Route Foundry privacy policy

Effective 22 August 2026 · Applies to the Route Foundry iPhone app, published by Divith Technologies · Website privacy policy is separate

Route Foundry is local-first by design. This document says exactly what data the app touches, where it goes, and why — so the claim is checkable against the code, not just asserted.

The short version, which is also what the app tells you in Settings:

Your routes stay on this device unless you export or share them.

What the app collects

Nothing. There is no account, no application backend, no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, and no telemetry of any kind. Nothing you do in the app is ever sent to Divith Technologies.

That is a structural fact rather than a promise about restraint: Divith Technologies runs no server for Route Foundry. There is nowhere for your data to go, no database that could be breached, and no logs to subpoena. The app is paid, and even that involves no server of ours — Apple handles the payment, and the purchase is verified on your iPhone. See The purchase.

Two things the app does reach out to are third parties, described in full below and never given anything about you: Apple's mapping services and Amazon's public terrain dataset.

We therefore hold no personal data about you, have no user database, and have nothing to sell, share or breach. There is no advertising and no tracking, and the app is not part of any data broker relationship.

What's stored, and where

Everything lives in the app's local container on your device:

Routes (geometry, waypoints, cues, notes) — SQLite plus file storage under Application Support.
Recorded tracks — append-only JSON Lines files under Application Support.
Imported map packs (raster MBTiles files you supply) — copied into Application Support.
Imported routing packs (Valhalla tile extracts you supply) — copied into Application Support.

Preferences — units, map style, which offline pack is active, the last map region — are in UserDefaults. Route content never is.

None of this is in iCloud, an app backend, or any third-party service. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

Route files are written with iOS file protection set to completeUntilFirstUserAuthentication: encrypted at rest, and unreadable on a device that has not been unlocked since boot. Not complete, which would make them unreadable while the device is locked — which is exactly when a track being recorded in your pocket needs them. There is no separate app-level encryption layer, because there is no server-side copy to protect against and the platform's protection covers the actual threat model.

Location

Location is used only for two features, both of which you have to explicitly start:

Recording a track as you move (the Record tab). This requests When In Use authorization the first time you use it — never on launch, and never as a side effect of drawing a map. A recording keeps running with the screen locked (a CLBackgroundActivitySession), which is why the app declares the location background mode — but that session exists only while a recording is actually running, and ends when you stop it.
Showing your position on the map, when you press the locate button. Same authorization, same "only while you asked for it" scope.

Every other part of the app — planning, editing, importing, exporting, the map itself — works with location permission denied, and is tested that way.

Location is never used to build a location history, never logged anywhere off-device, and never used for anything other than the screen you are looking at while it is active.

Network access

The app makes network requests only from features that are inherently online and say so:

Apple Maps draws the online basemap. This is the default map, so the map itself is an online feature until you install an offline pack.
Smart Routing calls Apple's MKDirections with the two points being routed.
Place search calls Apple's MKLocalSearch with the text you typed. A literal coordinate pair ("47.4816, 11.0958") is resolved on the device and sends nothing.
Elevation is calculated on your iPhone from terrain images the app fetches from the AWS Terrain Tiles public open-data bucket, hosted by Amazon Web Services. A route you draw carries no height information of its own, so this is where ascent, descent and the profile chart come from. Your route is never sent. What is sent is a tile number — three integers, like terrarium/12/2179/1410.png — identifying roughly a 10 km square of the world. There is no API key, no account and no identifier of any kind in the request, and it goes to Amazon, not to us. Tiles are cached on your iPhone permanently, so an area is fetched once and works offline from then on.

The first three are Apple Maps services, subject to Apple's own privacy terms; the fourth is Amazon Web Services, subject to the AWS privacy notice and the Terrain Tiles dataset terms. Route Foundry adds no tracking of its own on top of any of them, and sends no identifier that would tie those calls together.

Each is switchable off. Install an offline map pack for the basemap, draw segments by hand instead of routing them, type coordinates instead of searching, and turn off Look up elevation in Settings → Planning. With all four off the app makes no network requests at all.

Every other feature — offline map rendering, offline Valhalla routing, route editing, recording, and GPX/TCX/KML/FIT/.routefoundry import and export — makes zero network requests. The app never bulk-downloads from public tile endpoints; offline maps come only from files you import.

Turning on Airplane Mode leaves route planning, editing, import, export working, with an offline pack for the map and manual drawing in place of Smart Routing. Elevation still works for any area you have already planned in, because the terrain cache is never cleared on its own.

Terrain data from Amazon (the one third-party data call)

To calculate elevation, Route Foundry downloads terrain images from a public dataset hosted by Amazon Web Services. This is the only third-party data source the app uses that is not Apple, and we want it stated plainly rather than buried.

A route you draw on a map carries no height information. To show you ascent, descent and an elevation profile, the app has to know how high the ground is along it. It gets that from Terrain Tiles, a free, global, open dataset originally published by Mapzen (now a Linux Foundation project) and hosted on the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative.

What is sent, exactly:

An ordinary HTTPS GET for one image, addressed by three integers — for example terrarium/12/2179/1410.png. That identifies roughly a 10 km square of the world.
No API key. No account. No device identifier, advertising identifier or user ID. Nothing that says which app is asking. No request body at all.
Never your route. Not its points, not its shape, not its name, not its start or end. A tile number cannot express a decimal degree, and the app has an automated test asserting that no request it makes contains one.

What comes back: a PNG image of terrain heights. Nothing else. The elevation is then calculated on your iPhone.

What we receive: nothing. These requests go to Amazon, not to Divith Technologies. We have no visibility into them, no logs of them, and no relationship with Amazon in which they would be shared with us.

Being straight about the limit of this: while a request is being served, Amazon's infrastructure can see that some device at some IP address asked for a particular 10 km square. That is genuinely information about roughly where you are planning, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. It is governed by the AWS privacy notice. Three things limit it: the request carries nothing that identifies you or links two requests together; tiles are cached on your iPhone permanently, so an area is fetched once and never again; and you can turn the whole feature off with Settings → Calculate elevation, after which the app makes no terrain request at all.

Route Foundry hosts no map, terrain or routing data of its own, and downloads none on your behalf. Offline maps are files you supply.

One clarification, to avoid a fair confusion. This website is served by Google's Firebase Hosting, and its own request logs are covered by the website privacy policy. The app contacts no Google or Firebase service of any kind — no Firebase code is even linked into it. Reading this page and using the app are entirely separate things.

The purchase

Route Foundry is free to download with a 21-day trial of every feature, and then a one-time unlock. There is no subscription, no automatic charge when the trial ends, and no account.

Apple handles the payment in full. Divith Technologies never sees your card, your bank details or your Apple Account. Apple tells us aggregate sales figures, as it does for every developer; it does not tell us who bought anything.

The app decides what is unlocked by reading Apple's own cryptographically signed transaction, on your iPhone, through StoreKit. That information is never transmitted anywhere by the app. There is no licence server, no activation, no phone-home check. An unlocked copy keeps working with the phone in airplane mode indefinitely.

Restoring your purchase on a new device goes through Apple's own Restore Purchases, using your Apple Account — not through us. We could not look up your purchase if you asked us to, because we hold no record of it.

App Store privacy details

Apple asks every developer to declare, category by category, what their app collects. Route Foundry's declaration is the shortest one the form allows — Data Not Collected — and this is what that means in each category Apple lists:

Apple's category	Collected?	What actually happens
Contact info, identifiers, financial info	No	There is no account and no sign-in. Route Foundry never sees a card, a bank detail or an Apple Account.
Purchases	No	Route Foundry is a paid app with a 21-day trial and a one-time unlock. Apple handles the payment, and the purchase is verified entirely on your iPhone against Apple's own signed transaction. Nothing about it is ever sent to us — there is no server to send it to.
Location	No	Used on the device while you are looking at the map or recording a track, and stored on the device if you save that track. It is never sent to us or to any analytics service.
User content	No	Routes, tracks and notes are files in the app's own container on your iPhone. They leave only when you export or share them.
Usage data, diagnostics	No	No analytics SDK, no crash reporter of ours, no telemetry. A diagnostics report is generated only when you ask for one, and shared only if you choose to send it.
Tracking	No	Nothing is tracked across apps or websites, so App Tracking Transparency never needs to ask. No advertising identifier is read.

Apple's declaration covers data collected by the developer. The four online features above are requests your device makes to Apple or to Amazon and that we never see, which is why they are declared as no collection — and why they are described in full here rather than left to a checkbox.

Account deletion

There is no account, so there is nothing to delete. Route Foundry never creates one, never asks you to sign in, and holds no server-side copy of anything. Deleting the app removes its data from your device; anything you exported is a file you already own. There is no request to submit and no waiting period.

Individual routes can be deleted inside the app at any time, with a recently-deleted route recoverable until you leave the library screen.

Children

Route Foundry is not directed at children and collects no personal data from anyone, including children. Because nothing is collected, there is no children's data for us to hold, verify or delete.

Third-party dependencies

The app links a small number of open-source libraries — MapLibre Native, GRDB, ZIPFoundation, and Valhalla's mobile routing engine — all of which run entirely on-device and none of which phone home. The exact pinned versions are in the project's package manifests, and their licences are listed inside the app under Settings → About → Acknowledgements.

Map data you import carries its own attribution, which the app displays on the map rather than hiding.

Privacy manifest

PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy is Apple's machine-readable declaration of the same facts, shipped inside the app bundle. It records no tracking, no tracking domains and no collected data types, and declares the two required-reason API categories the app actually uses:

UserDefaults (CA92.1) — the app's own settings: units, map style, default activity, last map position, active offline pack.
File timestamps (DDA9.1, C617.1) — dates on recordings inside the app's container, and the size of a map or route file you picked with the document picker.

Nothing there leaves the device, and nothing is used to identify anyone.

Diagnostics

Settings can produce a diagnostics report as a plain-text file you choose a destination for. It is never uploaded — there is nowhere for it to go. It contains version and capability information and counts only: no coordinates, no route names, no file paths and no identifiers. There is a test asserting exactly that, so it stays true.

If you send us a diagnostics report with a support request, you are sending it deliberately, by email, and we use it only to answer that request. See the support page for what we do with it.

Exporting your data

Everything you create can be exported in full — GPX, TCX, KML, FIT Course, or the native .routefoundry package — because the file is the product. The native format is documented and versioned, stores the complete document, and verifies its own checksums on read. There is no lock-in and no server-side copy to request or delete, because none exists.

Your rights

Data-protection law gives you rights over personal data a company holds about you — access, correction, erasure, portability and objection among them. In Route Foundry's case those rights are satisfied structurally: we hold nothing, so there is nothing to disclose, correct or erase on our side, and the app itself gives you complete export and deletion of your own data at any time.

Rights in respect of the small amount of data our website processes, and the legal detail behind them, are set out on the GDPR and your rights page.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of the app changes what it stores, where it sends data, or which permissions it needs, this page is updated before that version ships, and the effective date at the top changes with it. A change that introduces any data collection would also change the app's App Store privacy labels and its privacy manifest — those three have to agree, and keeping them in agreement is part of our release process.

Contact

Route Foundry is published by Divith Technologies, Kumta, Karnataka, India. Questions about this policy, or about anything in it you would like evidence for:

contactnaikprajwal@gmail.com