Monolog for iPhone. Effective August 31, 2026.
Monolog has no account system, no analytics, and no server of mine for your data to travel to. Your trips are files on your iPhone.
The rest of this page explains what that means in practice, including the two places where information does leave your phone.
Each trip is a plain text file in Monolog's own folder on your iPhone, alongside any route files and voice notes belonging to that trip. You can read these files with any text editor if you ever move them off the device.
A trip file can contain dates and times, coordinates and a place name, distance and elevation, the number of people on the hike, and whatever you write in your notes. None of it is transmitted to me, and I have no way to see it.
Monolog asks for access to your photo library so it can read the date, time, and location that your camera saved into each photo. That is how a trip gets built without you typing anything in.
Photos are not copied into the app. Monolog stores a reference to each photo and asks the system for the image when it needs to display one. Your originals stay in your photo library, under your control. If you delete a photo from your library, it stops appearing in Monolog.
If you record a voice note, Monolog asks for microphone access at that moment. The recording is saved as an audio file inside that trip's folder on your device. Nothing is transcribed, uploaded, or analyzed.
Monolog never turns on GPS and never tracks where you are. It has no live location permission at all, which is why iOS never asks you for one.
Every coordinate in the app comes from a photo you already took. If a photo has no location saved in it, Monolog simply has no location for it.
Monolog uses Apple's Maps framework for two things, and both involve a request to Apple:
These requests go to Apple, not to me. Apple handles them under its own privacy policy, which you can read at apple.com/legal/privacy. I receive nothing from them and have no access to them.
Monolog's trip files live in the app's documents folder, which means they are included in your iPhone's normal backup to iCloud or to your computer, the same way most apps' documents are. That backup belongs to you and is governed by Apple's terms, not mine. If you would rather your trips were not backed up, you can exclude Monolog from iCloud Backup in your iPhone's settings.
Monolog can hand a single photo to the iOS share sheet when you ask it to. What happens next is up to you and whichever app you choose to send it to. Monolog uploads nothing on its own.
Monolog is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
Deleting the app removes its trip files from your device. Photos are untouched, since they were never copied out of your library in the first place. There is no server-side account to close and no deletion request to send me, because I hold nothing.
Privacy laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, and delete personal information a company holds about you. I hold none, so there is nothing for me to produce or erase. Your data is already in your hands, on your device. If you have a question about any of this, write to me at the address below.
If a future version of Monolog changes how it handles your information, this page will be updated before that version ships, and the effective date at the top will change with it.
Travis Cantrell
hello@traviscantrell.info