TrailCam Privacy Policy

Applies to TrailCam: Hike & Trail Tracker for iPhone, version 1.0.
Effective date: 4 September 2026.
简体中文 · Terms of Use

1. The short version

TrailCam has no account and no sign-in. There is nothing to register for and nothing to log into, so there is no profile of you anywhere. Your trips — the GPS track, and the photos, videos and voice clips you attach to points along it — are written to a database and to files inside the app's own private storage on your iPhone. We operate no server that receives them. They leave your phone only when you deliberately export or share them.

Four things do leave the phone, and section 4 lists all four with nothing held back: crash and error diagnostics, the App Store purchase exchange for the optional Pro upgrade, the map imagery drawn beneath your track, and — at the moment you finish a trip — that trip's starting coordinate, sent to a geocoding service and a weather service so the trip card can show a place name and the weather. That last one is the only time a coordinate of yours reaches an outside service, and it happens once per trip.

There is no advertising in TrailCam, no ad network, no tracking, no data broker, and no analytics beyond the crash and error reporting described in section 4.1.

2. What TrailCam records, and where it stays

Data	Why	Where it goes
Precise location while you are recording — latitude, longitude, elevation, accuracy and a timestamp for each fix	To draw and measure the track: its shape, distance, duration, pace and climb	An SQLite database file inside the app's own private storage on your iPhone. It is not transmitted, with the single exception of the trip's starting coordinate described in section 4.4.
Photos, video clips and audio clips you capture inside the app during a trip	Each one is pinned to the position on the track where you captured it, so you can replay the trip and find them where they happened — which is the whole point of the app	Files inside the app's own private storage. They are deleted when you delete the trip.
The place name and the current weather for the trip's starting point	To label the trip — "Hike · Sheshan · ☀️ 23°" — instead of leaving you with a bare timestamp	Looked up once, when you tap Finish, then stored as plain text with the trip. See section 4.4 for exactly what is sent to obtain it.
Your settings — units, language, map style, voice announcements, notification preferences and so on	To remember how you like the app	On the device.

Everything in this table lives in the app's own container on your iPhone, protected by iOS's standard app sandbox and file protection. If you back your iPhone up, your trips and their media are included in that backup — that backup is Apple's or your computer's, governed by their terms, and we cannot see inside it.

3. What TrailCam does not do

No account, no sign-in, no email address. The app never asks you to register and never collects an email address, a phone number, a name or an ID document.
No cloud backup and no cross-device sync. There is no copy of your trips on any server of ours, because there is no server of ours. A new phone gets your history only from your own device backup or from files you exported yourself.
No advertising and no tracking. The app contains no ad network and no measurement partner, does not read the advertising identifier, and does not present an App Tracking Transparency request. Its App Store privacy manifest declares tracking as false, with an empty list of tracking domains.
No analytics beyond crash and error reporting. There is no product-analytics SDK counting which buttons you press. Section 4.1 describes the one diagnostic service the app uses and exactly what it sends.
No selling or sharing of your data. We do not sell, rent or share your data with third parties. Your trips and media are not in our hands to sell.
No social features, no leaderboard, no feed. Nothing you record is visible to anybody else unless you export a file and send it yourself.

4. Every network connection the app can make

This is the complete list.

4.1 Crash and error diagnostics — Sentry

TrailCam uses Sentry to report crashes and handled errors, so that a bug that hits you can be found and fixed instead of guessed at. A report contains the crash or error itself — the stack trace, the exception message — together with basic device and operating-system information such as the iPhone model, the iOS version and the app version. Sentry also receives a sampled subset of performance timings (roughly one launch or screen transition in five) so that slow paths in the app can be identified.

What is never included: your trips, your GPS coordinates, your photos, your videos, your audio clips, your trip names, or any other content you created. The app does not attach an account identifier to these reports, because there is no account. Diagnostics are disabled in development builds and active in the version you download from the App Store.

4.2 Purchases — Apple and RevenueCat

TrailCam Pro is optional. Buying or restoring it goes through Apple's In-App Purchase system, handled by iOS: we never see your payment details — no card number, no billing address, no Apple Account.

Purchase state is managed for us by RevenueCat, which receives an anonymous identifier generated by the app on your device, plus your purchase and receipt state — which product was bought, whether the entitlement is currently active. That identifier is not linked to a name, an email address or any account, because none exists. RevenueCat receives no trip data: no track, no coordinates, no media, no statistics.

4.3 Map imagery — Apple Maps

The map drawn beneath your track is Apple's own map component, built into iOS. Displaying it sends map requests to Apple, which are handled by Apple under Apple's Privacy Policy; Apple states that its Maps service is designed not to associate map requests with an Apple Account. TrailCam sends Apple no recorded track, no media and no identifier of ours.

4.4 Place name and weather when you finish a trip

This is the one place where a coordinate of yours leaves the device, so it is described precisely. When — and only when — you tap Finish at the end of a recording, the app takes the first GPS point of that trip and makes two lookups with it:

Place name. The coordinate is passed to iOS's own reverse-geocoding service, which resolves it against Apple's servers, to get a district or city name. Handled by Apple under Apple's Privacy Policy.
Weather. The coordinate, rounded to four decimal places, is sent to Open-Meteo — a request of the form api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=…&longitude=…&current_weather=true — which returns the current temperature and weather condition there. Open-Meteo states that it does not use cookies and does not track users.

Both lookups send one point: where the trip started. Neither receives the rest of the track, the route you took, your photos, your videos, your audio, your trip name, or any identifier for you or your device beyond what any web request unavoidably reveals — such as your IP address, which any server you connect to can see. Both requests are made once per finished trip and never in the background. If either fails or you are offline, the trip saves anyway, simply without a place name or a weather label.

5. Permissions, and what happens if you refuse

Permission	What it is for	If you say no
Location, including Always / background	To record the track. Background location is what lets a recording keep going with the screen locked or while you are in another app — that is what a trip recorder is. Recording runs in the background only while a recording is in progress; when you stop, it stops. The points are stored on the device.	The app cannot record a track. This is the one permission it genuinely needs.
Camera	To take the photos and record the video clips you choose to attach to a trip.	You cannot capture photos or video inside the app. Everything else works.
Microphone	To record the voice clips you choose to attach to a trip, and the audio track of a video.	You cannot record audio clips, and videos record without sound. Everything else works.
Notifications	Local notifications only — recording status, a saved-trip summary, personal bests and reminders, all scheduled by the app on your own phone. There is no push server and no remote notification; the app does not request or hold a push token.	You get no notifications. Recording, saving and everything else is unaffected.
Speech synthesis	Optional spoken announcements of distance and pace while you move, spoken by iOS's built-in voice on the device. No audio is recorded and nothing is transmitted for this.	It is a setting inside the app; turn it off and the app stays silent.

6. The Apple Watch app and the home screen widget

TrailCam includes a companion Apple Watch app and a home screen widget. The widget reads the current trip's figures from a container shared between the app and the widget on the same device. The Watch app exchanges the live figures of a recording with your iPhone over Apple's Watch Connectivity, directly between your own two devices. Neither one sends anything over the network, and neither one has a server.

7. Children

TrailCam is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect data from them. It has no account, no chat, no user-to-user content and no advertising. If you believe a child has provided data through the app, note that everything the app holds is on the device itself and can be removed by deleting the trips or the app.

8. Your control over your data — including deletion

Because everything is on your iPhone, you do not have to ask us for anything:

Export — any trip, or your whole library, as GPX or CSV. The files are yours; where they go next is your decision.
Share — a trip, a clip or a summary image, through the iOS share sheet, to whoever you choose. Nothing is shared until you choose to share it.
Delete a trip — its points, its photos, its videos and its audio clips go with it.
Delete the app — iOS removes the app's entire storage with it.

There is no account to delete and no server-side copy of your trips to request the deletion of, because we hold none. Deleting a trip in the app, or deleting the app, is the deletion. If you would like that stated to you in writing anyway, write to the address in section 10 and we will confirm it.

9. Changes to this policy

If a future version of TrailCam collects or transmits something this page does not describe, this page is updated before that version ships and the effective date at the top changes. A material change — introducing an account, cloud sync, or any transmission of your tracks or media — will be described in the app itself, not only here.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything the app does with data:

Email: support@douhouse.com
Published by: Chaojun Dou (窦朝军)

We answer in English and Simplified Chinese.