Why there is no account
Better Translate Team ·
There is no sign-up screen. There is no password to forget and no email to give us.
Nothing you translate is attached to a person, because there is no person on file.
How a paid app works without one
Apple handles the payment and tells us one thing: whether the Apple Account on this phone holds a
subscription. Not who you are, not your card, not your billing address. If you reinstall, or get a
new phone, Restore Purchases asks the App Store the same question again and the app unlocks.
That is the whole mechanism. It is also why cancelling happens in iOS Settings rather than in our
app: we never hold the subscription, so we could not hold it hostage even if we wanted to.
What it means for what we know about you
- No account, so nothing to link a translation to.
- No analytics and no advertising identifiers, so no behavioural record either.
- Your audio never leaves the phone. Speech becomes text on the device.
- Your menu photograph is read on the device too. On a fast connection it is sent with its
text for that one request, because the model reads it more accurately, and nothing keeps it.
- Your conversation history stays on the device. Deleting the app deletes it.
The honest limit
Text does leave, because translating it is the entire job. What leaves is the transcribed words,
the language pair, and any context note you wrote. It goes over an encrypted connection, is held
only for as long as the request takes, and is not tied to an identifier because there isn't one.
So do not type anything into a free-text context note you would not send to a translation
service. It goes verbatim. It is not the place for a password or a card number.