Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2026

The short version: Folio Writer collects no personal data, contains no analytics or trackers, and has no accounts. Your manuscripts never leave your own devices except through a cloud service you choose to store them in, or when you compile on iPhone or iPad — where a copy is sent only to typeset your file and deleted right after.

What we collect

Nothing. Folio Writer has no analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash-reporting service, no advertising, and no user accounts. We do not see your documents, your file names, your usage, or your identity, because none of it is ever sent to us.

Where your work lives

Every Folio Writer project is a folder of plain files — Markdown, Typst, and BibTeX — stored wherever you put it: your local disk, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or any other Files location. Folio Writer reads and writes those files directly. It does not upload them anywhere, and there is no Folio Writer server involved in editing, saving, or syncing. (Compiling on iPhone and iPad is the one exception — see below.)

If you keep a project in a cloud folder, that cloud provider (Apple, Dropbox, and so on) syncs the files under their own privacy policy — exactly as they would for any other document. Folio Writer is only a reader and writer of those files; it adds no layer of its own.

Compiling on iPhone and iPad

iPhone and iPad can’t run the typesetting tools (pandoc and Typst are desktop programs), so tapping Compile on those devices sends a readable copy of the manuscript you are compiling — its text and the figures it references — to the Folio compile server over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection. It is typeset in memory and deleted the moment the compile finishes; it is never stored, logged, or used for anything else.

You can avoid any upload entirely:

Preview ▸ Share on iPhone and iPad exports a PDF or Markdown file rendered right on your device — nothing is sent anywhere.
Folio Writer for Mac compiles locally with the full pandoc / Typst toolchain — no upload, and more output options. Your project syncs over, so the file is a click away there.
Self-hosting: point the apps at your own folio-web server, so compiles run on infrastructure you control.

Settings on your device

Your preferences — editor font, appearance, writing-session mode, the list of recent projects — are stored on-device using the system’s standard settings storage (UserDefaults). They stay on your device and are never transmitted.

Network access

Folio Writer makes almost no network requests. The two exceptions are strictly local in purpose:

The live preview renders in a system web view, which requires the network capability to function even for local content — but no external request is made to display your document.
Typst, when you compile a Typst document that imports a package, may fetch that package from Typst’s public registry — the same way it would on the command line.
Compiling on iPhone and iPad sends the manuscript you are compiling to the Folio compile server, because the device can’t typeset locally — see Compiling on iPhone and iPad. On the Mac, and via Preview ▸ Share on iPhone and iPad, nothing is sent.

Apart from compiling on iPhone and iPad — where the copy sent is used only to typeset your file and then deleted — no request Folio Writer makes contains, or is about, the contents of your writing.

Required-reason APIs

Apple asks apps to declare certain system APIs and why they use them. Folio Writer’s uses are entirely local:

User defaults	To store your editor and app preferences on this device.
File timestamps	To tell whether a file changed on another device (so syncing is safe), and to show you the dates of snapshots, versions, and recovered copies.

Children

Folio Writer is a productivity tool that collects no data from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

Website visit counts

This website (not the apps) counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics — a cookie-less, anonymous measurement: no cookies, no identifiers, no cross-site tracking, aggregate numbers only.

If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be posted here with a new date. Since we collect nothing, changes will only ever clarify — never expand — what the app does.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Use the contact form — the right category is preselected.