Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 1, 2026

Dropwatch is built to be private. It has no user accounts and no servers of its own. This policy explains, plainly, what the app does and does not do with your information.

The short version

• No account, no sign-upYou never give us an email, name, or password.
• No tracking, no SDKsWe use no analytics or advertising SDKs, and nothing about you is tracked across apps or websites. The app makes lookup requests to Apple and MusicBrainz, and increments anonymous counters that tell us which onboarding step people reach — see Data we collect and Network requests.
• Your data stays on your deviceTracked artists, seen releases, and settings are stored locally on your iPhone.

What the app accesses

With your permission, Dropwatch reads your Apple Music library (the artists and albums in your library) using Apple's MusicKit framework. This happens on your device, so the app can find which artists you follow and surface their recent releases. You can revoke this access at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Media & Apple Music.

Using Dropwatch requires an active Apple Music subscription, which is governed by Apple's privacy policy.

Network requests

Dropwatch talks to two outside services. Neither one receives your name, email, Apple ID, device identifier, or any advertising identifier — the app has none of those to send. Dropwatch does not send your data to any servers operated by us, because we operate none.

Apple

To look up release dates, artwork, and album details, Dropwatch sends song and artist names to Apple's services (Apple Music / MusicKit and the public iTunes Search API at itunes.apple.com). These requests are necessary to show you accurate release information.

MusicBrainz

Dropwatch can also show you what a record label has released. Apple's catalog does not always list a label's releases, so when it comes up empty the app falls back to MusicBrainz (musicbrainz.org), a free and open music encyclopedia run by the MetaBrainz Foundation.

What is sent is the name of a record label — for example Ninja Tune — or MusicBrainz's own internal ID for that label, together with a year to search from. Those label names are read from the copyright field of albums already in your Apple Music library, so they are derived from your library, and we want to be clear about that rather than call them anonymous.

What is not sent: your name, email, Apple ID, device or advertising identifier, IP-linked account of any kind, your list of tracked artists, or your listening history. The requests carry no API key and no login — Dropwatch is not identified to MusicBrainz as you, only as the app (a generic app version string, which MusicBrainz's terms require). MusicBrainz receives no way to tell one Dropwatch user from another.

As with any web request, MusicBrainz's own servers will see the IP address the request comes from. Their handling of that is governed by the MetaBrainz privacy policy.

Data we collect

No personal data. Dropwatch has no account system, no user identifier, and no ability to identify you. The lookup requests described above go directly from your device to Apple and MusicBrainz; nothing about your library is routed through, logged by, or retained by us.

There is one exception, and we would rather describe it exactly than hide it behind the word "none". Dropwatch increments anonymous counters that tell us how far people get through setup — for example, how many people finished onboarding, and how many were stopped because Apple Music access was turned off. This exists because a first-run dead end produces no crash report and no complaint: without it, someone who gets stuck on the first screen is invisible to us, and the bug stays unfixed.

What is actually sent is a single request naming one counter, such as step_onboarded. There is no request body, no identifier, no device id, no timestamp, and no content from your library — the list of counter names is fixed in the app, so nothing else can be sent. The counters are plain totals: we can see that some number of people reached a step, and we can never tell which people, or link any two events to the same person. They are hosted by Abacus, a free counter service that stores nothing but an integer per counter. As with any web request, its servers see the originating IP address.

Children's privacy

Dropwatch does not collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13. The anonymous setup counters described above carry no personal information and cannot be tied to a person of any age.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of this page.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email support@dropwatchapp.com.