Privacy Policy

The short version: this app doesn’t track you. There’s no account, no advertising, and nothing about you is sold or handed on. It counts how many people open it, with a random ID that identifies nobody, and that is the whole of what it knows.

Who’s asking

Elseweather is a one-person project, not a company. Nobody here is in the business of knowing things about you, there’s no sign-in, no profile, no newsletter, and no third-party analytics or advertising code anywhere in the app. Nothing is watching which buttons you press.

What gets counted

Every request the app makes carries a random ID it made up on your device, and the one it sends when it opens carries the app version and your iOS build as well. Only that opening request is written down, along with anything to do with a subscription: it’s how I know roughly how many people use the app and whether a release has broken it, and the ID is what separates one person opening the app ten times from ten people opening it once. It’s a random string tied to nothing else about you — no name, no email, no account — and there’s nothing behind it to look up.

Where you are

The card at the top of the map shows the weather where you are, so the app asks iOS for your location once it opens. If you add the Here widget, it asks for the same thing on its own while the app is closed, as often as iOS lets it — a few times an hour at most. A widget that only knew where you were the last time you opened the app would be showing you the weather somewhere you no longer are. Your coordinates go to the app’s own server, which fetches that one forecast and caches it for a few minutes and then forgets it. That request carries the random ID above, like every other one, but nothing about it is written down: there’s no record of where you’ve been, because none is kept. Say no to the permission and everything else works exactly as it did; the card simply says it can’t find you, and so does the widget.

What the map asks for

As you pan, the app sends its server a list of the cities in view and gets their forecasts back. The server caches the answers, which is the reason it’s there, so the next person looking at Lisbon has a faster response. Nothing about which places you asked for is stored — the cache is keyed by the place, not by you, and it’s the same entry whoever looks at it next.

If you pay for Plus

Apple handles the purchase. Your name, email and card details go to Apple and never reach this app. To recognise the subscription afterwards, Apple is given that same random ID — it lives in the iOS keychain, which is what makes it survive reinstalling the app, so a reinstall doesn’t lose the subscription you’ve already paid for. Forecast requests then carry a short token saying how many days you’re entitled to, not who you are.

What stays on your device

Forecasts are cached for half an hour so panning back doesn’t refetch them, your settings are stored the ordinary iOS way, and the list of cities ships inside the app itself, searching it never leaves your phone. The widget keeps the last reading it took, in a spot the app and the widget can both reach, so it has something honest to show when it can’t get a fix or can’t reach the network — it says how old that reading is rather than passing it off as now. Deleting the app takes the cache, the settings and that reading with it. The random ID may outlive it in the keychain, which is exactly what lets a reinstall find your subscription again.

Last updated 1 September 2026.