1. Who this policy is for
This policy covers the CatchCrop iPhone app. Our website is covered separately by the Mirentha privacy policy.
CatchCrop is published by Mirentha Ltd (“Mirentha”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in England and Wales (company number 17207914), registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. For anything in this policy, contact privacy@mirentha.com.
2. What CatchCrop collects
Nothing. CatchCrop does not ask you to create an account, does not ask for your name, email address or phone number, and contains no analytics, attribution, advertising or crash-reporting SDK of any kind. No data reaches us from the app, so we process no personal data in connection with your use of it.
The app's one piece of third-party code is three.js (release r128), an open-source library used under the MIT License to draw the 3D garden. It is a file bundled inside the app rather than a service, and it runs entirely on your iPhone, loading nothing from the internet.
3. What the app stores, and where
Everything you enter is held in the app's own private storage on your iPhone:
Your site. A garden name, your last spring frost date and your first autumn frost date, whether you prefer centimetres or feet and inches, and, if you set them in the garden's North and sun panel, which way your garden faces and how far north or south it is, as a whole number of degrees of latitude.
Your garden plan. Where each bed sits in the 3D garden, and anything else you place there, such as a shed, greenhouse, tree or fence, with its size and position.
Your beds and plantings. Bed names, kinds and sizes and how much sun you said each gets, which squares each planting occupies, the crop and variety, whether it starts indoors or is sown direct, the sowing, planting-out and harvest dates the app worked out from your frost dates (or a sowing date you chose), and the days you picked and cleared each one.
Your jobs. The weekly list, and which of them you have ticked off.
Your journal. Dated notes, and any photographs you attach. Notes are held in the app's database. Photographs are stored as ordinary image files on the device, re-encoded to at most 2048 pixels on the longest edge when you add them.
A few settings. Kept in the app's own settings on this iPhone, and not synced: whether you have turned reminders on, whether you have closed the garden's Make it look like your garden prompt, and, so that photographs no journal entry uses any more can be tidied away, their file names and the day each was first found unused. Such a file is deleted once it has gone unused for 30 days.
A count for the rating prompt. How many times you have opened the app and added a planting (one per launch, however many you add), and the version of the app that last asked Apple to show its rating prompt, so that CatchCrop asks no more than once a version and never before the third such launch. It is a number and a version number with nothing about your garden in it, and it stays on this iPhone and is not synced.
Deleting the app removes all of it from that device. Delete this garden and start again, on the Site tab, keeps the app and removes your garden and journal, here and, where sync is on, from iCloud and your other devices. It deletes this iPhone's journal photographs at once. Photographs added on another device are removed by CatchCrop there a month or more after nothing uses them, or when you delete the app from that device.
4. iCloud sync
The Site tab shows whether sync is on. Open CatchCrop, go to Site, and look at the iCloud row under Sync. There is no switch to throw, because sync is not a setting inside CatchCrop: it follows the Apple Account signed in on your device. The row reads On when you are signed in to iCloud, and your garden syncs through it. It reads Not signed in, Unavailable (iCloud is restricted on this device) or Paused (iCloud needs attention in Settings) when it can't, Waiting for iCloud when iCloud couldn't be asked just now, and Checking… for a moment while it asks. It shows what iCloud says about your account, so it can't tell you if a sync has failed, for example because your iCloud storage is full.
When it says Not signed in, Unavailable or Paused, nothing of your garden goes to iCloud. It exists on that device and nowhere else, and starts syncing once iCloud is available again.
When it says On, your garden is mirrored through the private database of your own iCloud account, which is what lets it appear on your other devices. Sync is between you and Apple; we are not in it. That data is held by Apple under Apple's privacy policy and Apple's iCloud terms. Mirentha has no access to it, cannot read it, and cannot recover it for you. A change made on another device reaches this one through a silent notification that Apple's push service delivers for iCloud; you never see it, and it doesn't come from us.
Journal photographs are excluded from sync either way. Only the text of an entry is ever mirrored; the pictures are not. Photographs are large, the iCloud storage they would fill is yours rather than ours to spend, and quietly filling it would be a poor trade for a feature nobody asked for.
Photographs being excluded from sync is not the same as their never being copied anywhere. They are ordinary files in the app's own storage, so if you use iCloud Backup for your iPhone they are included in that backup, exactly as any other app's files are, and will be restored onto a replacement phone. That is Apple's backup of your device rather than anything CatchCrop does, and it is governed by your own iCloud settings.
5. What the app does not do
No location. CatchCrop does not use location services and never asks for your location. Your frost dates are the two dates you type in, optionally started from one of a short list of named reference climates that ships inside the app. Nothing looks up your postcode.
The one guess the app makes is for the sun in the 3D garden. Until you give your garden's latitude in North and sun, it uses a rough one: the typical latitude of the Region set in your iPhone's Settings, from a table inside the app, or, if your Region isn't in the table or is on the other side of the equator from your frost dates, a mild temperate one on your frost dates' side of the equator. The guess is worked out on the phone whenever the garden is drawn, and isn't stored or sent anywhere unless you save North and sun: the latitude shown there starts at the guess, and saving the panel makes it your garden's, kept with the rest of your site (section 3), and synced with it where sync is on (section 4).
No weather service. The crop library and the reference climates are bundled with the app. CatchCrop fetches no forecast, no frost data and no seasonal advice from anywhere.
No network of ours. The app makes no requests to any Mirentha server, because there isn't one. The 3D garden is drawn by code bundled in the app and loads nothing from the internet. The only connections it can open are to Apple: the App Store, for the one thing the app sells, and — where sync is on — iCloud.
6. Permissions the app asks for
Notifications. Requested only at the moment you switch on Remind me on the day in Site settings — never at launch, and never if you leave the setting alone. Reminders are scheduled locally on your device for 08:00 on the day a job is due. There is no push server of ours, nothing is sent from us, and nothing goes out for a job you have already ticked off. You can turn them off again in the app or in Settings › CatchCrop.
Camera. Requested the first time you choose Take a photo in a journal entry, with the message “CatchCrop uses the camera to take photos for your garden journal.” It is used only for that photo, which is stored like any other journal photograph (section 3). You can decline and add pictures from your library instead, and change your mind at any time in Settings › CatchCrop.
Photographs. CatchCrop uses the system photo picker, which runs outside the app. The app is handed only the specific pictures you choose and never gets access to your photo library, which is why iOS does not ask you for permission.
CatchCrop asks for nothing else. It does not request your location, microphone, contacts, calendars, health data or motion data, and it contains no tracking permission request because it does not track.
7. Paying for CatchCrop
CatchCrop plans two beds for nothing; a subscription lifts that limit. Apple sells the subscription and takes the payment, and records the purchase against your Apple Account rather than against your phone. Apple's StoreKit tells the app which subscription you have, if any, and whether it is active, and the app stores none of it. We never see your payment details, your billing address or your Apple Account.
Apple also processes your download as the operator of the App Store, and, if you have opted in to sharing analytics with developers, may give us statistics such as crash counts and device types. That data comes from Apple, which states that it collects it anonymously, and is governed by Apple's privacy policy.
8. Children
CatchCrop is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, including children.
9. Your rights
UK GDPR gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection over personal data held about you. Because CatchCrop sends us no personal data, we hold none in connection with the app, and there is nothing for you to access or erase with us. Deleting the app removes everything it held on that device. Anything of yours in iCloud — whether from sync or from an iPhone backup — is in your own account and managed by you, in Settings › your name › iCloud, where you can also delete it.
If you write to us about CatchCrop, with the support form or by email, we hold your message and email address in order to reply, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering support enquiries; that is covered by the Mirentha privacy policy. You can ask us to delete the correspondence at any time at privacy@mirentha.com, and you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
10. Changes to this policy
If a future version of CatchCrop ever collects anything, this policy will be updated before that version ships and the change will be described here rather than buried in a version number. The date at the top always reflects the current text.
11. Contact
Mirentha Ltd, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Privacy questions: privacy@mirentha.com. For help using the app, write to us with the form on the CatchCrop support page.