identifier was completed, and coarse duration buckets.

Journal text, check-in notes, mood or heaviness selections, crisis or abuse signals, anything about a former partner or a child, message drafts, contact details, a region more precise than a country, legal topics, reflection payloads or outputs, and advertising identifiers are all on a permanent denylist. There is an automated test that fails the build if any of them appear.

There is no session replay, no advertising SDK, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because the app does no cross-app tracking.

This website

This site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server logs including IP addresses for a limited period as part of running the service. The site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and shows no cookie banner, because there is nothing to consent to.

The resources page is plain server-rendered HTML with no scripting requirement, so it works with JavaScript disabled and on a poor connection.

The support form is delivered by FormSubmit, which receives the name, email address, category, message and version numbers you type, and forwards them by email to jaberelferkh@gmail.com. Do not put sensitive details in it.

Retention and deletion

Data stays on your device until you delete it or remove the app. Deleting the app removes everything with it. Inside the app you can delete all journal entries, all reflections, or everything, at any time. Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone: there is no account, no copy elsewhere, no waiting period and no recovery.

Deleting your data does not cancel a subscription. Cancel that in the App Store.

Export

Settings → Export everything writes a readable Markdown file containing your answers, check-ins, plans, journal entries and reflections, and hands it to the iOS share sheet. Once that file leaves the app it is no longer encrypted. Where you put it is your decision.

Backups

By default the app’s data can be included in an encrypted iPhone backup. Settings has a switch to exclude it. Excluding it means a new phone starts empty: there is no cloud copy to restore from.

Children

Steady Next is for adults and is not directed at children. It does not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18, and it has no field for a child’s details.

Your rights

Because there is no account and no server-side copy, access, correction, portability and erasure are all things you do yourself, immediately, inside the app. If you are in a region with statutory data rights and want that confirmed in writing, ask through the support form.

Security and breach

Sensitive data is encrypted on the device and the key is held in the keychain, device-only. The app enforces complete iOS file protection on its store, covers itself in the app switcher, and offers a lock with its own passcode. No claim is made that this protects a device someone else already controls.

If a security issue affecting user data is ever found, it will be described on this page and communicated to anyone reachable, within the timeframe the applicable law requires.

Changes

Material changes will be posted here with a new date. A change to the reflection policy also turns reflections off in the app until you read the new terms and opt in again.