Privacy Policy

Private by Design

Alternate needs no account, no email and no password. You set a pattern, add first names, and the app builds the calendar on your phone. Everything you see - Today, Schedule, Count, the day sheet - works offline from the copy on your device. There are no advertising or analytics SDKs, and the app does not measure how or how often you use it.

Data Stored on Your Device

• Your household: the first names you enter for parents, children and an assistant, the colour chosen for each parent, and optional avatar symbols for children.
• Your schedule inputs: the pattern, its start date and starting parent, handoff times, holidays and exceptions, notes, and swap requests with their status.
• The generated calendar, which is computed from those inputs on your phone and never written by hand.
• Settings: reminder time, notification preferences, and whether the schedule is shown as a list or a colour grid.
• Whether the household subscription is active.

Syncing Between Your Household

So that your co-parent and any assistant see the same schedule you do, your household’s data - member and child first names, the pattern, exceptions, notes and swaps - is stored in a hosted database operated for us by Supabase and synced to the phones of the people in your household. That is its only purpose. It is not shared with anyone outside your household, it is not used for advertising or profiling, and Culi Studio does not read it except where needed to keep the service running or where you ask us for help.

The generated day-by-day calendar is never stored on the server; only the inputs are, and each phone rebuilds the calendar from them. If you are offline, everything on your phone still works and your changes send when you are back online.

Children

Children are names on a schedule, not users. Alternate stores a first name or nickname and an optional avatar symbol for each child - no date of birth, no photo and no account. Children do not use the app and there is no "kids view". We recommend first names or nicknames only.

Invites

Inviting a co-parent or assistant generates a code shown as a QR and as a link. The code lives 30 minutes, minting a new one voids the old one, and it grants access only to your household’s schedule. Anyone who joins is a member of the household under a first name; no account is created for them.

Notifications

Handoff reminders are local notifications scheduled on your phone; they involve no server. Swap requests and answers are delivered as push notifications through Apple’s Push Notification service, which requires the app to store a device push token alongside your household membership. Turn either kind off in Settings › Notifications at any time.

Calendar Access

"Add to Apple Calendar" asks for calendar access so the app can create an "Alternate" calendar, write the next twelve months into it, and clear its own events before re-exporting. It reads nothing else from your calendars. "Share .ics file" generates a standard calendar file on your phone and hands it to the iOS share sheet, which you control.

Paste Your Plan

On supported devices, pasting the schedule section of your parenting plan is read by Apple Intelligence on your phone. The text is not sent to us or to any server, nothing is saved until you confirm the pattern it found, and the pasted text itself is discarded.

Siri and Shortcuts

"Who has the children" and "When is the next handoff" answer from the schedule already on your phone. They only read; nothing you say can change a day, a holiday or a swap. Your requests to Siri are handled by Apple under Apple’s privacy policy.

Subscriptions

The household subscription is processed by Apple through StoreKit and managed with RevenueCat, which receives an anonymous app-user identifier and the subscription status so that the unlock can be shared with your household. We never receive or store your name, email, payment details or Apple Account credentials. Restore Purchases works on any device signed into the same Apple Account, and you cancel in your Apple subscription settings.

What We Never Collect

• No accounts, email addresses or passwords - there is nothing to sign up for.
• No analytics, usage tracking or behavioural profiling.
• No advertising identifiers, no ads, and no data sold, rented or shared with third parties.
• No location, contacts, camera, microphone or photo library access. Calendar access is requested only when you export, and camera access only if you scan an invite QR code.
• No children’s dates of birth, photos or accounts.

Third-Party Services

• Supabase - hosted database and realtime sync for your household’s schedule inputs, and the scheduled job that expires unanswered swaps.
• Apple Push Notification service - delivery of swap request and swap answer notifications.
• Apple StoreKit and RevenueCat - subscription processing and household entitlement.
• Apple EventKit - writing the exported schedule into Apple Calendar, only when you choose to.
• That is the complete list. Alternate integrates no analytics or advertising services of any kind.

Deleting Your Data

Settings › Delete household, available to the parent who created it, removes the household for everyone in it: the server copy is deleted, and your co-parent’s and assistant’s phones clear on their next sync. This cannot be undone. Settings › Reset this phone wipes the schedule, household and settings from that phone only; the rest of the household keeps everything. Deleting the app removes all local data. The "Alternate" calendar in Apple Calendar is yours and can be deleted from the Calendar app.

Not Legal Advice

Alternate is a scheduling tool. It does not interpret your court order or parenting plan. If anything in the app disagrees with your order, your order is what counts.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated "Last updated" date.