Short version: your voice never reaches us. It goes from one phone in your house to another over your own Wi-Fi. We can’t hear it, we don’t store it, and there is nothing to hand over.
The longer version is below, and we’ve tried to write it so you can actually check it rather than trust it.
Your voice
When you hold the button, your voice is sent directly to the other phones in your home, over your home network. It is not recorded, not stored, and never passes through our servers.
There is no history. Nothing to play back, on your phone or ours.
The one part that uses the internet
To make a phone play your voice when nobody has touched it, we have to wake it up — and only Apple can do that. So when you press talk, we ask Apple’s push service to nudge the phones you’re summoning.
That nudge carries your name and nothing else. No audio, no message, no content of any kind.
It means Summon Home needs an internet connection to start a summons, even though the voice itself never leaves your house. We’d rather say that plainly than let “it all stays local” do work it hasn’t earned.
The microphone
Your microphone opens only while you are holding the talk button. Not before, not after, and never because someone else did something.
When you are on the receiving end, your phone is in a mode that cannot record at all — this is enforced by iOS, not by us being careful.
iOS shows an orange dot whenever any app is using the microphone. We would not hide it if we could, and we haven’t tried.
Location
Summon Home only plays someone’s voice when you’re at home. To know whether you’re home, your phone checks its own Wi-Fi network and location.
That check happens on your phone. Your location never leaves it and is never sent to us.
iOS asks for “Always” because a locked phone in your pocket has to be able to answer “am I home?” on its own. Without it, summonses stop arriving about half an hour after you last unlock your phone.
Photos of your family
Photos you add to people’s tiles stay on that phone. They are never uploaded. We hold no pictures of anyone, and particularly not of anyone’s children.
The trade is that photos don’t follow you to a new phone. We think that’s the right way round.
What we do store
On our server, for your household only:
- Who is in it — a device identifier and the first name each person chose
- The push token each phone needs to be woken up
- Invite codes, until they’re used or expire
- Who has blocked whom, so a block keeps working
That’s the lot. No audio, no transcripts, no history of who summoned whom.
Signing in
Sign in with Apple, and we ask Apple for nothing except confirmation that you’re you. Not your email, not your name. There is no mailing list because there is nothing to put on one.
Diagnostics
The app keeps a short log on your phone — timings, errors, and the first names of people in your household — so that if something goes wrong you can send it to us from Settings. It is only ever sent if you tap the button, and you can read the whole thing first, in the same screen.
It contains no audio. There isn’t any to contain.
Deleting everything
Settings → Delete my account.
It removes your membership, your invite codes and your blocks from our server, and deletes your sign-in. If you were the last person in your household, the household goes with you. On the phone itself it erases the people, their photos and their nicknames.
It cannot be undone, and we don’t keep a copy to undo it from.
Children
Summon Home is built for families and is meant to be used by children. It collects nothing about them beyond a first name their parent typed and a device identifier, holds no photos of them, and has no advertising, no analytics profile, and no third-party trackers.
Changes
If a future version of the app ever collects something new, this page will say so before that version ships, and the date at the top will change.
Contact
support@summonhome.app — a person reads it.