Effective April 2, 2026
Heaps is an RSS and podcast reader. It lives entirely on your iPhone. There are no accounts to create, no sign-ups, and no data sent back to us. We built it this way on purpose.
All your data lives locally on your iPhone: the feeds you subscribe to, articles you've read or saved, podcast episodes you've downloaded, your listening progress, muted words, heaps you've organized, and your color and display preferences. None of this leaves your device unless iCloud sync is on (more on that below).
Heaps also keeps a small diagnostic log on your device that records app activity like feed refreshes and errors. This log is capped at 1 MB, stored only locally, and may include feed URLs and abbreviated article titles. You can share this log via the app's settings if you ever need to send it for troubleshooting, but it's never sent automatically.
If iCloud is enabled on your device, Heaps uses Apple's iCloud services to keep things in sync across your devices. This includes your feed subscriptions, read/unread state, saved articles, reading positions, listen queue, clipped articles, and preferences. All of this is stored in your personal iCloud account and protected by Apple's encryption. Heaps has no server and no way to access your iCloud data. For details on how Apple handles iCloud storage, see Apple's Privacy Policy.
Heaps connects to the internet for a few things, all initiated from your device:
Fetching your feeds. When Heaps refreshes, it contacts the servers that host your RSS, Atom, or JSON feeds to check for new articles. These requests include standard HTTP headers (like a user-agent string identifying the app and conditional headers such as ETags to avoid re-downloading content that hasn't changed). Feed servers can see that a request came from your device's IP address. This is how all RSS readers work, and Heaps doesn't add any extra tracking on top.
Prefetching images. To make your feed load feel fast, Heaps downloads thumbnail images for recent articles in the background. This means a publisher's image server may receive a request even if you haven't tapped on that particular article yet.
Podcast downloads. When you download a podcast episode, the audio file is fetched directly from the podcast host's server.
Podcast search. When you search for podcasts, Heaps queries Apple's public iTunes Search API. No personal information is sent with that request.
Background refresh. Heaps may periodically refresh your feeds in the background (roughly every 15 minutes when the system allows it) so new articles are ready when you open the app. This means feed servers may receive requests from your device even when the app isn't on-screen.
All network traffic goes directly from your device to the relevant servers. Heaps does not route anything through a proxy or intermediary.
On supported devices, Heaps can summarize articles and answer follow-up questions using Apple Intelligence — specifically Apple's on-device Foundation Models. All of this processing happens locally on your device. No article text is sent to external servers, and we have no access to the content being processed or the summaries generated.
On devices that don't support Apple Intelligence, Heaps uses a basic extractive summarization method that also runs entirely on-device. In either case, no data leaves your device for summarization purposes.
Apple Intelligence features are provided by Apple and subject to Apple's Privacy Policy. Availability depends on your device model, OS version, and region.
When you open an article, Heaps can display it in a built-in reader or in an embedded browser that loads the publisher's full page. In reader mode, Heaps strips out known advertising and analytics trackers before displaying the content.
If you sign in to a publisher's website for paywalled content, your login session cookies are stored on your device and managed by iOS. These cookies persist so you don't have to log in every time, and you can clear them per-site in Heaps' settings.
Articles from your feeds sometimes include embedded content from platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter/X, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Google Maps (among others). When you view an article containing one of these embeds, your device connects directly to that platform to load it. Heaps has no control over what data those services collect through their embeds — each platform operates under its own privacy policy, and they may set cookies, log your IP address, or track viewing activity on their end.
When you're listening to a podcast, Heaps publishes the episode title, show name, and artwork to your iPhone's Now Playing controls. This is what makes playback info appear on your lock screen and in Control Center. This info stays on your device, but it is visible to anyone who can see your screen and may be accessible to other apps that read Now Playing metadata.
| Category | Collected? |
|---|---|
| Analytics or usage data | No |
| Crash reports | No |
| Advertising identifiers | No |
| Device identifiers | No |
| Location data | No |
| Contacts or address book | No |
| Health or fitness data | No |
| Browsing history | No |
| Diagnostics sent to us | No |
Heaps contains zero third-party SDKs. No analytics frameworks, no ad networks, no crash reporters, no tracking code. The entire app is built with Apple's own frameworks and nothing else.
Heaps doesn't collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13. Because the app displays third-party RSS content, parental discretion is advised regarding which feeds a child subscribes to.
You can delete any data in Heaps at any time. Removing a feed, clearing your read history, or deleting downloaded episodes erases that data from your device immediately. Uninstalling the app removes everything stored locally. To remove synced data from iCloud, visit Settings > Apple Account > iCloud > Manage Storage on your device.
If we update this policy, the revised version will be posted here with a new effective date. Since Heaps doesn't collect your contact info, we can't notify you directly — we'd encourage you to check back from time to time.
If anything here is unclear or you have questions about how Heaps handles your data, feel free to reach out at contact@zachbrown.xyz.