Privacy Policy for Notch

Last updated: 26 September 2026

This policy covers the Notch apps and widgets for macOS, iOS and iPadOS (“the app”), published by Michael Shear. The iPhone and iPad app is listed on the App Store as Notch Reminders, and the Mac app comes from the same App Store listing. It explains what the app stores, where it is stored, and who can reach it — which, in every case, is you.

Your reminders are Apple's, not ours

This is the whole architecture, and it is the most important thing in this document. Notch has no database. It reads and writes your existing reminders through EventKit, Apple's own framework for the Reminders database on your device. When you tick something off in Notch, you are ticking it off in Reminders.

So there is no second copy of your tasks to worry about, no export to somewhere else, and nothing for the developer to hold. If your reminders sync between devices, that is Apple's Reminders syncing through your iCloud account, at your instruction, governed by Apple's privacy policy — Notch is not involved in it and could not be.

What the app stores on your device

Only three things, all local to the device and all created by your use of the app:

• Your settings, in the app's own preferences, readable by this app alone: the theme, the Light/Dark/System choice, text size, whether the completion sound is on, and whether notifications are on.
• A small snapshot for the widgets, written to the app's own shared container on the device. It holds just enough about upcoming reminders for a widget to draw them: title, due date, priority, and the name and colour of the list. It never leaves the device, and it exists only because a widget has to be able to render before it has finished reading Reminders itself.
• Scheduled local notifications, held by the operating system's own notification system. See below.

That is the entirety of it. The app does not store or transmit:

• Your name, email address, or any account or login information — there is no account.
• Device identifiers, advertising identifiers, or IP addresses.
• Location data.
• Analytics, telemetry, usage statistics, or crash reports of any kind.
• Your contacts, photos, calendar events, messages, browsing history, or any other data belonging to other apps.

Network access

The app makes no network requests, of any kind, to anywhere, on Mac, iPhone or iPad. Updates arrive through the App Store.

The Mac purchase

On the Mac, the panel you summon with a shortcut is free for 14 days and then unlocked by a one-time in-app purchase. Both the free trial and the purchase are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store. The app learns only whether they have been made, and when the trial began, from Apple's own signed record on your Mac. Notch never sees your Apple Account, your payment details or your identity, and it sends nothing about the purchase anywhere. Apple's handling of purchases is governed by Apple's privacy policy. On iPhone and iPad there is nothing to buy.

The direct-download Mac version

There is also a version of Notch for the Mac that is downloaded from this site rather than the App Store, and adds capture. Everything above applies to it, with these additions:

• A daily check for updates. Once a day, and when you choose Check for Updates…, it downloads a small public file from GitHub describing the latest version, and the update itself if you choose to install it. It uses the open-source Sparkle framework, configured to send nothing about you: no system profile, no identifier and nothing about your reminders. Like any web server, GitHub sees the IP address of the Mac that asks. Every update is signed, and the app refuses one that is not.
• Capture. When you capture a task over Mail, Mimestream, Finder, Photos or Prexy, Notch asks that app, on your Mac, for a link to the item in front of you and writes the link into the reminder's notes; macOS asks your permission once for each app. A captured photo is saved to Pictures › Captured to Tasks on your Mac. Over Messages or WhatsApp, the area you select is read with Apple's on-device text recognition and the picture is deleted straight afterwards. Nothing is uploaded, anywhere.
• Unlocking from the App Store purchase. The App Store version leaves Apple's signed record of your purchase in a folder on your Mac that both versions can read, and the direct version checks Apple's signature on it. The check happens on your Mac; nothing about it is sent anywhere.
• Buying it directly. If you buy the direct version on this site rather than on the App Store, the checkout is run by Stripe, which acts as the seller: it collects your name, email address, billing address and payment details under Stripe's privacy policy. The license you receive carries your name and email address so the app can say whose it is; it is kept and checked on your Mac, and nothing about it is sent anywhere. A Mac holding such a license also downloads, once a day, a small public list of refunded licenses from GitHub, and compares it with the license on your Mac. The request carries nothing about you, and a Mac without a direct license never makes it.

There is consequently no server of ours for your data to sit on, no API key to store, and no outage or breach on our side that could expose anything.

Natural-language parsing happens on your device

When you type “call the desk tomorrow at 9” into the quick add bar, the work of pulling “tomorrow at 9” out of that sentence is done entirely on your device, by Apple's built-in text handling plus the app's own rules. What you type is never sent anywhere.

For full disclosure: an earlier, pre-App-Store version of Notch could optionally send quick add text to Google's Gemini API if you supplied your own API key. That feature was removed in August 2026, and the current version deletes any such stored key from earlier builds when it launches.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, Notch schedules them locally, through the operating system's own notification system on your device. There are no push notifications and no server involved; nothing about a reminder is transmitted in order to alert you about it.

A notification necessarily shows the reminder's title so it is useful, which means it can appear on your lock screen like any other notification — that is the operating system's display behaviour, controllable in your device's notification settings. Notch deliberately schedules its own notifications instead of writing alarms into Reminders; nothing about that choice sends data anywhere.

On macOS, Notch offers to open at login so that reminders created while it was closed still get scheduled. This uses Apple's login-item service, is off unless you turn it on, and involves no network access.

Permissions the app asks for

• Reminders — required. Without it there is nothing for Notch to show, since it holds no data of its own. Reminders are read and written locally through EventKit; nothing about them is transmitted anywhere by the app, and the developer never sees them.
• Notifications — optional. Declining leaves the app fully usable; you simply won't be alerted.
• Open at login (macOS, optional) — so notifications work for reminders created while Notch was closed.

One point of full disclosure about entitlements, because reading them out of the app would otherwise look odd: on macOS the app declares the system's calendars entitlement rather than a reminders one. That is because EventKit reaches the Reminders database through a system service that macOS gates behind that specific entitlement — without it, every Reminders operation fails at launch. Notch contains no code that reads or writes calendar events, and never touches your calendars.

Third parties

The app bundles no third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, crash-reporting or tracking libraries, and no third-party code of any kind. No data about you or your reminders is shared with any third party, because none is ever sent anywhere. Apple is not a third party in this sense — it is the platform, and your reminders are in Apple's Reminders and your own iCloud account because that is where you keep them.

Tracking

The app does not track you, across apps or websites or at all, and contains no tracking domains. Nothing about your use of it is ever measured or reported. The app's machine-readable privacy manifest states the same thing: no tracking, no tracking domains, and no collected data types whatsoever.

Your control over your data

• Delete any reminder or list from within Notch — it is deleted in Reminders, and so everywhere.
• Revoke Reminders access at any time: System Settings → Privacy & Security → Reminders on macOS, or Settings → Notch on iOS and iPadOS. The app stops seeing anything immediately.
• Turn notifications off in Notch's settings or in your device's notification settings.
• Uninstall the app, which removes its settings and its widget snapshot from that device. Your reminders are unaffected — they were never Notch's, and they stay in Reminders.

There is nothing to request from the developer, because there is nothing held by the developer.

Children's privacy

The app is not directed to children under 13, and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone of any age — it collects none at all.

Changes to this policy

If the app's data handling ever changes, this page changes with it: the updated policy will be posted at this URL and the “last updated” date above revised.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about Notch generally: shearm@mac.com. General help is on the support page.