Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Fernweh is made by BearMo Studios LLC (“BearMo Studios,” “we,” “us”), a company registered in North Carolina, United States. This policy explains how the Fernweh iPhone app handles information. It covers the app only; the website privacy notice covers bearmostudios.com.

2. What stays on your device

Fernweh is a local-first app. The journal you build in it is written to a database stored inside the app’s own storage area on your iPhone. That includes:

• Hike entries — title, date, location name, distance, elevation and your rating
• Your notes, in full
• Tags you create and apply
• Photos you attach to an entry
• Routes you record with GPS tracking, including the path walked and its summary figures
• Your in-app settings and preferences

None of this is transmitted to BearMo Studios. We do not operate a server that receives, stores or processes your journal, and we could not retrieve your entries even if you asked us to.

3. What we collect (and don’t)

We do not collect personal information through the app. Specifically, Fernweh contains:

• No account system. There is no sign-up, no login, no email address required to use the app.
• No analytics or telemetry. There is no Firebase, no Google Analytics, no Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment or equivalent. We do not count screen views, sessions or feature usage.
• No advertising or attribution SDKs. No ad networks, no IDFA collection, no install attribution.
• No third-party crash reporting. If you opt in to Apple’s own device-level analytics sharing in iOS Settings, Apple may share aggregated crash and usage data with us as the developer. That is an Apple feature you control in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, and what we receive from it is aggregated and not identified to you.
• No selling or sharing of personal information, as those terms are used in United States state privacy laws. We have nothing to sell.

4. Location

Fernweh asks for location access for two purposes, and only when you use the features that need it:

• Recording a route. When you start tracking a hike, the app reads your location repeatedly to draw the path you walked. This continues while the app is in the background so tracking doesn’t stop when your screen locks or you switch apps. The recorded route is written to the entry on your device.
• Better place search. When you search for a location to attach to an entry, the app can use your approximate current location to prefer nearby results. This is optional — search works without location permission, just with less relevant ordering.

Location data is never sent to BearMo Studios. You can revoke location access at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → Fernweh; route tracking will stop working, and the rest of the app will continue to function.

5. Photos

When you attach photos to an entry, iOS shows you its own photo picker. Fernweh receives only the specific images you select — it does not get access to browse your photo library. Selected images are resized and stored with the entry inside the app. They are not uploaded anywhere.

6. Apple and other third parties

Fernweh contains no third-party SDKs. It does use Apple’s own frameworks, and two of them involve Apple’s services:

• Apple Maps / MapKit. Displaying maps and searching for places sends the map region and your search text to Apple. Apple handles that request under Apple’s Privacy Policy; Apple states that Maps is designed so these requests are not associated with your Apple Account. We do not receive the content of your searches.
• The App Store. Downloading the app and managing a subscription happen entirely within Apple’s systems.

We have no data-sharing agreements with anyone, and we do not use processors, hosting providers or CRM tools that touch your journal, because your journal never leaves your phone.

7. Subscriptions and purchases

Fernweh’s subscription is sold and processed by Apple through the App Store. We never see your payment card, billing address or Apple Account details. Apple provides us with aggregated, non-identifying sales and subscription reports (for example, how many subscriptions were active in a country in a month). Whether your subscription is active is verified on your device against Apple’s receipt, not against any server of ours.

8. If you email support

If you contact support@bearmostudios.com, we will have your email address, your message, and anything you choose to include (screenshots, device model, a description of the problem). We use it only to answer you. Support email is handled through our email provider, and we keep correspondence no longer than we need it to resolve your issue and handle any follow-up — ordinarily no more than 24 months. We do not add you to a mailing list.

9. Backups and device transfer

Because your journal is stored on your device, it is included in your iPhone’s backups if you have them enabled — whether that is iCloud Backup or an encrypted backup to a computer. Those backups are managed by Apple under Apple’s terms, not by us. We strongly recommend keeping backups turned on: if you lose or reset your phone and have no backup, your journal cannot be recovered by us or by anyone else.

10. Deleting your data

You are in control of all of it:

• Delete an individual entry inside the app to remove it and its photos and route.
• Delete the Fernweh app to remove the entire journal from that device. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription — see the Terms of Use.
• Remaining copies in your device backups are removed according to your backup settings and Apple’s retention.

There is nothing for us to delete on our side, but the data deletion page explains how to make a request in writing if you want one on record.

11. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of personal information a company holds about you, and to not be discriminated against for exercising them — for example under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) or the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In our case, exercising these rights is unusually simple: we do not hold personal information about you, other than support correspondence you have sent us. You can ask us to delete that correspondence at any time by emailing support@bearmostudios.com. For the data in the app itself, you already hold it, and you can access, export, correct or destroy it directly on your device without asking anyone. We do not use your information for automated decision-making or profiling.

12. Children

Fernweh is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Because the app collects no personal information from anyone, we have no children’s data to hold or delete.

13. If this ever changes

We are considering an optional cloud sync feature in a future version, so a journal can survive a lost phone and move to a new device. If we build it, it will be opt-in, this policy will be updated before that version ships, and the update will say plainly what is stored, where, and for how long. We will not quietly start uploading your journal under this version of the policy.

For any change, we will update the “last updated” date at the top of this page and raise the version number. Material changes will also be noted in the app’s App Store release notes.

14. Contact

Privacy questions, and everything else, go to the one address: support@bearmostudios.com.

BearMo Studios LLC
4030 Wake Forest Rd STE 349
Raleigh, NC 27609
United States