Waypost.

Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 17, 2026

Data controller: Mind Map LLC

Waypost is designed around a simple privacy principle: your photos, events, and personal information never reach Waypost servers. Your data lives on your device and — for backups and for keeping your library in sync across your own devices — in your own iCloud.

What Waypost accesses on your device

• Photo library access: Waypost reads photos and video files from your iOS Photo Library, including their metadata (date, time, GPS coordinates, EXIF). This is required for Waypost to organize your memories into events and place them on a map.
• Calendar access (optional, read-only): If you choose to connect your calendar during setup, Waypost reads the titles and dates of events in your device calendars so it can name the matching photo groups for you — both recurring dates that matter to you (birthdays, anniversaries, holidays) and any other meaningful event already on your calendar, such as a trip or a concert, when its dates line up with photos you took around that time. You choose which birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays to use; other calendar events are matched to your photos automatically by date. Waypost never writes to your calendar, and the calendar information is used only on your device to derive names — it is never transmitted to Waypost. Connecting your calendar is optional; you can skip it and add event names by hand, and you can decline or revoke calendar permission in iOS Settings at any time.
• Photo Library write — two explicit, user-initiated cases only:
  1. Importing a shared .waypost bundle. If a friend or family member sends you a bundle, Waypost shows you exactly which photos are inside. You decide every time whether to import, and you choose exactly which photos get saved to your library.
  2. Creating an Apple Photo Album. When you tap "Create Apple Photo Album" on an event, Waypost creates or updates an album in your Apple Photos library with the photos you select. Every album Waypost creates is prefixed with Waypost: so you can find them easily. The album lives in your Apple Photos library where it's easy for you to find when you want to upload it to a third-party print service (Shutterfly, Walgreens, Mpix, etc.). Waypost never reaches outside the device to send the album anywhere — it stays in your library, controlled by you.
  Both writes use the same Photo Library access you granted during onboarding — there is no separate permission prompt. Waypost never writes to your library on its own — no background saves, no automatic imports, no exceptions.

What Waypost stores on your device

The information you enter is used only to power three things inside the app:

1. Separating home events from travel events on your timeline.
2. Automatically naming or labeling events that match dates you've told Waypost are meaningful (birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, honeymoons), so you don't have to label them by hand.
3. Recording the corrections, renames, splits, and merges you make to auto-detected events so they reflect the way you want your timeline organized.

It is never used for analytics, advertising, profiling, or any other purpose, and it is never transmitted to Waypost or any third party.

Specifically, Waypost asks you to enter:

• States you've lived in and the years you lived in each (e.g., California, 2018–2024) — used to distinguish "home" from "travel" when grouping your photos. Selection is at the state level, not city or address. Only the years are stored, not full dates.
• The month and day of birthdays that matter to you, plus an optional name — used to surface birthday-related events on the timeline. The year of birth is not stored.
• Anniversary dates, entered as a full date (month, day, and year) along with a label — used the same way as birthdays. The year you enter is what lets Waypost recognize wedding-day events and the honeymoon photos that follow it.
• The holidays you want recognized, chosen from a checklist (and, if you connect your calendar, pre-filled from the holidays it finds) — used to label events that fall on those dates. Only the holidays you select are stored.
• Edits you make to detected events — renaming, merging, splitting, or adjusting dates.

All of this is stored in Waypost's own private data area on your device — separate from your iOS Photo Library. None of it is transmitted to Waypost. See "Backups to your own iCloud Drive" below for the one place this data is also written outside the app's private area (your own iCloud account, not Waypost's).

What leaves your device

Waypost's privacy guarantees:

• Waypost has no servers of its own that receive your personal Waypost data. We never receive your photos, photo metadata, locations, detected events, the information you entered during onboarding (states lived, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays), the contents of your calendar, or any of the edits you've made. The one carve-out is the public feedback board at thewaypost.app/feedback: if you choose to submit a suggestion or vote, the text you type and an anonymous browser identifier are stored on Cloudflare's edge database — see (e) below.
• Waypost contains no third-party analytics, telemetry, advertising SDKs, or trackers.
• The only data that leaves your device does so either to your own Apple iCloud account (backups and cross-device sync), or because you explicitly tap a button to share, purchase, restore, or post to the feedback board.

The complete list of situations in which Waypost causes data to leave your device:

• (a) Backups to your own iCloud Drive. Waypost takes rolling auto-backups of its on-device data (events, your edits, the onboarding information you entered — never your photos themselves) and mirrors them to Waypost's private container in your iCloud Drive. This uses Apple's standard iCloud Drive API, which means the backup lives in your iCloud account and is governed by your Apple ID's privacy settings; Waypost never sees the file in transit and has no way to read your iCloud Drive. The purpose is to let you reinstall Waypost (or move to a new iPhone) without losing your events. To stop new backups from syncing, turn off the master iCloud Drive switch under iOS Settings → [your name] → iCloud → iCloud Drive. To delete your existing iCloud-stored backups, open iOS Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Waypost → Delete from iCloud.
• (b) When you start a Waypost Premium trial, buy a subscription, or restore purchases. Tapping "Start 14-Day Free Trial" on Card 11 of onboarding, any subscription option on the in-app paywall, or "Restore Purchases" in Settings triggers an Apple StoreKit transaction. Your payment details go directly from your iPhone to Apple — Waypost never sees them. To track entitlement (whether your trial or subscription is currently active), Waypost uses RevenueCat, a third-party subscription-management service. RevenueCat receives the StoreKit receipt and a pseudonymous device identifier from Apple, returns a yes/no entitlement, and that's it. RevenueCat does not receive your photos, locations, events, or any personal information from Waypost. See RevenueCat's Privacy Policy for details.
• (c) When you choose to share a .waypost bundle with a friend. Tapping "Share All Photos" or "Select Photos to Share" packages the chosen photos and event metadata into a .waypost file and hands it to iOS's standard Share Sheet (Messages, Mail, AirDrop, etc.). The bundle travels via whichever app you pick; Waypost itself never uploads it. The recipient must have Waypost installed to import it.
• (d) When you choose to share an animated travel link. Tapping "Share animation" builds a URL that opens the recipient's web browser to a small viewing page hosted at thewaypost.app/p. The link only includes the geographic points associated with each event you chose to include in the animation, as well as the center of your home state(s). No event names, dates, or photos are sent with the animation. Your photos, photo metadata, and any other details from your library are never sent. Because of how the link is constructed (the data lives in the URL fragment after the #), it travels straight from your iPhone to the recipient's browser — Cloudflare, who hosts the viewing page, never sees what's being shared.
• (e) When you choose to post on the Waypost feedback board. The title and description you type at thewaypost.app/feedback are stored in Cloudflare's D1 database alongside a random identifier we generate locally in your browser. That identifier is used only to deduplicate your votes (one vote per suggestion) and to enforce a daily submission rate limit; it never leaves your browser except when you submit or vote, and it isn't linked to your iPhone, your Apple ID, your photos, or anything else in Waypost. None of your event data, photo data, or Waypost preferences are sent. The board displays whatever text you choose to write publicly, so don't include anything you wouldn't share. Clearing your browser data resets the identifier.
• (f) When you use Waypost on more than one of your own devices. If you sign into Waypost on more than one device using the same Apple ID (for example an iPhone and an iPad), Waypost keeps your library in sync across them using Apple's CloudKit — the private-database area of your own iCloud account. What syncs is the same on-device data described above: your detected events, the edits you've made, and the dates and labels you entered (states, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays). Your photos themselves are never copied between devices — each device displays the matching photos from its own copy of your iCloud Photo Library. As with iCloud Drive backups, this all stays within your own iCloud: there is no Waypost server in the middle, Waypost never sees the data in transit, and Waypost cannot read your iCloud. Sync turns on by default when a newly-installed device finds your existing library; when you set up an additional device you can instead choose to keep its library separate, in which case it does not sync. Sync relies on iCloud and iCloud Photos being enabled; turning either off on a device halts syncing for that device.

Third parties Waypost relies on

Waypost is a small product but it does depend on a few well-known services to function. The complete list:

• Apple — the iOS platform, App Store distribution, StoreKit for payments, iCloud Drive for backups, CloudKit (your own private iCloud database) for cross-device sync, and the Photo Library and Calendar APIs for reading your photos and (if you connect it) your calendar. Apple's privacy practices govern these.
• RevenueCat — subscription-entitlement management, as described in (b) above. RevenueCat receives only the StoreKit receipt and a pseudonymous identifier; never your photos, events, or onboarding information.
• Cloudflare — hosts thewaypost.app, including the animated-travel viewing page (see (d)) and the feedback board (see (e)). The feedback board uses Cloudflare's D1 database to store only what you choose to post there. As described in (d), Cloudflare never sees the contents of shared animations because the data lives in the URL fragment, which browsers do not transmit to the server.

That's the entire third-party list. Waypost does not use any analytics service, crash reporter (other than the anonymous aggregate crash data Apple provides to every developer; see "Aggregate App Store statistics" below), ad network, attribution SDK, push notification provider, or feature-flag service.

Deleting the Waypost app

If you delete the Waypost app, everything Waypost stored on the device is removed with it: the information you entered (states lived, birthdays, anniversaries), the events Waypost detected and created within the app, and the edits you made inside the Waypost app. Your actual photos and videos are not affected. Waypost only reads from your Photo Library — it never owns those files, so deleting Waypost cannot delete them. Photo favorites you set from inside Waypost stay too, because favorites live on the photo itself, not in Waypost. Any photos that arrived in your library because you imported a .waypost share bundle also remain in your library; once saved, they are indistinguishable from any other photo.

Your iCloud data is not removed when you delete the app. Waypost's private iCloud Drive container — and any cross-device sync data Waypost stored in your private iCloud (CloudKit) — stay put, so that if you reinstall Waypost (here or on a new device signed into the same iCloud account), your events are automatically restored and any other device of yours keeps syncing. To remove both the iCloud backups and the sync data, open the iOS Settings app → tap your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Waypost → Delete from iCloud; this clears both. One caveat if you've used Waypost on more than one device: any device that still has Waypost installed will re-upload its copy of your library to iCloud the next time it syncs, so delete the app from your other devices first if you want it gone everywhere. Once Waypost is removed from your devices and deleted from iCloud, nothing of yours from Waypost remains.

If you have an active Waypost Premium subscription, deleting the app does not cancel it. Cancel via iOS Settings → [your name] → Subscriptions → Waypost Premium → Cancel Subscription.

Aggregate App Store statistics

Like every developer on the App Store, Waypost receives anonymized, aggregate statistics from Apple through App Store Connect: total downloads, crash reports, country/region breakdowns, iOS version and device model mix, App Store search referrals, and similar high-level metrics. These describe the app overall — not any individual user.

Apple anonymizes and aggregates this data before it ever reaches the developer. Waypost cannot see who downloaded the app, identify any user, or trace any specific install back to a person. This is standard Apple-provided developer information that applies to every app in the App Store; Waypost does not request, configure, or have any control over it.

Children

Waypost is rated 4+. If a child uses Waypost, the app will ask them the same onboarding questions an adult would receive (states lived, important birthdays, anniversaries — see "What Waypost stores on your device" above), and it will read the photo library on the device the same way. As with adults, none of this information is transmitted to Waypost — everything stays on the device or in the user's own iCloud Drive backup.

Waypost has no way to identify who entered any information or whose photos are in the library. We don't know if a user is a child, and we receive nothing about anyone regardless. Parents and guardians who allow children to use Waypost retain full control: deleting the app removes everything Waypost stored on the device, and deleting the "Waypost Backups" folder from iCloud Drive removes the backup. The child's photos in the iOS Photo Library are not affected — Waypost only reads from the library, it doesn't own or store those files.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes meaningfully, the "Last updated" date above will reflect the change. Because Waypost has no servers, there is no way for us to notify you in-app — please re-read this page if you want to be certain of the current state.

Contact

Questions? Email support@thewaypost.app or visit thewaypost.app/support. Waypost is operated by Mind Map LLC.