Privacy

Your account is optional

You can use Rucksteady without an account. Nothing leaves your device until you sign in. If you want your rucks on more than one device, or on the web, you can sign in with Apple - from the end of the first-run flow, or later from your account in Settings. Signing in gives us a stable account identifier and an email address, which may be Apple’s private relay address if you chose “Hide My Email”. Apple’s sheet offers to share your name and we ask for it, but we do not keep it - it is discarded as it arrives, never stored and never uploaded. The name we do keep is the rucker name you choose yourself.

What syncs once you are signed in

Your finished rucks sync to your own account so they are on all your devices:

• start time and duration
• distance, pace and elevation gain
• the load you carried, and any additional weight
• the terrain you selected
• your GPS route - the path you walked
• estimated calories, and which calorie model produced them
• any title, notes and perceived-effort rating you add

Where that data lives

In Supabase, hosted in the European Union (Paris, France). Row-Level Security means you can only ever read or write your own rows. Your rucks are linked to you. You can delete any ruck, or your whole account and everything in it, from inside the app at any time.

What never leaves your device

Everything Rucksteady reads from Apple Health, the photos you attach to a ruck, raw heart-rate samples, your settings, and a ruck that is still in progress. None of these are uploaded, whether you are signed in or not.

Apple Health

To keep the calorie estimate honest, Rucksteady reads a few things from Apple Health - your body weight, height, biological sex, and date of birth. Those are used only on your device, to calculate calories. They are never sent to our servers, never shared with anyone, never used for advertising or marketing, and never sold. There is no exception. Health access is optional: you can type your weight in Settings instead, and either way that number is used here and stays here. When you finish a ruck, Rucksteady writes it to Apple Health as a hiking workout (time, distance, active energy, and route), so your history is never trapped in the app.

Location

With your permission, Rucksteady uses your location to record your route, distance, pace, and climb while you ruck, and to show your local weather. Your route is part of the ruck, so it syncs with the rest of it once you are signed in; signed out, it stays on your device. To fetch a forecast, your coordinates go to the weather service (Apple WeatherKit, or OpenWeatherMap) only to look up the weather there - nothing else, and never for advertising. You can decline location and still track a ruck by time and load.

Rucking with other people

Ruck Together is invite-only. While a shared session is running, the partners you invited see your live elapsed time, distance, load and calories, alongside your display name and handle. That fan-out is live only and is never stored as a record. Your route is a separate opt-in: seeing your pace does not mean seeing where you are.

Subscriptions

Purchases are handled by Apple. We use RevenueCat to check what you are entitled to; when you are signed in, your account identifier is sent to them so your subscription follows your account. We never see or store your payment details.

Maps

Map tiles are served by Mapbox. The Mapbox SDK collects de-identified location and usage telemetry to improve its map services; you can opt out from the information (ⓘ) menu on any map. See Mapbox’s privacy policy.

What we don't do

No analytics, no crash reporters, no remote logging, no advertising, no trackers, and no selling your data - to anyone, ever. We do not track you across other apps or websites. If that ever changes, we will say so here first, and any new sharing will be opt-in.

Contact

Questions? Email privacy@rucksteady.com. This page is the plain summary; the full policy - what we collect, why, your rights, and how to reach us - is the long-form document it is based on.