Privacy Policy

Last updated: 25 August 2026

Sapida is an iOS app for logging food and digestive symptoms and spotting the connections between them. It was built to keep your data on your phone. This policy explains, in plain English, what data the app handles, what (little) leaves your device, and why.

Who we are

Sapida is developed by Iain McAndrew, a sole independent developer based in the United Kingdom, who is the data controller for any personal data processed in connection with the app.

Contact: hello@sapida.app

This policy is written to comply with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

What the app stores — on your device

Everything you enter in Sapida is stored locally on your iPhone using Apple's SwiftData database:

• Food entries (what you ate, when, portions, nutrition values and ingredients)
• Symptom entries (Bristol scale, severity scores, custom symptoms and any notes)
• Custom foods, meal templates and favourites
• Daily health summaries imported from Apple Health, if you've connected it (see below)
• Cached food searches, barcode lookups and nutrition data (so repeat lookups work offline)
• Your settings and preferences, including your nutrition targets

We cannot see any of this. There is no Sapida server, and the app does not sync your data to iCloud or any other cloud service.

Apple Health (HealthKit)

Sapida's use of Apple Health has two separate halves, each with its own permission: reading context about your day, and (optionally) writing your logged nutrition back. Neither is required to use the app, and all HealthKit processing happens on your device.

What Sapida reads

With your permission, Sapida reads a deliberately narrow set of types — exactly the ones it actually uses, and nothing more:

• Sleep (sleep analysis: duration, deep and REM time)
• Activity: step count, walking & running distance, active energy, exercise time
• Resting heart rate
• Workouts

This is shown alongside your food and symptom logs so you can tell a bad night from a bad meal. Earlier versions of the app also asked for general heart rate, water intake and mindfulness minutes; those were removed, because nothing in the app read them.

A daily summary of these values is imported into the app's own on-device database when you open the app (and when you pull to refresh or tap Sync Health Data), so charts work without querying Health each time. Because it is stored in the app, it is included in exports you create and is deleted by Clear All Data.

What Sapida writes (off by default)

If you turn on Write Nutrition to Health in Settings, Sapida writes the nutrition from the food you log — calories, protein, carbohydrates, fat and fibre — into Apple Health, so it appears alongside data from your other apps.

• It is off unless you switch it on, and asks for its own separate permission. Connecting Apple Health for reading never enables writing.
• Sapida only ever writes nutrition — it never reads dietary data back, including its own. Dietary types are excluded from its read permissions entirely.
• Each sample is tagged with the food entry it came from, so editing or deleting an entry in Sapida updates or removes the matching sample in Health. Sapida only ever touches samples it wrote itself.
• If you switch the setting off, Sapida stops writing and stops maintaining what it has already written. Samples written up to that point remain in Apple Health — you can delete them in the Health app under Sharing → Apps → Sapida.

Both directions

• Health data is read, stored and processed on your device only; it is never uploaded to us, shared or sold. There is no server to send it to.
• In line with Apple's rules, HealthKit data is never used for advertising or marketing, and is never sold or disclosed to data brokers.
• You can grant or revoke either permission at any time in the Health app under Sharing → Apps → Sapida. iOS deliberately doesn't tell apps which read permissions are currently granted, so Sapida cannot display your current settings — Health is the source of truth.

What leaves your device, and why

Sapida talks to a small number of external services, and only sends the minimum needed for each job. Your symptom history, health data and identity are never included in these requests. Note that any request over the internet necessarily reveals your device's IP address and standard connection metadata to the service that receives it.

Before any of that happens, food searches and barcode scans are answered from a food database bundled inside the app itself — around 20,000 common branded products plus a set of generic whole foods — and from an on-device cache of your recent lookups. Many lookups are satisfied entirely on-device and never generate a network request at all; the services below are used when the bundled data doesn't have a match.

Bug reports

If you choose to send a bug report from the app, Sapida first asks whether to include diagnostic logs, then opens a pre-filled email in your own mail app addressed to our support inbox (or the iOS share sheet, if you don't have Apple Mail set up, so you can send it from Gmail, Outlook or anything else).

The report includes basic diagnostics: app version and build, bundle ID, device model, iOS version, locale, date and time, and whether you have an active subscription (yes/no). If you choose Email with logs, a text file of the app's own technical log entries from roughly the last two hours is attached — app events only, not your food, symptom or health data. You can review, edit or remove anything before sending, and nothing is sent automatically.

No ads, no tracking, no selling of data

Sapida contains no advertising, no analytics SDKs and no third-party trackers. We do not sell, rent or share your personal data with anyone. We have no data to sell — it lives on your phone.

How long your data is kept

Because your data is stored on your device, you are in control of it:

• It stays on your phone until you delete it: remove individual entries at any time, erase everything at once with Clear All Data in the app's Settings (which also clears the health summaries imported from Apple Health), or delete the app itself (which removes all Sapida data).
• Anything Sapida has written into Apple Health lives in Health, not in Sapida, so deleting the app does not remove it. Delete those samples in the Health app under Sharing → Apps → Sapida.
• You can export your data as CSV or JSON at any time, free — it is your data, and getting it out is not a paid feature. Exports cover your food and symptom log plus any health summaries imported from Apple Health, are created on-device, and are shared only where you choose to send them — once you send an export somewhere, that copy is outside the app and outside our control.
• If you email us, we keep the correspondence only as long as needed to help you.

Children

Sapida is not directed at children and is not intended for use by anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children — and since the app collects no personal data on our servers, there is nothing for us to collect.

Your rights under UK GDPR

You have the usual rights over your personal data: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection. In practice, because your data is stored only on your device and we cannot access it, you exercise most of these rights directly in the app — view and edit entries, export them, or delete them.

For anything we do hold (essentially, emails you've sent us), contact hello@sapida.app and we'll respond within one month.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk.

Legal bases

Where UK GDPR applies to the little processing that touches us or our service providers: food lookups and purchases are processed because they're necessary to provide the service you've asked for (performance of a contract), and support correspondence is handled under our legitimate interest in helping users and improving the app.

Changes to this policy

If the app's data practices change — for example, if iCloud sync is ever added — this policy will be updated and the "last updated" date changed before the change ships.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: hello@sapida.app

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