a note from sahil · june 2026
The line on the App Store privacy label says "data not collected." Four words, no asterisk. It is the truest thing I have ever shipped.
I could tell you the technical reasons. That there are no accounts and no servers. That nothing leaves the device. That the App Store privacy review wrote back with nothing to flag because there was nothing on the wire. But the technical reasons are downstream of a smaller, more boring decision.
I did not want to build a product that surveils the thing it is supposed to help you protect.
ember is for the people you love. Those people are not data points. The cadences at which you tend to them are not signals. Your hesitation about whether to send a text on a tuesday night does not need to be telemetry. So it isn't.
Most wellness apps sell intent data to advertisers. Journaling apps say your data is encrypted while training the next product on your prose. Fitness apps you trusted as a teenager turn out, a decade later, to have been a CRM the whole time. The small print is a foreign language. The trade is rarely articulated.
The cost shows up later. Usually after a breach. Usually after the news cycle has moved on. Occasionally in the form of an ad that knows something it shouldn't, and a faint feeling of having been watched without consent.
I am not interested in pretending the cloud is bad. Cloud sync is a real convenience. So is cross-device continuity. So is sharing a list with someone you live with. ember does none of these things in 1.0, and the absence is a real cost. Someone with the same hearth on iPhone and iPad has to pick one. A phone in the ocean takes the data with it.
I made the trade anyway because the alternative is a product that, in its quietest moments, betrays its own thesis. An app for tending the people you love should not be a vector for selling who you tend to.
The conditions for a quieter product are better than they have ever been. There are just very few quieter products being made.
What ember gets to be, in exchange for what it can't do: an app you can install without thinking about what you are signing up for. An app with a privacy nutrition label you can read without a magnifying glass. An app whose entire data model fits in a screenshot.
The world is full of products that ask for more than they need. Accounts you didn't need. Notifications you didn't ask for. Permissions you would have refused if asked directly. The right answer is not always a loud objection. Sometimes the right answer is a quieter product.
ember is a small refusal. The privacy nutrition label says "data not collected" because I did not want to. Four words. No asterisk. That is the work.
If it sounds small, that is the point.
sahil