Privacy policy
FORM 36-P36 Frames doesn’t collect anything.
No account. No sign-up. No analytics, no ads, no tracking, no third-party SDKs, and no server of ours anywhere. 36 Frames does not send your photos, your location, or anything else off your iPhone. The app works in airplane mode, and that is not a coincidence.
What follows is the same thing said slowly, because “we collect nothing” is the sort of claim that deserves the detail behind it.
There is no lab
Sending a roll “to the lab” is the app’s language for a wait that runs entirely on your own phone. Your frames are written to the app’s private storage on the device, developing happens on the device, and the developed photos stay there until you choose to do something with them. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to. The wait is real; the lab is a fiction.
Your photos
Every frame you shoot lives in 36 Frames’ own private storage area, which no other app on your iPhone can read. Undeveloped frames never enter your photo library — that is the app’s central rule, not just a privacy nicety.
A developed photo only leaves the app when you send it somewhere yourself: saving it to Photos, or sharing it through the iOS share sheet. Where it goes after that is between you and whatever you shared it with.
If you back up your iPhone to iCloud or to a computer, your rolls are included in that backup like any other app’s data. That backup is between you and Apple; we never see it.
Permissions, and what each one is actually for
- Camera — required, for the obvious reason. Asked for when you first open the camera. The video feed is used to show a viewfinder and to capture the frames you shoot, and it is not recorded or sent anywhere.
- Photos — add-only. The app can add your developed photos to your library and can do nothing else: it cannot read, browse, or see a single photo already in it. Asked for the first time you save a developed roll.
- Location — entirely optional, offered once during onboarding and never demanded mid-flow. If you turn it on, the place a photo was taken is written into that photo’s own EXIF data, so your developed shots remember where they came from. That data stays inside your photo, on your device. It is not logged, stored separately, or transmitted. Say no and everything works exactly as before, minus the location tag.
- Notifications — optional, asked for after you send your first roll, used only to tell you a roll is ready. The notifications are scheduled locally on your iPhone. There are no push notifications, no marketing messages, and no notification server.
Buying the unlock
The one-time “Unlimited Rolls” purchase is handled entirely by Apple’s App Store. Your payment details never touch this app, and Apple does not pass them to us. What we receive is Apple’s ordinary sales reporting: how many copies sold, in which countries. That tells us nothing about who you are, and there is no way for us to connect a purchase to a person, a device, or a photo.
Crash reports and diagnostics
36 Frames contains no analytics or crash-reporting service of its own. If you have opted in to sharing analytics with developers in your iPhone’s own privacy settings, Apple may pass us anonymised, aggregated crash reports. Those come from Apple, are stripped of anything identifying, and you can switch them off in Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements.
Children
36 Frames is rated 4+ and is safe for any age. It collects no personal information from anyone, children included, and there is nothing in it that could be used to contact or identify a user.
Deleting your data
Delete the app and everything it holds goes with it — rolls, frames, developed photos, settings. There is no copy on a server to request, because there is no server. Note the flip side: an undeveloped roll exists only on your phone, so deleting the app takes that roll with it for good. Send it to the lab and let it develop first.
Photos you have already saved to your photo library are yours and stay there; removing the app doesn’t touch them.
Changes to this policy
If a future version of 36 Frames ever does something that genuinely involves your data — ordering physical prints, say — this page will be updated before that feature ships, and the app will ask before anything leaves your device. The date at the bottom of this page is when it last changed.
Getting in touch
Questions about any of this, or about the app in general: hjalle@36frames.app.