Privacy Policy

Last updated: 10 September 2026

DeskState is made by Abraham Rubio, an independent developer, who is the data controller for everything described here. This policy covers the DeskState iOS app and this website. It is written to be read, not to be survived — if something below is unclear, write to privacy@deskstate.com and it will be fixed.

The short version

  • Your files, notes, tasks and everything you browse stay on your device. They are never sent anywhere.
  • The app does send anonymous product analytics — which screens and features get used — tied to a random ID, never to your name or Apple Account. You can turn this off in Settings → Data.
  • Subscriptions are handled by Apple and RevenueCat. That part cannot be switched off, because it is how a subscription works.
  • Nothing is sold, traded or used for advertising, and there are no advertising trackers in the app or on this site.

1. What stays on your device

The app is built so that the things you actually make never leave the phone. All of this is stored locally and is not accessible to the developer:

2. What leaves your device

Product analytics — Amplitude

To understand which parts of DeskState people use, the app sends usage events to Amplitude, a product analytics service in the United States. Each event carries a random identifier generated on first launch and kept in the device Keychain, plus the identifier for vendors (IDFV) that Amplitude's SDK adds automatically. Neither is your name, your email or your Apple Account, and neither can be used to contact you.

The events say things like: the app was opened, a display was connected, the 24-hour Pro Preview started or ended, a paywall was shown, a purchase was made, a built-in tool was opened, a free session ran out. Amplitude also receives your device model, iOS version, app version, language, and your IP address, from which it derives an approximate location — country, region and city, never a street or a coordinate. The IP address reaches Amplitude and is held under its own retention policy; DeskState never stores it.

One case deserves naming explicitly: when a streaming site refuses to play on an external display, the app records that a DRM block happened and the hostname of the site involved (for example netflix.com) so the problem can be diagnosed. No other browsing is recorded — no URLs, no page contents, no search terms.

You can switch all of this off. Open Settings in the app, scroll to Data, and turn off "Share Usage Analytics". Nothing further is sent from that moment on.

Subscriptions — Apple and RevenueCat

Payment happens entirely inside Apple's App Store; the app never sees your Apple Account, your card or your billing address. To know whether you have DeskState Pro, subscription receipts are validated by RevenueCat, a subscription service in the United States. RevenueCat receives the App Store transaction, the product bought and an anonymous customer identifier, which is linked to the same random ID the analytics use. This cannot be turned off — without it the app cannot tell whether you have paid.

Weather — Open-Meteo

The desktop menu bar can show local weather. If, and only if, you grant location access when iOS asks, the app requests your location at kilometre accuracy, rounds the coordinates further, and sends them to Open-Meteo in Germany to get the forecast. No identifier of yours is attached to that request. Decline the permission, or turn location off for DeskState in iOS Settings, and no request is ever made.

Feedback you send

If you use Settings → Send Feedback, the message you write is sent to a server run for DeskState on Hostinger and forwarded by email to the support mailbox. It carries your device model, iOS version and app version, and your email address if you choose to give one — leave it blank and there is no way to reply, which is fine if you do not want one. To stop abuse, the server keeps a one-way hash of the sending IP address for a short window; the address itself is never written down.

iCloud sync — your own account

Pro subscribers can turn on iCloud sync, which copies your notes and a small set of desktop settings between your own devices through your own iCloud account, using Apple's CloudKit. The data sits in your private iCloud database. The developer cannot read it, and turning the switch off stops the sync.

3. The built-in web browser

Web panels are a real browser. When you sign in to Gmail, Notion or anything else in one, you are dealing with that site directly and under its privacy policy — it can set cookies and see your IP address exactly as it would in Safari. DeskState adds no tracking of its own to those pages and cannot read what you do inside them. Session data is kept in the app's storage and is erased by Reset All Data in Settings, or by deleting the app.

4. This website

deskstate.com sets no cookies and carries no advertising or third-party tracking scripts. Fonts are served from this site itself, so no request goes to a font provider.

To know roughly how many people visit and whether they go on to the App Store, the site counts page views with its own first-party measurement. It records the page, the language, the country your IP resolves to, whether the device is a phone or a desktop, and the site that linked you here. Your IP address and browser user-agent are never stored: they are combined with a secret that is regenerated every day to produce a short one-way hash, which makes it possible to avoid counting one person twice within a day and impossible to follow anyone across days. Nothing is written to or read from your device, and the data is not shared with anyone. If your browser sends "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control, nothing is counted at all.

Links to the App Store carry an Apple campaign tag so that App Store Connect can report, in aggregate and never per person, which part of the page brought a download.

5. How long any of this is kept

6. Legal basis and your rights

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, the legal basis is legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR) for product analytics and website measurement — keeping a small app working and knowing which features earn their place — balanced by the fact that the data is pseudonymous, is never used to advertise to you, and can be switched off in the app. Handling a subscription is contractual necessity (Article 6(1)(b)), and answering feedback you send is legitimate interest. Location for weather rests on your consent, given through the iOS permission prompt and withdrawable in iOS Settings.

Amplitude and RevenueCat are in the United States; transfers rely on their Standard Contractual Clauses and, where applicable, their certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

You have the right to ask what is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to processing based on legitimate interest, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to complain to your national data protection authority. Write to privacy@deskstate.com. Because the app deliberately holds no name or email, finding your records means quoting the identifier the app shows in Settings → Send Feedback; requests are answered within 30 days.

7. Children

DeskState is not directed at children and is not designed for them. Nothing is knowingly collected from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent something through the feedback form, write to privacy@deskstate.com and it will be deleted.

8. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything that materially alters what is collected will be called out in the app's release notes rather than left for you to spot here.

9. Contact

Abraham Rubio, independent developer — privacy@deskstate.com. For anything that is not about privacy, support@deskstate.com reaches the same person faster.