Do? has no login and no sign-up. The first time you open it, there’s no email to enter, no password to invent, no phone number to verify. You just start.
That’s a little unusual now. We’ve gotten used to handing something over before we’re allowed to begin — make an account first, and then every entry you make quietly ends up on some company’s server. Most of the time you don’t even think about it, because every app works that way.
I didn’t want Do? to. Not because logins are hard — the opposite, really. Building it with accounts would have been easier, and it would have made more money. An account lets me see how many people use it, how often, when. That’s worth something on its own. That’s the thing I gave up.
I gave it up because of what this app records. It’s personal enough that, to me, the best protection isn’t “we promise not to peek” — it’s making sure there’s nothing for me to peek at. Your entries go onto your phone and stay there. I don’t keep a database full of everyone’s private moments, so there’s nothing to leak, nothing to hand over, nothing to cash in when money gets tight. None of that can happen to me, because the thing it would happen to doesn’t exist.
One thing I want to be straight about, so you don’t misread it: “stays on your phone” doesn’t mean the data never moves at all. If you turn on iCloud yourself, or you want to share with a partner, it does travel — but it travels through Apple, under your own account, still out of my reach. The one you’re trusting there is Apple, the same as with everything else on your phone, not one more small developer like me.
And there’s a limit I should own up to as well: it can’t protect you from someone who’s already holding your unlocked phone. Anyone who can open your phone can open the apps on it. So Do? carries its own lock — you can put a separate layer on it, so these records aren’t sitting one tap away.
So when I say your data just stays on your phone, what I really mean is this: it’s yours to hold, not mine to keep. The rest is up to you — whether to turn on iCloud, whether to set that lock.