The short version
- We do not collect, store or transmit any personal information about you.
- There is no account, no sign-in and no profile.
- There is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK and no crash reporter in the app.
- Your runs — routes, times, heart rate, everything — are written to your phone and stay there.
- We cannot see your runs. Not in aggregate, not anonymised, not at all.
- Delete the app and your run history goes with it. There is no copy anywhere else.
What the app sends over the internet
Almost nothing, and it is worth being precise about the exception.
Runt ships with every voice pack already inside it, so on a normal run the app makes no network requests at all. It does make one kind of request, in two places: when you open Settings, or reach the voice pack step while setting up your plan, the app asks our server for the current list of voice packs, so that packs added after you installed the app can appear.
That request is a plain fetch of a public list. It carries no account, no device identifier, no advertising identifier and no information about you or your running. Our server has no request logging: it reads the pack list and returns it. As with any connection to any server on the internet, your device's IP address is necessarily involved in delivering the response, and our hosting provider may hold short-lived operational records of that; we do not collect it, store it, or have any way to connect it to a person.
If you ever choose to download a voice pack that is not already installed, the file is fetched from our storage over a temporary link. That is the entire extent of the app's networking. There is no other request, on any screen, at any time.
Permissions, one at a time
iOS asks your permission for each of these, and Runt asks for each one only at the moment it is actually needed. Every one of them can be refused or later withdrawn in iOS Settings, and the app keeps working with less.
- Location
- Used to measure your distance, your pace and your route while you are running — including with the screen locked and the phone in your pocket, which is why Runt asks for background location. The positions are used to draw your route and calculate your splits, they are saved with the run on your phone, and they are never transmitted. Refuse it and a run is still timed; it just is not measured.
- Bluetooth
- Used to connect to a heart-rate monitor — a chest strap, or a watch or band broadcasting over the standard Bluetooth heart-rate profile. Runt reads your heart rate directly from the device. It does not scan for anything else, does not identify other devices around you, and does not send the readings anywhere.
- Motion & fitness
- Used to read the barometer, which is how the app works out how much you climbed. Nothing else.
- Health
- Write only, and only if you say yes. When a run finishes, Runt can save it to Apple Health as a workout — distance, duration, your route and your heart-rate samples — so it counts towards everything else you track. Runt never reads anything from Health; it has no permission to. You are asked the first time a run finishes, and there is a switch in Settings to turn it off. Health data lives in Apple's store on your device under Apple's protection, not ours.
- Photos
- For the end-of-run share card you can add one of your own photos. Runt uses Apple's photo picker, which runs outside the app: the app never gets access to your photo library, only to the single image you hand it. The card is composed on your phone and handed to the standard iOS share sheet, where what happens next is between you and whichever app you send it to. Nothing is uploaded to us at any point.
What is stored on your phone
Your plan and your progress through it, your finished runs with their routes, splits and heart-rate samples, your settings, and any voice packs you have downloaded. All of it is in the app's own storage on your device, covered by iOS's normal app protections and by your device passcode. If your phone backs up to iCloud or a computer, it is included in that backup, encrypted the same way as everything else; that backup is Apple's, not ours, and we have no access to it.
Deleting the app deletes all of it. We cannot restore it, because we never had it.
This website
youbettarun.com sets no cookies, runs no analytics and embeds nothing from anyone else. The fonts and images are served from this domain. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to. Our host keeps ordinary web-server logs for reliability and abuse handling, which is the standard behaviour of any website you have ever visited.
Children
Runt is rated for teenagers and older, mostly because it swears. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone of any age — there is no mechanism in the app that could.
Your rights
Data-protection law gives you rights to access, correct, export and erase personal data an organisation holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to hand over or delete. Everything the app knows about you is already in your hands, on your phone, and you can erase it by deleting the app. If you would like this confirmed in writing, ask and we will confirm it.
If we ever charge for something
Runt version 1 is free and complete, and nothing that is free today will be taken away later. If a paid tier is added in future it will need things this version does not have — a sign-in, and for some features a request to a server that has to carry what you asked for. That would be a different arrangement, so it would come with an updated version of this page, published before those features ship, and it would apply only from then on. It would not apply retroactively to anything, and it would not change what happens to data already on your phone.
Changes to this policy
If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes will be described here rather than quietly edited in.
Who we are, and how to complain
Runt is made in the United Kingdom by Alan Butterworth. For anything about this policy, or about privacy in general, write to runt@youbettarun.com and you will get a real reply. If you are in the UK and you are not satisfied with that reply, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.