Owly privacy policy

The short version

Owly has no account, no sign-in and no Company31 server. Your notes are ordinary files in a folder you chose, on your own device. We do not collect your notes, and we could not read them if we wanted to. There is no analytics, no tracking, no advertising and no crash-reporting service in any of the apps.

Two things can leave your device, and neither goes to us. The first is entirely your choice: if you pick a cloud AI provider and enter your own API key, the AI features send that provider the text they need to answer you. Choose Apple Intelligence or, on the Mac, a model running on your own machine, and nothing leaves at all. The second is speech: when you dictate, or when you speak a note into your watch, your iPhone asks Apple’s speech recognition to turn it into words — on the device itself wherever your language supports that, and on Apple’s servers where it does not.

You can change your mind at any time, and the rest of this page explains exactly what is sent, to whom, and how to stop it.

What Owly stores, and where

Everything Owly keeps is on your own device or in storage you control. Company31 receives none of it.

What the apps write, and where it lives

What	Where it lives
Your notes	Plain Markdown files in the folder you chose. On iPhone and iPad that is the app’s own Documents folder, visible in the Files app under On My iPhone or On My iPad, unless you pick an iCloud Drive folder instead.
Images and attachments	In your vault folder, beside the notes that reference them.
Sketches	In your vault, in the Attachments folder, as an ordinary .png image the note links to, with a small .owlysketch file beside it that keeps the pen strokes so the sketch can be edited again. Marking up a photo saves a new image and leaves the original photo where it was.
Recordings	In your vault, in an Attachments folder beside the notes, as ordinary .m4a files. The note a recording makes links to its file. Nothing is uploaded: if your vault is in iCloud Drive, Apple syncs the recording as it syncs every other file in that folder.
A recording on its way from your watch	Two short stops, both on devices you own. On the watch, in the app’s own folder, until your iPhone confirms it has written the note — then it is deleted. On the iPhone, a working copy in the app’s support folder while the words are being recognised, deleted as soon as they are. If your vault cannot be reached at the moment the words are ready, the words wait in the app’s preferences store on the iPhone, and are written into the note and dropped from there as soon as it can be. The recording that is kept is the one in your vault.
Deleted notes	A hidden .trash folder inside your vault, until you empty it.
The search index	A database in the app’s support folder on each device, not in your vault, rebuilt from your notes. It holds a copy of their text and meaning-based search vectors computed on your device. On iPhone and iPad it is deleted with the app and left out of backups. On the Mac it is in ~/Library/Application Support/Owly/Indexes and is not removed when you delete the app; delete that folder to remove it.
Settings	Your device’s standard preferences store: which folder is open, which AI provider and model you chose, capture and daily-note preferences, and whether you have finished onboarding. Never an API key. The only note content it can hold is a watch recording’s recognised words while they wait for your vault, as above; it also keeps the paths of notes that a watch capture or a reminder tap is waiting to act on.
API keys, if you add one	Your device’s Keychain, marked “this device only”: it is never synced to another device, and although your device backup includes it, Apple encrypts it so it can be restored only to the same device. Owly displays keys masked.

The only things that leave your device

1. AI requests you make, to the provider you chose

Cloud AI stays off until you choose a provider and add your own key; on iPhone and iPad, Owly also shows you what would be sent and asks you to agree first. On a device with Apple Intelligence, the on-device features, such as suggesting a title for an untitled note, work from the start and send nothing anywhere. If you choose a provider that runs in the cloud — Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, OpenAI, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you enter yourself — you supply your own API key, and Owly sends your request directly to that provider over HTTPS. It does not pass through Company31.

What is sent depends on what you asked:

• A question asked from inside a note: the text of that note, plus whatever other notes fit the question (as for a vault question below), and the recent turns of the conversation. A question that names the note, such as “summarise this note”, sends that note alone; so does turning on This note only in the chat’s menu on iPhone and iPad, or choosing the This note scope on the Mac.
• A question about your vault: as much of your vault as the model can hold. If it all fits, Owly sends every note in full. If it does not, Owly sends the most relevant notes until the space runs out. Either way it also sends the note titles and the folder names, and it tells you on screen which of the two it did.
• Rewriting or tidying: the note, or the part of it you selected.
• Filing suggestions: the notes being filed, their paths and the names of your folders. When a note is asked about on its own, the titles and folders of up to five of your already-filed notes that read most like it go with it as hints; the comparison that picks them runs on your device.
• Saved web pages and stylesheets: if your vault holds .html or .css files, the text Owly reads from them goes with a question the same way as your notes’ text. Their links are never sent.
• Naming an untitled note: up to 1,500 characters of it. This one is automatic — it happens when you leave an untitled note that has enough text in it — so if you would rather nothing was ever sent without you pressing something, use Apple Intelligence or a local model.
• Tidying dictated text, on iPhone: the words you just dictated, if you have turned that option on.

Owly never sends your notes to a provider you have not chosen, and never sends them to more than one. Search vectors are always computed on your device and are never sent anywhere.

What your chosen provider does with what it receives is governed by that provider’s own terms, not by this policy, and you are their customer rather than ours. Before you choose one, read theirs: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI. Company31 receives nothing from these exchanges and has no access to them.

Owly sends your data to a third party only when you choose a cloud AI provider, and only to that provider, under your own account and key. Company31 has no agreement with them and receives nothing. Before you choose one, check that its terms protect your data at least as well as this policy does.

2. A note spoken into an Apple Watch

The watch app has no vault and cannot reach one. When you press Record, the watch records you through its own microphone, for up to twelve seconds, and writes the file to the watch. At twelve seconds the recording stops on its own and the microphone closes. If you leave the app first, by pressing the Digital Crown or opening something else, the recording stops then and the microphone closes. The file is held on the watch until your iPhone confirms it has written the note, and is then deleted. It travels over Apple’s WatchConnectivity, directly between two devices you own. That hop does not pass through Company31 and does not go over the internet; what happens next, on the iPhone, is the paragraph below.

Your iPhone is what turns the recording into words, because watchOS has no speech recognition of its own. The iPhone saves the audio into your vault first and writes a note that links it, so a capture is never lost, and then asks Apple’s speech recognition to read it — on your device wherever your language supports that, and on Apple’s servers under Apple’s privacy policy where it does not. The transcript becomes the note. The recording stays in your vault, under Attachments, linked from the note; Owly does not delete it and does not send it anywhere else. Company31 never receives it.

You can type on the watch instead, with the Type button, and nothing is recorded at all.

3. Recording a meeting

Your iPhone does the recording, never the watch, and the audio is written straight into your vault when you stop. It is a file in your folder like any other. Owly does not transcribe it and does not send it anywhere — not to us, not to an AI provider, not to Apple.

While a recording is running, the main note list shows a Recording bar with the elapsed time and a Stop button, and iOS shows its microphone indicator the whole time, whether it was started on the phone or from the wrist. Recording someone else may require their knowledge or consent where you live; that is your responsibility, and Owly will never start recording on its own.

4. Dictation, through Apple

When you dictate, Owly uses Apple’s speech recognition. It asks for recognition to happen on your device, and on a device and language that support it, your voice never leaves. Where the language is not supported on device, Apple processes the audio on Apple’s servers under Apple’s privacy policy. Company31 never receives your audio.

5. Looking for a local model, on your own machine

On the Mac, Owly checks two addresses on your own computer — 127.0.0.1 on ports 11434 and 1234 — to see whether you are running Ollama or LM Studio. That request never leaves your machine. If you use one of those, your notes go to that program on your own hardware and no further.

6. Nothing else

Sketches are files in your vault like any other, and Owly never sends an image to anyone — not to Company31, and not to an AI provider. When you ask Owly to turn handwriting into text, Apple’s Vision framework reads the writing on the device itself, and nothing is sent to do it. The text it finds goes into your note, where it is treated like anything you typed. The Apple Pencil needs no permission and Owly asks for none.

There is no analytics of any kind, no advertising, no tracking, no third-party SDK, and no update-checking service. None of the apps contains any third-party code that phones home. Owly does not use the advertising identifier and does not track you across other apps or websites, as Apple defines tracking.

One indirect exception is worth naming: the iPhone app is uploaded to Apple with debug symbols, so if you have told iOS to share crash diagnostics with developers, Apple may show us an anonymous crash report that names the part of the code that failed. That is Apple’s mechanism, under your control in iOS Settings, and it contains no note content.

iCloud

Owly has no cloud of its own. If you keep your vault in iCloud Drive, Apple syncs those files between your devices exactly as it syncs any other folder, under Apple’s terms. If you back up your iPhone or iPad to iCloud, the notes stored in the app’s own folder are included in that backup. In both cases the relationship is between you and Apple; Company31 has no access to it.

Children

Owly is a general-purpose writing tool and is not directed at children. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.

Retention, deletion and withdrawing consent

Company31 holds no data about you from these apps, so there is nothing for us to retain or delete. What exists, exists on your device:

• To delete a note: delete it in Owly and empty the trash, or delete the file in Finder or the Files app.
• To delete a recording: delete its file from the Attachments folder in your vault. Deleting the note that links to it does not remove the audio, the same way deleting a note does not remove a photo it shows.
• To delete everything: delete your vault folder, and delete the app. On the Mac, also delete ~/Library/Application Support/Owly. Nothing of yours remains anywhere else.
• To stop anything being sent to a cloud provider: switch your AI provider to Apple Intelligence, a local model, or none. Remove your API key in the app’s AI settings, and withdraw consent there if you granted it. Egress stops immediately.
• To delete what a provider already holds: that is between you and them, using the account and key you created with that provider.

If you email us for support and send us a note or a screenshot as part of your question, we keep that correspondence only as long as it takes to help you, and we do not add you to any list.

Your rights

Australian privacy law, the GDPR and similar laws give you rights over personal information a company holds about you: access, correction, deletion, portability and objection. Because we hold none from these apps, there is nothing to exercise those rights against — but if you believe we hold something about you, write to us and we will answer. You may also complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Changes to this policy

If the apps ever start doing something this page does not describe, this page changes first, and the date at the top changes with it. A change that materially affects what leaves your device will also be told to you inside the app.

Contact

Email

connect [at] company31.com

Publisher

Company31 Pty Ltd, ACN 698 697 166, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

On the App Store

The seller is shown as Manuel Re, the Apple developer account Owly is published under. The apps are made and supported by Company31 Pty Ltd.

The apps

Owly for Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch