Last updated: 23 August 2026
Tread blocks distracting apps and sells the minutes back to you for steps, at a price set by your own recent average. This policy says what that requires us to store, and what we never see.
We store your email address, your display name if you set one, your daily step total, and a few counters that make up your account: streak, saved minutes, unblocks, freezes. That is all. We do not sell it, we do not share it with advertisers, there is no analytics or tracking of any kind in the app, and you can delete all of it from inside the app in two taps.
Which apps you block. iOS hands the app an opaque token for each app you pick. It is not a name, and it cannot be turned back into one. Tread itself cannot tell you which apps you chose, so there is nothing here for us to store even if we wanted it.
Your screen time. iOS does not let an app read screen time as data. It only lets an app embed a view that iOS itself draws. The numbers never reach our code, so they cannot reach our server, and this is a limit of the platform rather than a policy we could change.
Every time you saw a price and walked away. The part of iOS that draws the block screen is not allowed to write anything down. We record unlocks bought and blocks that held, and no figure exists for anything else.
Nothing on this list is stored anywhere, on your phone or ours.
Your app selection, your schedule, your commitment locks, and today's ledger live in a container on your device that only Tread and its own blocking extensions can open. Your sign-in session lives in the iOS Keychain. None of this is uploaded.
The Keychain entry deliberately survives deleting the app, which is what lets a reinstall come back signed in with your streak intact. Signing out removes it.
An account is required to use Tread, and this is what having one means.
From signing in, whichever provider you used:
| Email address | Apple's Hide My Email works normally, and then we only ever have the relay address |
|---|---|
| A user ID | A random identifier for your account. It is not your device ID and it does not follow you between apps |
| Display name | Only if you set one, or if your provider supplied one. You can change or clear it in the app |
From using the app:
| Your daily step total | One number per day |
|---|---|
| Minutes bought, steps spent, minutes expired unspent, and whether you matched your average, per day | The Ledger screen shows you exactly this |
| Your streak, saved minutes, unblocks and freezes | The account itself |
Only if you join a group: the group, your membership of it, and how many days you were on pace that week. Your step counts are not shared with a group, on purpose: the whole point of the comparison is that everybody is measured against their own average.
If you allow it, Tread reads your step count from Apple Health. It never writes anything to Health, and it asks for nothing else: not workouts, not heart rate, not weight.
Your daily step total is saved to your account, which is what makes a streak survive a new phone. It is stored as one number per day, it is used only to run the app for you, and it is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with anyone else. If you would rather it stayed on your phone, decline the Health permission: Tread falls back to the phone's own step counter, and the totals for finished days are still saved to your account, because that is what the streak is made of.
Deleting your account deletes these totals along with everything else.
Supabase hosts our database and handles sign-in. They store the data described above on our behalf and do nothing else with it.
Apple and Google handle sign-in itself, if you use their buttons. They tell us your email address and nothing more. What they log about the sign-in is covered by their own policies.
That is the complete list. There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising network and no third-party tracker in Tread. Nothing in the app tracks you across other apps or websites, and we do not ask for permission to, because we have no use for it.
Profile, then Delete account. It removes your rows from every table, deletes your sign-in identity, and wipes the local container on the phone. It takes effect immediately and it is not reversible. Deleting the app alone does not do this, because the account is deliberately built to outlive the app being deleted.
One exception, so that deleting your account cannot delete other people's: if you created a group that other people are still in, the group itself remains for them. Your membership, your name and your scores in it are gone, and the group no longer records who made it.
Signing out leaves your account on the server and removes the session from your phone.
We keep your data until you delete it. Backups roll off within 30 days.
Tread is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
You can see everything we hold about you inside the app: the Ledger is the day history, Profile is the account. You can correct your display name, and you can delete the lot without asking us. If you would rather have a copy by email, or want anything else done, write to us.
If we change what the app collects, we will change this page and update the date at the top before the change ships.
EU or the UK, this section also needs a lawful basis for processing and a line about where the data is hosted.