Legal
Privacy Policy
Snapshelf is built so that the things you scan stay yours. There is no Snapshelf server, no Snapshelf account, and nothing you capture is sent to us.
Who is responsible for your data
Snapshelf is made by Ting Tze Chuen, an individual developer (sole trader), who is the data controller for the limited personal data described below. You can reach a person about anything on this page at hello@ting.rocks.
What stays on your device
Everything you actually create in Snapshelf is stored on your device and never transmitted to us:
- The photographs and PDF pages you scan or import.
- The text recognised from them, and any edits you make to it.
- Your playlists, hashtags and search history.
- Translations of your snippets.
Text recognition runs on your device using Apple's Vision framework. Translation runs on your device using Apple's Translation framework. Neither sends the contents of your scans anywhere. Speech is produced by the voices installed on your iPhone.
iCloud sync
If you use Snapshelf Pro and turn on syncing, your snippets and playlists are synchronised through your own private iCloud account using Apple's CloudKit, so that they appear on your other devices. That data sits in your personal iCloud container. We cannot see it, and neither can anyone else. It is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy, and you can delete it by deleting the app's data from your iCloud settings.
What we do collect
Two things, both narrow, and neither of them contains anything you scanned.
Crash reports
We use Firebase Crashlytics, a service provided by Google, to find out when the app crashes and why. A crash report contains technical information about the failure — the type of device, the version of iOS, the version of Snapshelf, and a stack trace showing where the code failed. It does not contain your snippets, your images or your recognised text. Firebase's handling of this data is covered by Google's Firebase privacy documentation.
Anonymous product analytics
Snapshelf uses Firebase Analytics to record twelve product-interaction events — things like "a snippet was created" or "playback was started" — so we can tell which parts of the app people actually use and where to spend effort. These events are:
- Anonymous, and not linked to your name, email or Apple Account.
- Free of any content you scanned, typed, translated or listened to.
- Not used for advertising, profiling, or tracking you across other apps or websites.
Snapshelf does not request the App Tracking Transparency permission, does not read the advertising identifier (IDFA), and contains no advertising SDKs.
Who processes it
Both of the above are provided by Google — Google LLC in the United States and Google Ireland Limited — acting as our processor. They are the only third parties that receive any data from the app. The data categories involved are a randomly generated installation identifier, crash diagnostics, and basic device and app-version information.
Why we are allowed to
Where the UK GDPR or EU GDPR applies, we rely on our legitimate interest in keeping the app working and understanding which features are used, balanced against the fact that the data is anonymous and cannot identify you.
How long it is kept
Crash reports and analytics events are retained only as long as they are useful for diagnosing problems and understanding feature use, and are then deleted on the provider's standard retention schedule. Your snippets are kept for as long as you keep them, because they are on your device.
What changed in version 2.0
We think you should know when a privacy practice improves, not just when it gets worse. Snapshelf 1.x translated your text by sending it to a Google translation endpoint over the internet, and the previous version of this policy did not disclose that. Version 2.0 removes that entirely: translation now runs on your device through Apple's Translation framework, and no part of your text is transmitted for translation any more.
What we never do
- We do not upload your scans, images or recognised text.
- We do not sell or share personal data with data brokers.
- We do not build advertising profiles or track you between apps.
- We do not use your content to train machine-learning models — ours or anybody else's.
Purchases
Subscriptions and the lifetime purchase are processed entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never see your payment card, billing address or Apple Account details. We receive only Apple's confirmation of whether a valid purchase exists, which is what unlocks Pro features.
This website
This site is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, loads no third-party scripts and embeds no fonts from anyone else's server. Our host records standard server request logs for security and reliability, as any web host does.
Children
Snapshelf is rated 4+ and is not directed at children in a way that collects their personal data. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, because in ordinary use we do not collect personal information from anybody.
Your rights
Because your content stays on your device and in your own iCloud, you already hold it directly: deleting a snippet deletes it, and deleting the app removes its local data. For the crash reports and anonymous events described above, you may ask what is held and request deletion by writing to hello@ting.rocks. Depending on where you live you may also have rights to access, correct, port or object to the processing of personal data, and to complain to your local data protection authority.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects you, we will update the date at the top of this page and, where the change is significant, note it in the app. The current version always lives at https://snapshelf.app/privacy/.
Contact
Questions about privacy:
hello@ting.rocks
Help with using the app:
hello@snapshelf.app or the
support page.
Snapshelf 2.0 · requires iOS 26 · App Store ID 1477627350