Crest

Ride the Wave, Beat the Urge

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 30 July 2026

Crest has no servers, no accounts, and no analytics. Your surfs are stored on your device and synced through your own private iCloud, so they follow you between your iPhone and iPad. That sync is encrypted by Apple and tied to your Apple ID. We cannot read any of it, and neither can anyone else.

The short version

No account, ever. There is nothing to sign up for and no email required to use Crest.
No analytics, no tracking, no ads. Crest contains no third-party SDKs of any kind.
No servers of ours. We operate no backend that receives your data.
Private sync. Your data syncs through your own iCloud account, which we cannot access.

What Crest stores

Everything Crest records is created by you, on your device:

Your surf sessions — when they started, how long you rode them out, and whether the urge passed
What you chose to log afterwards — urge intensity, mood, energy, triggers
Journal entries and notes you write during or after a surf
Your categories, streaks and preferences

Where it lives

On your device, and in the private database of your own iCloud account. Apple calls this a CloudKit private database. It exists so your history is still there when you open Crest on another one of your devices, and so it survives a new phone.

A private CloudKit database is readable only by the Apple ID that owns it. As the developer of Crest, we have no ability to query it, browse it, or see that it exists. It is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy.

If you are signed out of iCloud, or you turn iCloud off for Crest in iOS Settings, the app keeps working exactly as before — your data simply stays on that one device.

What we can see

Nothing. There is no dashboard, no logging, no crash reporter, and no event tracking. We learn about problems the same way any other user would: by someone telling us.

Notifications

Reminders and the optional heads-up before your usual urge window are scheduled on your device by your device. Nothing is sent through a push server, and the times are calculated locally from your own history. Notifications are off until you turn them on, and you can revoke permission at any time in iOS Settings.

Surf Crew

Earlier versions of Crest included Surf Crew, an optional feature for surfing alongside a small group. It has been retired: it is no longer offered to new users, and no new crews can be created.

While it was available, a crew record held a randomly generated crew code, anonymous member identifiers, and aggregate counts such as how many surfs the crew completed that week. It never contained journal entries, notes, categories, individual session times, names, or anything identifying. Those records are being wound down.

Third parties

Crest integrates no third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, or tracking services. The only external system involved is Apple's own iCloud, described above.

Deleting your data

Delete any individual surf from your history inside the app.
Delete the app to remove everything stored on that device.
To remove the synced copy as well, open iOS Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Crest, and delete its data.

Children

Crest is not directed at children and collects no information from anyone. It requires no account and transmits nothing to us.

Changes to this policy

If how Crest handles data ever changes, this page will be updated before the change ships, and the date at the top will change with it.

Contact

Questions about any of this are welcome: beracasaalejandro@icloud.com