Privacy Policy
Crosstela collects no personal data. It has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no crash reporting, and it makes no network connection of its own. What follows is the long version of that sentence.
1. What we collect: nothing
Crosstela does not collect, transmit, sell or share any personal data. The app's privacy manifest — the file Apple requires every app to ship and checks at submission — declares no collected data types and no tracking. There is no sign-in, no account, no e-mail address to give us, no analytics library, no crash reporter and no advertising SDK. The app has no server of its own to send anything to.
In App Store terms, Crosstela's privacy label is Data Not Collected.
2. What stays on your device
Everything you make in Crosstela lives in the app's own storage on your iPhone or iPad:
- Your charts — the patterns you import (PDF, Pattern Maker
.xsd, OXS) and the ones you draw or convert from a photo, stored as.crossteladocuments. - Your progress — every mark, parked needle, goal and note, kept as a journal so that statistics can be worked out from it.
- Your settings — appearance, grid style, fabric choices and similar preferences.
- Your thread stash and buy lists, if you keep them.
None of this is visible to us. Deleting the app deletes all of it from the device (see § 9 for iCloud copies). The app can also write a portable backup file (.crosstelabackup) when you ask it to; that file goes only where you choose to save or share it.
3. iCloud sync
If iCloud is turned on for Crosstela in your device settings, the app keeps your library and progress in sync between your own devices through Apple's CloudKit, in the private database of your own iCloud account. In plain words:
- the data goes from your device to Apple's iCloud servers under your Apple Account, and back to your other devices;
- it is never routed through any server operated by us, and we have no access to it — the private database is readable only by your account;
- Apple's own privacy policy and iCloud terms govern that storage;
- you can switch it off at any time in Settings ▸ [your name] ▸ iCloud ▸ Apps Using iCloud, and remove the stored data from iCloud there or in the app.
Apple does not count an app's use of the user's own private CloudKit database as data collected by the developer, and neither do we — because it isn't.
4. Photos and camera
Crosstela can turn a photograph into a cross-stitch chart. To do that it asks for access to your photo library or camera when you choose a picture. The conversion runs entirely on your device. The photograph is not uploaded anywhere, is not kept by the app beyond the chart you make from it, and is never seen by us. You can decline the permission; the rest of the app works without it.
5. Apple's required-reason APIs
Apple asks every app to declare a handful of system interfaces that could in principle be misused for fingerprinting, together with the approved reason for using them. Crosstela declares three, and uses each only as stated:
| API | Declared reason | What Crosstela actually does with it |
|---|---|---|
| User defaults | CA92.1 | Stores the app's own settings (appearance, grid style, first-launch flags). Read and written only by Crosstela, only on the device. |
| File timestamps | C617.1 | Reads the creation dates of temporary files inside the app's own container, to clean up an import that was interrupted. No timestamp is shown to anyone or sent anywhere. |
| System boot time | 35F9.1 | Measures the time elapsed between two events inside the app — how long a gesture rested, whether a touch is still being answered. Only differences are used, never a timestamp, and nothing leaves the device. |
Nothing derived from these calls is stored beyond the moment it is needed, and none of it is transmitted.
6. Third parties
Crosstela contains no third-party SDKs — no analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no attribution, no payment library. It has no in-app purchases and no subscriptions, so there is no payment processor. The only external services involved in using the app are Apple's: the App Store, which delivers it, and iCloud, if you choose to sync. Both are governed by Apple's terms and privacy policy.
7. This website
crosstela.com is a static site. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from third-party servers — its fonts, images and scripts are served from this domain. If you switch the site between light and dark appearance, that one preference is kept in your browser's local storage and goes nowhere else.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes the connection data needed to deliver a page (your IP address, the page requested, the time) and may keep short-lived logs for security and reliability under Cloudflare's privacy policy. We do not receive, read or use those logs to identify visitors.
If you e-mail us, we will have your e-mail address and what you wrote. We use them only to reply and keep them only as long as the conversation needs.
8. Children
Crosstela is not directed at children under 13 and, as set out above, collects no personal data from anyone, of any age.
9. Your rights and your data
Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to access, correct, export or erase on your behalf — every copy of your data is under your own control:
- On the device: delete individual charts in the app (they move to Recently Deleted for 30 days, then are removed), or delete the app to remove everything.
- In iCloud: turn off iCloud for Crosstela and choose to delete the data from iCloud, or manage it under Settings ▸ [your name] ▸ iCloud ▸ Manage Account Storage.
- Backups you saved:
.crosstelabackupfiles are ordinary files wherever you put them; delete them as you would any file.
If you believe we hold personal data about you despite the above — for example because you wrote to us — contact us and we will delete it.
10. Changes
If the app ever starts to collect data, or gains a component that does, this policy will be revised before that version ships, the effective date above will change, and the app's privacy manifest and App Store privacy label will be updated to match. We will not describe less than the app does.
11. Contact
Questions about privacy: [email protected].