Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 2026

The short version: Folio Writer collects no personal data, contains no analytics or trackers, and has no accounts. Your manuscripts never leave your own devices except through the cloud service you choose to store them in.

What we collect

Nothing. Folio Writer has no analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash-reporting service, no advertising, and no user accounts. We do not see your documents, your file names, your usage, or your identity, because none of it is ever sent to us.

Where your work lives

Every Folio project is a folder of plain files — Markdown, Typst, and BibTeX — stored wherever you put it: your local disk, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any other Files location. Folio reads and writes those files directly. It does not upload them anywhere, and there is no Folio server involved in editing, saving, or syncing.

If you keep a project in a cloud folder, that cloud provider (Apple, Dropbox, and so on) syncs the files under their own privacy policy — exactly as they would for any other document. Folio is only a reader and writer of those files; it adds no layer of its own.

Settings on your device

Your preferences — editor font, appearance, writing-session mode, the list of recent projects — are stored on-device using the system’s standard settings storage (UserDefaults). They stay on your device and are never transmitted.

Network access

Folio makes almost no network requests. The two exceptions are strictly local in purpose:

The live preview renders in a system web view, which requires the network capability to function even for local content — but no external request is made to display your document.
Typst, when you compile a Typst document that imports a package, may fetch that package from Typst’s public registry — the same way it would on the command line.

No request Folio makes contains, or is about, the contents of your writing.

Required-reason APIs

Apple asks apps to declare certain system APIs and why they use them. Folio’s uses are entirely local:

User defaults	To store your editor and app preferences on this device.
File timestamps	To tell whether a file changed on another device (so syncing is safe), and to show you the dates of snapshots, versions, and recovered copies.

Children

Folio Writer is a productivity tool that collects no data from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be posted here with a new date. Since we collect nothing, changes will only ever clarify — never expand — what the app does.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email bbchen@me.com.