Privacy Policy

Better Translate. Last updated 20 October 2026.

Better Translate translates conversations and photos. It has no account, no sign-in and no email address for you. This page says exactly what leaves your phone.

The app is published on the App Store by Michael Ovcharenko. The translation service behind it is run by Ultim8 Holdings Inc., a New York corporation, which is the data controller for everything described below and the company to write to about any of it.

What never leaves your phone

• Audio. Speech is transcribed on the device itself. The recording is never uploaded and never stored.
• Your conversation history. Kept on the device. Deleting the app deletes it.

What does leave your phone

Only what is needed to translate, and only in order to translate it:

• The transcribed text of what you say, and the language pair.
• The text found in a photo, where each line sits in it, and the language pair. A photo is always read on the device first.
• On a fast connection, the photo itself, resized, because the translation model reads a page more accurately from the photo than from its text alone. On a slow connection, with Low Data Mode on, or with Speed set to Fast, the photo is not sent and its text goes alone.
• Whichever of those is sent is also used to tell whether the photo is a menu, a sign, a label, an ingredients list, a receipt or a document.
• Any context note you wrote, so the translation fits the situation.
• Recent turns of the current conversation, so pronouns and follow-ups make sense.
• If you turn on Where you are in Settings, the name of the town the phone is in, with its region and country, so a place name the transcriber misheard can be put back. It is off until you turn it on. The app asks for approximate location only, turns it into a name on the phone, and sends the name. Your position itself is never sent.

It is sent over an encrypted connection to servers we run, which pass it to a third-party AI provider (currently OpenAI) to be translated, and return the result. This is the AI processing that iOS asks you to be told about when it asks for microphone and camera access.

If you send feedback

After a few conversations the app asks you to rate it. Whatever you pick, the rating goes to Apple's own review sheet and nothing about it reaches us. Writing to us is separate: Send feedback in Settings opens a note you can send at any time.

If you write one and send it, three things reach our servers. The stars you pick on that page, what you typed, and the app's version number, which is there because "it stopped working" is unanswerable without it. Nothing else goes with it: no identifier, no device details, and nothing from any conversation or photo you have translated. Leave the note empty and nothing is sent.

The note is free text and we read it exactly as you wrote it, so keep out of it anything you would not want us to see.

How long it is kept

Our relay servers do not keep a database of translations, and nothing you say or photograph is written to disk. A conversation is held in the relay's memory while it is going on, so each turn can be translated with the ones before it: the recent turns, any context note, and the town name if you turned that on. It is dropped when the conversation ends, or after 45 minutes with no new turn, and whenever the server restarts. The text of a photo is held only for as long as that one request takes, and so is the photo itself when it is sent.

Like any web server, ours keep ordinary request logs: the time, the address a request came from, which part of the service it asked for, and for a photo how many lines it had, whether the photo itself was sent, and what kind of page it was. The logs never contain the words or the photo themselves. Our hosting provider holds them for a limited period and then they roll off.

Our AI provider retains request data for a limited period under its own policy for abuse monitoring, currently up to 30 days, and does not use it to train models on our account.

A feedback note is the one thing written down rather than passed through. It goes into our server's log output, which our hosting provider holds for a limited period and then rolls off. It is not put in a database, not attached to any identifier, and not linked to anything you have translated.

What we do not do

• No analytics, no tracking, no advertising identifiers, no third-party SDKs for either.
• Nothing is sold or shared with anyone beyond the translation provider above and the database provider under Payments.
• No profile is built. Nothing sent is tied to a name or a device identifier.

Payments

Purchases are handled entirely by Apple. We never see your name, your email, your card or your billing address.

So that only paid-for translations go through, each request carries Apple's signed record of your purchase. Our servers check Apple's signature and keep one thing from it: the purchase's transaction ID, next to a count of how much it has translated that month. That is stored with Upstash, our database provider, for 40 days and then deleted. It is used for nothing else, and it is the one identifier anything you send is tied to.

Children

Better Translate is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect anything from them.

Your rights

There is no account to delete and no profile to export, because neither is created. Removing the app removes everything held on the device. If you are in the EU or UK and want to ask anything about the above, or exercise a right under the GDPR, write to the address below.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what leaves your phone, the date at the top changes and the new version is published here before the app ships the change.

Contact

Ultim8 Holdings Inc., New York, NY
support@bettertranslate.app