How AirReveal handles your data

1 Overview

AirReveal is a flight-planning, live-tracking, and landmark-discovery app. It is designed around a simple idea: your flight details and travel history should stay under your control, not ours.

This policy explains exactly what AirReveal records, where it lives, and what — if anything — ever leaves your device. There is no account to create, and what you record stays on your device. The sky features (the aircraft around you, flight lookup and the notifications you can turn on) send small, specific requests to the services in section 19, a few of them through iSafeNet's own small server. Most of these are requests about aircraft, not about you. The optional notifications are different: they involve an identifier for your phone and a rounded location, so they are not anonymous, even though no name or account is needed. Section 19 separates the two. So most of this policy is a description of on-device behavior rather than a list of things we do with your information.

2 Data you enter

Using AirReveal, you may choose to record:

All of it is optional — AirReveal only stores what you choose to type, select, or photograph inside the app.

3 Location Services

AirReveal uses your device's GPS only while you're Live-tracking a real flight — a feature that plots your actual position against your planned route and detects nearby landmarks. AirReveal asks for location access when you start tracking, and then for "Always" access so tracking can continue in the background — while your device is locked or another app is open — for the whole flight. Its only use is to record your actual flown route and, on your device, to compare it with the route you planned.

The sky features (Above You Now, the sky map and the sky camera) also use your location, only while one of their screens is open and only with your permission, to find the aircraft around you. What that sends is in section 19.

• Location is never requested or used while you're only planning a flight — Plan mode is fully offline-capable and needs no GPS access.
• Your recorded route is stored locally on your device (see Section 7) and is included in an iCloud sync only if you explicitly choose to sync (Section 8).
• You can revoke location permission at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services → AirReveal; Live tracking will simply stop working until it's re-granted.

4 Offline maps & landmark content

When you choose to download offline content for a flight, AirReveal contacts three free, keyless public services on your behalf:

None of these services receives your name or location history — only the specific map area, airport area or landmark title needed to fulfil that one request. Like any service you connect to over the internet, each can see your device's IP address. These requests only happen when you download offline content for a flight, or open Runway View at an airport whose layout isn't saved yet; an airport's layout is then kept on your iPhone for 90 days.

5 Weather

AirReveal can show live weather conditions along your route using Apple's WeatherKit service. When this feature is active, the coordinates and time you're requesting weather for are sent to Apple's own weather infrastructure — never to AirReveal or any other third party.

6 Photos

AirReveal lets you capture or pick a photo and compose it with a flight-info overlay (landmark name, country, altitude, route, timestamp — all generated locally). Photos are selected or captured through Apple's native picker and camera, and the finished composite is saved back to your own Photos library. In Look Up and Window View you can also take a photo, a video or a timelapse of what the camera sees, with AirReveal's labels and a caption on it; it's made on your iPhone, with no sound, and saved to your Photos library. The camera records nothing unless you press the shutter or record. AirReveal never uploads a photo or video anywhere.

7 Where your data lives

Everything you record is stored locally on your device in a private, sandboxed app database, shared only between the AirReveal app and its widgets/Live Activity so they can display consistent, up-to-date information. Nothing you enter is uploaded anywhere by default. The only things iSafeNet's server keeps that relate to you or your phone are the optional notification requests in section 19 and, in TestFlight and Xcode test builds only, the daily lookup-limit code described there, and only for the periods stated.

8 iCloud sync (only when you ask)

AirReveal offers an optional "Sync Now" action on the Profile page to sync your flight history, journal, and progress across your own devices using your personal iCloud account. This feature:

• Never runs automatically — it only syncs when you tap Sync Now yourself.
• Stores data only in your private iCloud database — never a shared or public one, and never anywhere AirReveal's developer can access it.
• Is managed end-to-end by Apple's iCloud infrastructure, subject to Apple's own privacy practices.
• Requires you to be signed into iCloud on your device; existing synced data is managed through your Apple ID's iCloud storage settings.

9 Live Activities & widgets

While Live-tracking a flight, AirReveal can show a Live Activity (Lock Screen / Dynamic Island) and a Home Screen widget with your flight's progress. Both are rendered entirely on-device using Apple's ActivityKit and WidgetKit frameworks and share data with the main app only through a private, on-device app group — nothing is transmitted anywhere to make these work.

10 Subscriptions & payment

AirReveal Pro is sold as an auto-renewable subscription (until October 2026 also as a one-time Lifetime purchase) through Apple's App Store using StoreKit. All payment details — card numbers, billing address, and purchase history — are collected and processed by Apple, not by AirReveal. We only receive confirmation from Apple that an active entitlement exists, so we can unlock Live tracking on your device; that check is made on your device by StoreKit, not by an AirReveal server.

Your first Live-tracked flight is free. AirReveal keeps a single note on your device recording that you've used it, so it isn't offered twice; nothing about it is sent to us.

11 Exporting & importing your data

AirReveal lets you export a single flight, or all of your trip data, as a JSON file at any time from My Flights or the Profile page, and import a previously exported file back in. Both actions happen entirely on your device and hand the file to iOS's native share sheet or file picker — no network request is made and no copy is sent to us. Where you send an exported file afterward (email, Files, AirDrop, another device) is entirely up to you.

Import Past Flights. You can also bring in the flights you've already flown from a file another app exports (Flighty, myFlightradar24, OpenFlights, or a spreadsheet). The file is read on your iPhone: the date, the airports, and the flight number, airline and aircraft when the file has them become flights in My Flights. Nothing from the file is sent anywhere.

12 No analytics, ads, or tracking

AirReveal contains no analytics SDKs, no advertising networks, and no third-party trackers of any kind. We do not know how often you open the app, which screens you visit, or anything else about your usage. The information about you or your phone that reaches us is limited to what section 19 describes: the optional notification data you choose to turn on, and, in TestFlight and Xcode test builds only, a daily lookup-limit code made from your connection's IP address. Like any server, ours and the public data services' can see the IP address a request comes from.

13 Sharing your data

We don't share, sell, or rent your data to anyone. The only parties who ever touch your information are:

14 Retention & deletion

You control retention directly: delete any flight, journal entry, or photo inside the app at any time, or use Profile's "Remove All Trip Data" to erase everything at once. Deleting the AirReveal app removes its entire local database from your device. If you've used iCloud sync, you can also remove that data via Settings → [your name] → iCloud → Manage Storage on your device.

Notification data held on iSafeNet's server (section 19) is separate from what is on your device. Turning an alert off in AirReveal asks the server to delete that alert's record. AirReveal makes that request once and does not retry it, so if you are offline when you turn an alert off, or the request fails, the record stays until it expires: for emergency-aircraft and spotter alerts, a daily clean-up deletes records that have had no update for 30 days; a landing notification is meant to expire 24 hours after you start following the plane. The server checks that expiry every minute, but only after it has fetched aircraft data from ADSB.lol, so if that service is unavailable, or the server's own check fails, cleanup can be delayed until it next succeeds. Deleting the app does not contact the server either, so turn alerts off first. Records of which aircraft have already been alerted are cleared in a daily clean-up once they are more than a day old. Deleted records may remain recoverable in Cloudflare D1's rolling backup history for up to seven days after deletion from the live database. Separately, iSafeNet's server does not have Cloudflare Workers Logs, Logpush or a log consumer switched on, so iSafeNet does not store request logs from it. That does not mean Cloudflare processes no connection information: as the provider that runs the server, Cloudflare still processes information about requests to it, such as IP addresses and traffic routing data, as described in the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

15 Children's privacy

AirReveal is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 (or the relevant minimum age in your region). Since AirReveal has no account system, we have no practical way to identify a user's age — if you believe a child has used AirReveal to store personal information, the data on the device can be removed by deleting the app, after turning off any notifications (otherwise their records expire as described in section 14).

16 Security

Your data benefits from iOS's standard app sandboxing and device-level encryption. If you use iCloud sync, data in transit and at rest is protected by Apple's iCloud security model. There is no AirReveal account, so there is no central database of users' flight history, journals or photos. iSafeNet's server does hold the optional notification records in section 19, for the periods stated there.

17 Changes to this policy

If AirReveal's data practices change — for example, if a future version introduces an optional server-backed feature — this policy will be updated and the "Effective" date above will change accordingly. Material changes will be noted in the app's release notes.

18 The AirReveal 2.0 launch list

Before AirReveal 2.0 came out, this website let you leave your email address to be told when it was released. That list has closed, and no email addresses are kept: it was deleted once the launch email had gone out. It was separate from the app, which has no account.

If we open a list like it again, this section will say what it keeps, how it's used and when it's deleted, before anyone can join.

19 The aircraft around you

AirReveal's sky features show the planes flying over you and let you follow one. They use public flight-tracking data, and AirReveal asks only for what each one needs. Two kinds of data appear below. Public aircraft data (an aircraft's position, address, callsign, registration, type and route) comes from public flight-tracking sources and is about aircraft, not about you. Information about you or your phone (its push-notification token, your location rounded to about a kilometre, your alert settings, and the aircraft you follow) is sent to iSafeNet's server only when you turn on one of the notifications below. Not needing an account or a name does not make that information anonymous: the push token identifies this installation of AirReveal on your phone to Apple's notification service and to us. Public aircraft data being public doesn't make a request for it anonymous either: each service that answers a request, including the public ones below, can see the IP address it came from, and some requests include a point near you.

• The aircraft around you. While a sky screen is open, AirReveal asks ADSB.lol, a community network of receivers, for the aircraft around a point near you, rounded to about a kilometre, or around an airport you choose to look around (its position, not yours). Turn Live Monitoring off (Profile › Settings › The Map › Planes Above You) and nothing is asked for. ADSB.lol states that it retains temporary logs for less than 30 days. Depending on the feature, requests include rounded coordinates or an aircraft identifier, and the service can see your connecting IP address. See ADSB.lol’s privacy information.
• A plane you tap or follow. Its details come from adsbdb, asked for by the aircraft's own address and its flight number (for the route), and a photo of it from Planespotters.net, asked for by the address. A plane you follow is asked for the same way, wherever it is.
• The aircraft page. A photo of the aircraft type comes from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. On the day of your flight, AirReveal asks ADSB.lol which aircraft is flying it, by the flight's callsign.
• Looking up a flight. In the App Store version a flight number is looked up on your phone, in route data built into AirReveal; SkyLink is not used. Routes change, so about once a day, while the sky features are in use, AirReveal asks iSafeNet's server for the routes changed since the date of the copy on your phone. That request carries only that date. In TestFlight and Xcode test builds only, a flight the built-in data doesn't have is also sent to iSafeNet's server, which answers from its own route data or asks SkyLink, a flight-data service, and the same applies to a flight's status. For those test-build lookups the answers (flight data, not information about you) are kept so the same flight isn't asked twice: a flight's status for about five minutes, and a route that was found for up to 14 days (one day if none was found). To limit how many of these lookups one person can make in a day, the server keeps a scrambled code made from the connection's IP address and the date, not the address itself, which is cleared each day.
• Emergency-aircraft alerts (off until you turn them on). iSafeNet's server keeps this phone's notification token, your location rounded to about a kilometre, the distance and services you chose and your units, so it can tell you when one comes near. It also notes which aircraft it has alerted this phone about, for about a day, to avoid repeats. Turning alerts off asks the server to delete the subscription; if that request doesn't get through, a daily clean-up deletes it once 30 days have passed without an update (section 14).
• Spotter alerts (off until you turn them on). To tell you when an aircraft type you're watching for (an A380, say) comes near, iSafeNet's server keeps this phone's notification token, your location rounded to about a kilometre, the distance and aircraft types you chose and your units. Every two minutes it asks ADSB.lol where aircraft of those types are. It also notes which aircraft it has alerted this phone about, for about a day, to avoid repeats. Turning spotter alerts off asks the server to delete the subscription; if that request doesn't get through, a daily clean-up deletes it once 30 days have passed without an update (section 14).
• Siri and Shortcuts. "What's below me" and "How long left on my flight" are answered on your iPhone. "What's flying above me" asks ADSB.lol for the aircraft around a point near you, rounded to about a kilometre, as the sky screens do.
• Landing notifications (Tell Me When It Lands). While you follow a plane, iSafeNet's server keeps this phone's notification token, the plane's address and callsign (or registration) and, when AirReveal knows it, the city it's flying to, plus the plane's last height and climb rate so it can tell a landing from losing the signal. The plane's details are public aircraft data, but together with your push token they show which plane you are following. It's deleted when the plane lands, when you stop following (a request AirReveal makes once; if it doesn't get through the record still expires), when Apple reports the token is no longer valid, or, as intended, 24 hours after you started following. That expiry is checked every minute once the server has fetched aircraft data from ADSB.lol, so a failure there can delay it (section 14).

Notifications are delivered by Apple's push notification service. iSafeNet's server runs on Cloudflare. These requests don't include your name, an account or your location history, and we don't use them for tracking or advertising. The notification requests do include the identifiers and rounded location described above. Our legal basis is our legitimate interest in providing the features you open, and your consent for the notifications, which you can withdraw at any time in Settings › Sky & Aircraft.

20 Your calendar (only when you ask)

If you tap Add From Calendar in My Flights, AirReveal asks iOS for access to your calendar and looks through your events from two years ago to a year ahead for ones that name two airports or a flight number. This happens on your iPhone. Only the flights you choose to add are saved, in My Flights; nothing else from your calendar is kept, and nothing from it is sent anywhere. A flight's route is worked out from route data that comes with the app. You can turn calendar access off at any time in your iPhone's Settings › Apps › AirReveal.

21 Contact

Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to info@isafenet.app.