Privacy

Last updated 14 September 2026 · Brainwave for Mac and iPhone, private beta

Brainwave is a note app that holds private thoughts, so the short version is this: your notes live on your own devices and in your own iCloud account, and nobody else can read them. What does leave your Mac or iPhone is a technical health report about the app itself, and it never contains anything you wrote or recorded.

Your notes

• Notes, recordings and transcripts are stored on your device.
• They sync between your own devices through your iCloud account, in Apple's private database. There is no Brainwave account, no login, and no server of ours in the middle. We cannot see any of it.
• Transcription runs on your device. Your voice is not sent anywhere to be transcribed.
• Deleting a note deletes it from your devices and your iCloud.

Diagnostics during the beta

Brainwave is in a private beta, and the most common way a beta breaks is silently. So the app sends a small technical report about its own health: once a week, and again when it notices something wrong (a sync that has stopped making progress, notes that haven't reached iCloud, or a launch that followed a crash). On iPhone, only beta builds installed through TestFlight send reports. A version installed from the App Store sends none.

A report contains:

• App version and build, the macOS or iOS version, and the device model identifier (a code such as "iPhone16,1", not the name you gave your device).
• How many notes, recordings, folders and to-dos exist, and how much space they take. Counts and byte sizes only.
• The dates of your oldest and newest note, so we can see whether a sync arrived partly.
• iCloud sync activity: what the sync engine did, when, and any error codes it returned.
• Whether your device can reach iCloud, and how many notes iCloud holds compared with that device.
• On iPhone, a few settings that can pause iCloud sync: free storage space, Low Power Mode, Background App Refresh, and whether the app can receive iCloud's change notifications.
• A random identifier for the install, your iCloud account identifier (an opaque code Apple provides, not your email address), and your name if you typed one into Settings.

Reports go to private storage that only we can read. We use them to fix the app, and for nothing else. They are not sold, shared or used for advertising, and they are deleted once they are no longer useful.

Turning it off. On the Mac, open Settings, then Account, and switch off "Send diagnostics". On iPhone, tap your profile picture to open Settings, and switch off "Send diagnostics" under Diagnostics. The app works exactly the same with it off. The same places also let you save a report as a file and send it yourself.

Crash reports

If the Mac app crashes or freezes, a crash report is sent through Sentry, whose servers for this app are in the European Union. It contains the technical state of the app at the moment it failed: the code that was running, app version, and macOS version. It does not contain your notes.

Update checks

The Mac app asks our update feed once a day whether a newer version exists. We record each check so we know how many Macs are running Brainwave and which versions are still out there. What is stored is the app version, the macOS version, the country the request came from, and a scrambled code made from your network address (the address itself is never written down, and the code cannot be turned back into it). No note data is involved, and this is not linked to your name or your iCloud account.

Children

Brainwave is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If what we collect changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves.

Asking us anything

The beta is invite only, so you already have a direct line to Ryan. Ask him for a copy of anything held about your install, or to have it deleted, and it will be done.