OvenbirdPrivacy
Privacy Policy.
Ovenbird is built so that your recipes are yours. Here’s exactly what that means.
What Ovenbird keeps, and where
Your recipes, photos, scanned pages, Meal Plan, grocery list, the things you keep At Home, and your settings are stored on your device. With Ovenbird Pro and iCloud turned on, they sync through your own iCloud account (Apple’s CloudKit), to your devices and to the people you choose to share your household with. We can’t see any of it. Apple’s privacy policy covers iCloud.
Sharing your household
With Ovenbird Pro you can share your household with up to five other people. Sharing uses Apple’s iCloud sharing: your recipes, Meal Plan, grocery list and At Home list stay in your iCloud, and the people you invite see and change the same ones from their devices. They need only an Apple Account. Apple shows everyone in a household the names or contact details of the others in it, as it does for any iCloud share. You can remove people or stop sharing at any time; someone who leaves, or is removed, no longer has the household on their devices. Ovenbird itself never sees who’s in your household or what’s shared.
Settings → Household → Sharing status shows what sync and sharing are doing on your device, to help if something goes wrong. It stays on your device; its Copy report button copies it as text only for you to paste wherever you choose.
Sending a recipe
When you send a recipe (a recipe’s ••• menu → Send recipe), Ovenbird hands it to the app you pick, such as Mail or Messages, and that app sends it to the people you choose. What goes is the recipe itself: its text and photo, a printable card, and a small Ovenbird file that adds it to the recipient’s Ovenbird. Ovenbird doesn’t see or keep who you send to.
What happens on your device
- Scanning: photos of recipe cards and pages are read on your device.
- Apple Intelligence: sorting scanned recipes, writing recipes from what you have, reading your Fill the week requests, sorting groceries and naming timers all run on your device.
- Voice: when you turn on listening in cook mode, speech is recognized on your device to hear commands like “next”. Audio isn’t recorded, stored or sent anywhere. Reading steps aloud also happens on your device.
When Ovenbird goes online
Ovenbird connects to the internet only to do what you ask, and only to these places:
- Websites you save from: when you save a recipe from a link, Ovenbird downloads that page. It may also visit a recipe’s own page to find a full-size version of its photo.
- Discover: the catalogue of dishes and their photos is downloaded from TheMealDB. Like any website, TheMealDB sees your device’s internet address when it’s asked for them.
- Web search: searching the web from inside Ovenbird opens Google search results; Google’s privacy policy applies to that search.
- iCloud and the App Store: syncing and purchases go through Apple. Purchases are handled by the App Store; we don’t receive your name, email or payment details.
Permissions Ovenbird may ask for
- Camera: to scan recipe cards and pages.
- Microphone and speech recognition: to hear commands in cook mode, only while listening is on.
- Alarms and notifications: so cook timers ring.
- Reminders: only to add your grocery list to the Reminders list you choose. Ovenbird doesn’t read your other reminders.
Apple Watch, Siri and widgets
The Apple Watch app gets today’s meals, the grocery list and cook mode from your iPhone directly. Siri, Shortcuts, Spotlight and widgets use information kept on your device.
If you write to us
If you email us, we use your message and address only to reply and to improve Ovenbird. We don’t share them, and we delete them on request.
Children
Ovenbird doesn’t collect personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with its date.
Contact
Questions about privacy: hello@ovenbird.app.