Privacy

Privacy Policy

Last updated 12 November 2026. Applies to the HomeCubbie app on iPhone, iPad and Android, to the HomeCubbie household server, and to this website.

The short version. HomeCubbie collects nothing about you. There is no account, no server of ours, and no analytics of any kind. Your records stay on your phone, except where you send a copy yourself. If your household chooses to share, they travel — encrypted on the phone first — only to a server your household runs itself. Nobody at HomeCubbie can see or read them.

• What is stored
• If your household shares
• Never collected
• Permissions
• Reading documents
• Backups
• Deleting
• This website

What HomeCubbie stores, and where

The app keeps a database file and a documents folder in its own private storage on your device. That is where your Property, Places, Things, Tasks, Policies, Events, Notes, People and Accounts live, along with any photos and files you attach.

The developer cannot read that storage, and has no way to: nothing is sent to us, and the app has no way to reach us.

If your household shares

Sharing is off unless your household turns it on. Just this phone is the default, and in that mode the app makes no network requests at all.

A household that shares runs the HomeCubbie server on a computer of its own, at home. Every phone that joins sends its changes there, and picks up everyone else's.

What goes to the server, and what it can see

• Everything is encrypted on the phone before it leaves: every change, every copy of the house, every document and photo, and each phone's name. The key that opens it stays on your household's phones; the server never has it. The server stores the house without being able to read it.
• What the server and your home network can see is which phones connect, when, and how much they send.
• Phones reach the server over plain http on your home network. Because everything inside is already encrypted, and every request and reply is proven with a key neither side sends, this shows someone on your Wi-Fi the traffic, not the house.
• The only identifier sharing uses is a random one each phone makes for itself. It goes to your household's server and nowhere else.

Where the server is, and who runs it

• The server runs on your household's computer. HomeCubbie does not host it, cannot reach it, and is never told it exists.
• It answers only this computer and your home network, and closes any connection from elsewhere.
• It contacts nobody: no update check, no telemetry, no time server.

One thing to know about browsers

If your household opens the house in a web browser, the server also serves the HomeCubbie web app to that browser. Someone who took over the server's computer could change that page, and read the house the next time the browser opened it. Phones are not exposed to this, because their app comes from the App Store or Google Play. Keep the server's computer as safe as you keep your phones.

Leaving, and lost phones

Any phone in the household can remove another — a lost one, say — and the key changes in the same step, so the removed phone can read nothing sent after. A phone's keys are kept in the device's secure storage, on that device only, and never in a backup.

What is never collected

• Personal information. No name, email address, phone number or postal address is asked for or sent to us.
• Usage and analytics data. No screen views, no session counts, no feature tracking, no crash reports.
• Identifiers. No advertising identifier, no device identifier, no cookies in the app.
• Where you are. The app never asks where your phone is.
• Contacts, calendars, health data, or your photo library. None of these are asked for.

Because nothing is collected, there is nothing to sell, share or hand to a third party, and no data broker relationship exists.

Permissions the app asks for, and why

Camera

Only if you choose to photograph a document, a bill or a serial plate. The photo is kept in the app's private storage; in a shared house it also goes, encrypted, to your household's other phones. The photo library itself is never opened.

Face ID, Touch ID, or the phone's fingerprint or face unlock

Only if you turn on the app lock. HomeCubbie asks the operating system whether the person holding the phone is the one enrolled on it, and gets a yes or a no. The app never sees, receives or stores biometric data — it never leaves the secure hardware on your device.

Notifications

Only if you allow reminders. These are local notifications scheduled on your device. HomeCubbie sends no push notifications and cannot: there is no push server, and the remote-push capability is removed from the app.

Local network (iPhone and iPad)

Only if your household shares. iOS asks whether HomeCubbie may use the local network the first time it connects to your household's server. On Android, network access is granted without a prompt; the app uses it only to reach your household's server.

Reading bills, serial plates and documents

When HomeCubbie reads a bill, a serial plate or a document, it does so on the phone, with the operating system's own text recognition on iPhone and a text-recognition engine built into the app on Android. On iPhones that have Apple's on-device model, Search can answer a question from your records with that model, on the phone. Nothing is sent anywhere to be read, and no third-party service is involved.

Backups

HomeCubbie can write a backup file of everything you have entered. Out of the box it does so weekly and keeps the file on the phone, and you can save a copy wherever you choose — another app, a file on the device, a cloud drive of your own.

On Android you can also pick a backup folder once. From then on, every automatic backup is copied into that folder as well, together with a readable copy of the house. If another app syncs that folder — a cloud drive, say — the files go wherever that app sends them. You can stop it in Settings at any time.

The readable copy is the house as plain pages in a zip, which you can open without HomeCubbie. You can export one whenever you like. It leaves out anything marked "Hidden until tapped"; the backup keeps it.

Once a file goes somewhere, the privacy policy of wherever it went applies to it, so choose a place you trust. Neither file is encrypted. Anyone who opens a backup can read what is in it, including alarm codes and policy numbers.

Automatic operating-system backups are switched off

By default, mobile operating systems copy an app's private storage into the user's cloud backup. HomeCubbie opts out on both platforms, so your records are not swept into a cloud account without your asking. On iOS the app's data is also marked for the strongest file-protection class available, so it is encrypted and unreadable whenever the device is locked.

Deleting your data

Delete an entry inside the app, or delete the app to remove everything on that phone at once. If your household shares, the house stays on the other phones and on your server until your household deletes it there — the server's data is a folder on your own computer. Backups and readable copies you saved somewhere else stay there until you delete them. There is no copy anywhere else to ask us to delete, and no account to close.

Children

HomeCubbie is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, of any age.

This website

homecubbie.com is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no third-party fonts, scripts or embeds — the one typeface it uses is served from this site itself. The only thing it stores in your browser is your choice of light or dark, if you make one.

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. Like any web host, GitHub receives your IP address and browser details in the ordinary course of serving a page to you, which GitHub's privacy statement covers. Nothing further is recorded, and no visitor information reaches the developer.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. A change to what the app sends would first need the app itself to change, and its network rule is enforced by the app's own automated tests: exactly one part of the app may reach a network, it talks only to your household's server, and the build fails if anything else is added.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything else: support@homecubbie.com.