Privacy policy.
Last updated November 2, 2026
The short version: your notes live on your phone, not on our servers. To sort a note and find its details, Walnut sends the note's text to the services that look it up, and nothing is kept along the way. There are no accounts, no ads and no tracking.
Walnut is made by RAND STUDIO LLC, a Delaware limited liability company (“we”). This policy explains what the Walnut app for iPhone handles, why, and what choices you have. Questions go to hello@getwalnut.app.
Your notes stay on your phone
Everything you write in Walnut, along with the categories, tags and details it finds, is stored only on your device. We have no copy and no account to sync it to. Deleting the app deletes your notes. Your iPhone's own backups (iCloud or your computer) may include them, under Apple's terms.
What happens when Walnut sorts a note
When you save a note, Walnut sends its text through our server to the services below, which classify it and look it up. Our server adds the access keys and passes the request on; it does not store or log the text of your notes. Each service handles what it receives under its own privacy policy.
| Service | What it receives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | The note's text, and the titles of a few of your recent notes | Choose the category and pull out names, places and dates. Recent titles help it read ambiguous names the way you mean them. |
| Google Places and Books | The name you wrote and, for places, the city | Find the restaurant, bar or book: address, photo, links |
| TMDB and OMDb | The title you wrote | Find the movie or show: poster, year, ratings |
| Spotify | The name you wrote | Find the album, artist or podcast |
| Ticketmaster | The name you wrote | Find upcoming shows |
For some kinds of notes your phone asks free public sources directly, without going through our server: Wikipedia, Apple's iTunes Search, Open Library, TheMealDB and Open Food Facts. They receive the name you wrote and your phone's IP address, like any website you visit. Pictures in your notes are loaded from the sites that host them.
Voice notes
If you dictate a note, the recording is sent through our server to Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, which turns it into text. We don't keep the recording, and Walnut only uses the microphone while you're dictating.
What our server keeps
So that the free notes and your plan work, our server keeps an anonymous record for each installation of the app:
- a random installation ID, created by the app the first time it runs;
- your plan (free trial or subscription);
- for each note that has been sorted, a random note ID and when it was sorted, so the same note is never counted twice. Never the note's text.
This record holds no name, email, phone number, location or advertising identifier, and we can't tell which person it belongs to. The installation ID is saved in your phone's keychain, so reinstalling the app doesn't restart the free trial.
Our server runs on Cloudflare, which sees your IP address to deliver requests and to limit abuse (for example, too many new installations from one address). We don't store IP addresses, and we keep error logs only, which never include note text.
Purchases
Subscriptions are sold and processed by Apple. We never see your name, Apple ID or payment details; we only learn whether the installation has an active subscription.
What we don't do
- We don't sell or share your data for advertising.
- We don't use analytics, ad networks or tracking across apps and websites.
- We don't access your location, contacts, photos or calendar.
- We don't use your notes to train AI models.
Your choices and rights
You can edit or delete any note in the app, and deleting the app erases them all. Because we hold nothing that identifies you, there is no personal profile to access, correct or export. If you live somewhere with privacy laws that give you further rights (such as the EU, the UK, California or Argentina), write to us and we'll help.
Children
Walnut is not directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
If we change this policy, we'll update this page and the date at the top.