Privacy Policy
TL;DR
md does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any data. It contains no analytics, no advertising SDKs, no trackers, and no servers operated by us — we operate no servers at all. The documents you open and edit stay where you put them — on your device or Mac, in Files / Finder, or in your own iCloud Drive. The app's only network activity is fetching images that your own documents reference by a remote URL, so they can appear in the preview and in what you print or export. Nothing about you is ever sent anywhere.
If that already answers your question, you don't need to read the rest.
What we collect
Nothing. md has no account to create, no email to
register, and no telemetry pinging home. There are no servers in
this picture. The app initiates exactly one kind of network request,
and only on your behalf: downloading an image that
your document points at by remote URL
(). See Network use below.
Network use
One and only one thing in md causes a network request: an image your own document references by a remote URL. It is fetched when that document is rendered — in the live preview, and also when you print it or export it to PDF or EPUB, because the printed page has to show the same picture the preview does.
The request goes directly to whatever host your document names. That host sees your device's IP address and a normal HTTP request, exactly as it would if you had opened the same URL in a web browser — that is unavoidable for any app that displays a remote image, and it is the only reason md touches the network. We are not party to it: no request is ever made to us, because there is nothing of ours to make it to. If your document references no remote images, md makes no network requests at all. Local images (files next to the document, or inside your book folder) are read from disk and involve no network.
There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no ads, and no tracking of any kind.
Your documents
md is a document editor. The files you open, create and save are
handled entirely by Apple's system document architecture
(DocumentGroup / FileDocument on
iOS / iPadOS, NSDocument on Mac) and are stored wherever
you choose — locally on your device or Mac, in the Files app /
Finder, or in iCloud Drive. We never see them.
If you store a document in iCloud Drive, it syncs through your Apple Account under Apple's privacy terms, not ours. We have no access to your documents under any circumstance.
Documents saved in a legacy text encoding (UTF-16 with a byte-order mark, or Windows-1251) are decoded on-device when you open them. No part of that happens off the device.
Writer mode and books
In writer mode a book is simply a folder you pick on your own storage: its subfolders are chapters, the Markdown files inside them are articles, and both are ordered by name. Creating, renaming, reordering and deleting chapters and articles are ordinary file operations in that folder — reordering writes the new order back into the file names. Compiling the book into a single PDF, or exporting it as an EPUB 3 file, happens entirely on-device and writes only to the destination you choose.
md never uploads a book, indexes it, or copies it anywhere. It only touches the folder you handed it, and only while that book is open.
The example documents — and the sample book — are bundled inside the app. Opening one downloads nothing; unpacking the sample book writes it to a folder you choose.
Private author notes. An HTML comment placed
on its own line whose text begins with note: —
for example <!-- note: fix this later --> — is
treated as your private note: it is listed for you in the app but is
kept out of the preview, out of print, and out of every PDF and EPUB
you export. This applies only to comments that start their own line;
a comment written inline in the middle of a line is left alone and
renders as part of your text, so don't rely on an inline comment to
hide anything.
Printing, PDF and EPUB
Print, Share Rendered PDF, Export as PDF and Export as EPUB all run
on-device through the system print engine and produce real
A4 pages. Pagination is line-aware, so no line of
text is sliced in half at a page boundary; a diagram taller than a
single page can still be split across pages. A line containing only
\newpage (or \pagebreak) starts a fresh
page.
Printed and exported pages are always white with dark ink, whichever theme you use in the app — the theme affects the screen, never the page. The resulting file goes only where you send it: the destination you pick, or the share sheet you choose.
Third-party code
md uses no third-party Swift packages — no dependency manager, no analytics or advertising SDK, nothing that phones home.
To render math and diagrams, the app bundles a small set of open-source JavaScript engines inside the app itself: KaTeX (math), Mermaid (diagrams), Viz.js / Graphviz and PlantUML. They run on your device, offline, inside the web view that draws the preview and the printed page. They ship in the app bundle: nothing is downloaded at runtime, no CDN is contacted, and your document's contents are never sent to any service to be rendered.
What the app stores on your device
md keeps a few small settings in the standard system preferences store. All of it is local, none of it is personal, and none of it is transmitted anywhere:
| Stored | Why |
|---|---|
| Your view layout (Edit / Split / Preview) | So the app opens the way you left it. |
| A pointer to the book folder you picked — a security-scoped bookmark | So writer mode can reopen your book without asking you to find the folder again. It identifies a location you chose; closing the book discards it. |
| Mac only: which article was open last | So the book reopens on the article you were writing. |
| Mac only: whether articles open in separate windows | A window-behaviour preference. |
Permissions
md asks for no camera, microphone, contacts, location, or photo-library access. It does need the network — but only for the remote images described above. File access is mediated entirely by the system:
| Platform | What the app is allowed to do |
|---|---|
| iPhone / iPad | Files and book folders are chosen through the system document browser / folder picker. The app is sandboxed and only ever sees the documents and the book folder you explicitly open or create. |
| Mac |
The app runs in the macOS App Sandbox and holds exactly three entitlements:
com.apple.security.files.user-selected.read-write — read and write the documents and book folder you pick, and nothing else;
com.apple.security.print — without it the system print panel's Print button stays disabled;
com.apple.security.network.client — required for the preview's web view to launch inside the sandbox at all, and used for the one real network request md makes: fetching a remote image your document references.
|
Data the App Store privacy label declares
md's App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected" across the board — no data of any category is collected, linked to you, or used for tracking:
| Data type | Collected? |
|---|---|
| Contact info, identifiers, usage data, diagnostics, location, content you create | No — none of it leaves your device except where you place a file in your own iCloud Drive, or where your document asks for an image from a host you named. |
| Analytics / advertising / tracking | None. The app contains no such SDKs and performs no tracking. |
Children's privacy
Because md collects no data at all, it collects no data from children.
Changes to this policy
Any change is committed to this file in the app's public source repository, so the history is auditable.
Contact
Questions: nettrash@nettrash.me. Source: github.com/nettrash/md (iOS / iPadOS) and github.com/nettrash/md.macOS (macOS).