Drop Recipe

Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 24, 2026

Drop Recipe has no accounts, no ads and no tracking, and your recipe library lives on your device. This policy explains the few things we do handle, on iPhone and on Android, and what you can do about them.

One policy, both apps. Sections marked iPhone or Android apply only to that app; everything unmarked applies to both.

1. Who We Are and What This Covers

Drop Recipe is made by Pine Mobile Apps (“we,” “us”). This policy covers the Drop Recipe app on iPhone and on Android, the recipe-processing service behind them, and the public share pages on droprecipe.app. It is one document for both apps: anything marked iPhone or Android applies only to that app; everything else applies to both.

2. No Account, No Sign-In

There is no sign-up, no login, no password, and no email address collected. We never ask who you are, and neither app contains any account or authentication system. Everything below is either stored on your own device or handled under an anonymous, randomly generated identifier that is not linked to your identity.

3. What Stays on Your Device

Your recipe library — recipes, ingredients, steps, photos you attach, meal plans, shopping lists, cooking progress, food preferences, and your optional local profile (display name, short bio, avatar) — is stored on your device. We do not hold a copy of your library, and we cannot browse it.

iPhone

On iPhone, that data is also synced through Apple iCloud (CloudKit) to your other devices signed in to the same Apple Account, and is preserved if you delete and reinstall the app. It is protected by your Apple Account and Apple’s iCloud security. You can view or delete it in the app or through your device’s iCloud settings.

Android

On Android, that data is stored in an app-private database on your device (drop_recipe.db) together with app-private image files. It is not synced to any Drop Recipe cloud account — there is none. If Android Backup is enabled on your device (Settings → System → Backup), Android copies this app’s data, including your recipe database, your saved food preferences and your recipe images, into your own Google Drive backup and onto a new device when you transfer. That backup belongs to your Google Account, is encrypted by Android, and we have no access to it; you can switch it off, per-app, in your device’s backup settings. The app’s internal settings file — which holds the anonymous analytics identifier described below — is deliberately excluded from that backup. Uninstalling the app deletes the on-device copy.

4. Usage Analytics

Both apps send first-party usage analytics to our own server. There is no third-party analytics or attribution SDK in either app, and this data is never used for advertising. Specifically, we receive:

We use this to understand which features are used, to fix crashes and failures, and to measure how many people upgrade. In the EEA and UK we rely on our legitimate interest in operating and improving the app; you can ask us to delete this data at any time (see “Your Choices and Rights”).

5. Recipe Import, AI Features and Prompts

When you import a recipe from a link, a video, a photo, or pasted text, or ask the AI to generate one, that content is sent to our recipe-processing service and on to the AI provider that extracts or generates the recipe, plus — for videos — a transcript provider and a provider that fetches public post metadata and thumbnails. We use it only to return your result. Results are cached against the source link so the same link does not have to be processed twice; that cache holds the recipe, not you. These requests carry no analytics identifier and no account, so the recipe content is not tied back to you — with one exception, described in the next section.

6. Food Preferences, Allergies and Meal Planning

The app lets you save food preferences: allergies, dietary restrictions, disliked ingredients, a daily calorie target, household size, cooking style and which days you cook. These are stored on your device, as part of your library. When you use the AI weekly planner or ask the AI to generate a recipe, the preferences relevant to that request — including your allergies and dietary restrictions — are sent to our service and on to the AI provider so the plan can respect them, along with a short summary of the recipes already in your library (titles, times and nutrition figures). We do not store the resulting plan on our servers, and we do not use this information for anything other than producing your result.

Some countries treat allergy and dietary information as health-related. We treat it that way too: it is used only to fulfil the request you made, it is never sold, never used for advertising, and never combined with your analytics history to profile you. One narrow exception, stated plainly: if you are on the free tier, a weekly-plan request also carries your anonymous install identifier so we can enforce the “one free plan preview per week” limit. All that identifier is used for is a counter — we store the fact that an identifier used its free preview in a given week, and nothing about the plan itself.

7. Photos

Photos are handled in two different ways, with two different retentions. Please read both.

Scanning a photo to import a recipe — not stored. When you scan a cookbook page, a screenshot or a handwritten card, the app resizes and re-encodes the image on your device (which strips the original photo’s metadata, including any GPS location) and uploads it to our service, which passes it to the AI vision provider to read the text. We do not save these images: they are processed in memory to produce the recipe and are not written to our storage. Text recognition also runs on your device before upload. On Android the app requests no camera or photo-library permission at all — it uses the system camera app and the Android photo picker, so you choose exactly which images it ever sees.

Sharing a recipe — stored publicly for up to one year. If you tap Share and create a link, the recipe’s text and its photo are uploaded to our servers and served publicly at droprecipe.app/r/… to anyone who has the link. This is the one case where a photo of yours is stored by us, and it is stored in a form anyone with the link can see. Shared recipes and their images are deleted automatically after one year, and you can delete a share yourself at any time from the app — that removes both the recipe and the image from our servers. You can also email us the link and we will remove it. Share pages are excluded from search-engine indexing, and every share page carries a reporting link.

8. Purchases

Drop Recipe is free to download, with optional paid plans. We never see or receive your payment card details — the store handles payment end to end. We do record that a purchase happened (product, timestamp, subscription status) in the analytics data described above, so we can tell whether the app is paying for itself.

iPhone

Purchases are processed by Apple through the App Store. We use a subscription-management provider to validate and restore your entitlement across your devices; it receives the purchase receipt and basic device information needed to do that.

Android

Purchases are processed by Google through Google Play Billing. Your entitlement is calculated on your device directly from Google Play — the Android app sends no purchase receipt to us and uses no third-party subscription-management provider. Google processes the payment under its own privacy policy.

9. Notifications

We do not send marketing or promotional messages, and notifications are never used to track you.

iPhone

On iPhone, your device may receive silent background notifications through Apple’s iCloud and push services so your recipes and lists stay in sync across your devices.

Android

On Android, the app schedules reminders locally on your device — cooking timers and occasional re-engagement nudges such as a weekly meal-plan reminder. There is no push service and no Firebase: nothing leaves your device, and nothing is sent to us to trigger them. Android asks your permission before the first notification, and you can revoke it at any time in your device settings.

10. Technical and Connection Data

When either app contacts our servers, our infrastructure provider (Cloudflare) automatically receives normal connection data — IP address, request time and basic request details. It is used to deliver the response, to rate-limit and block abuse, and to keep the service secure. It is kept briefly at the network layer and is not written into our analytics database or used to identify you. Traffic is encrypted in transit.

11. Service Providers

We share the minimum necessary with a small number of providers, each under its own privacy and security terms:

12. No Advertising, No Tracking, No Sale of Data

Neither app contains advertising, an advertising SDK, or any cross-app or cross-site tracking, and we do not use cookies for tracking. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined under US state privacy laws.

13. How Long We Keep Things

On-device data (both platforms) stays until you delete it or uninstall — plus, on Android, in your own Google backup until you delete that. Shared recipes and their images: up to one year, or until you delete the share. Cached import results: kept against the source link so repeat imports are fast. Analytics events and the install row: kept while the app is operating so we can compare periods, and deleted on request. Scanned photos: not retained. Network-layer logs: short-lived, for security.

14. Your Choices and Rights

Most of your data never leaves your device, so you are in direct control: delete recipes, plans, lists and preferences in the app; delete a shared link from the app to remove it from our servers; uninstall to remove the local database. On Android you can also turn off Android Backup for this app, and clearing the app’s data resets the anonymous analytics identifier. Depending on where you live (for example the EEA, the UK, or California), you may also have the right to access, correct, delete, port, or object to the processing of personal data we hold.

Requesting deletion. Email info@pinemobileapps.com with the subject “Data deletion request”. To delete a shared recipe, send us its link — that is all we need. To delete analytics data, tell us as much as you can about the install (approximate first-use date, device model, country, app version); because we hold no name, email or account, there are cases where we genuinely cannot single out your rows, and we will tell you honestly if that happens rather than pretending otherwise. We respond within the time applicable law requires, and at the latest within 30 days.

15. International Transfers

Our providers may process data on servers outside your country, including in the United States. Wherever it is processed, we require providers to protect it under terms consistent with this policy and with applicable transfer safeguards.

16. Children’s Privacy

Drop Recipe is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

17. Changes

We may update this policy. Significant changes will be reflected here with a new “last updated” date and communicated through the app.

18. Contact

For any privacy question, request or complaint, contact Pine Mobile Apps at info@pinemobileapps.com.