Privacy policy · Effective 6 October 2026
Your notes, todos and recipes live on your device. HobPad has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking, and it never sells data. Recipe content leaves your device in three situations only. A recipe that HobPad names for you, which is one you photograph or one you add without typing a name, has its first page sent to our service to be named. A recipe you convert into a shopping list is sent to our service for its ingredients to be extracted. On Android, if you turn on recipe file backup, your recipe files are copied to your own Google Drive. Content sent to our service is processed transiently and is not stored by us.
Everything you create in HobPad, including notes, todo lists, recipes, photographs and imported PDFs, is stored on your device. On iPhone and iPad, if you use iCloud Backup, that data is included in your device backup under your own Apple account, where it is governed by Apple's terms rather than ours. On Android, Android's own backup includes your notes, todo lists and recipe details in the backup held by your Google account, under Google's terms. We have no access to your backups.
When you photograph a recipe, or add a recipe from a PDF or an image and leave its name blank, the first page is sent over an encrypted connection to our service so that a short name can be suggested for it. A recipe you name yourself is not sent for naming. When a recipe is read, which happens when you photograph one with credits in hand, when you accept the offer after attaching one, or when you tap Read recipe, the pages of that recipe, or its typed notes, are sent over an encrypted connection to our service so that its name, ingredients, servings and method can be extracted. The extraction itself is performed by Anthropic's Claude API, acting as our processor. Our service does not store your recipe content. It relays the content, counts the pages for billing, and returns the result. Anthropic's commercial API terms state that content submitted through the API is not used to train its models.
Conversion credits are tied to a randomly generated identifier created on your device. On iPhone and iPad it is stored in your iCloud Keychain. On Android it is kept in HobPad's own settings, which Android's backup includes. It contains no personal information and is not linked to your identity.
When you buy a credit pack, the purchase is handled entirely by Apple on iPhone and iPad, and by Google Play on Android. We never see your payment details. To confirm that a Google Play purchase is genuine before adding its credits, our service asks Google Play about that purchase using its purchase reference, and it checks Google Play regularly for refunded purchases.
Our service keeps a ledger of credit grants, purchases by transaction or order number, and credit spends, so that your balance is correct and refunds can be honoured. That ledger contains the anonymous identifier and nothing about you.
Each device can receive the free starter credits once. To make sure of that without keeping anything about you, a new install asks its platform to vouch for the device. On iPhone and iPad, HobPad uses Apple's DeviceCheck service. On Android, it uses Google Play's Play Integrity service, which also tells our service whether HobPad was installed from Google Play and whether the device passes Google's integrity checks.
Our service asks Apple or Google whether this device has already received HobPad's free credits and, if it has not, asks them to note that it now has. Apple and Google keep that single yes-or-no note for the device. We do not store any device identifier, and the note says nothing about you or about how you use HobPad. Apple and Google describe the information their services use in their own documentation.
You can ask us to delete everything our service holds for your install, which is the credit balance and the ledger of grants, purchases and spends described above. Use the support page and give the order number of a Google Play credit purchase, or the order ID from an App Store receipt, so that we can find the right ledger. We will delete it and confirm by email. Any credits left on that install are lost when the ledger is deleted.
Some records are outside that deletion. Apple and Google keep their own records of your purchases. The device note described under Free credits and device checks stays with Apple or Google, so that the free credits are not granted to the same device again. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, keeps short-lived request logs, which record only the kind of request and its result. If you never bought credits, nothing our service holds can be linked to you, because the ledger contains only an anonymous identifier.
Your notes, todos and recipes never reach our service. Deleting HobPad removes them from your device. Copies in your own device backups and, on Android, in your recipe file backup in Google Drive stay under your control.
Android's own backup cannot hold recipe photographs and PDFs, so HobPad for Android offers a separate recipe file backup. It is off until you turn it on in Settings. When you turn it on, Google asks you to allow HobPad to see, create and delete its own data in your Google Drive. HobPad then copies your recipe photographs and PDFs into a private folder in your own Google Drive. That folder is hidden from the Google Drive interface and from other apps, and the permission does not allow HobPad to see any of your other Drive files.
The files travel directly between your device and Google. They never pass through, and are never stored on, our service. HobPad uses this access only to back up your recipe files and to restore them to a new or reset device, and for no other purpose.
You can turn recipe file backup off at any time in Settings. Turning it off stops further backups but leaves the existing copies in your Drive. To delete those copies, open the settings in Google Drive, choose Manage apps, and delete HobPad's hidden app data. You can withdraw HobPad's access entirely from the list of third-party apps in your Google Account.
HobPad's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Recipe naming, recipe reading and, on Android, recipe file backup are the only features that send content off your device. Naming runs only when you photograph a recipe or add one without typing a name; reading runs only when you photograph a recipe with credits in hand, accept the offer after attaching one, or tap Read recipe; and recipe file backup runs only once you have turned it on. If you use none of them, nothing you create in HobPad leaves your device except through your own backups.
Questions about this policy can be sent through the support page.
If this policy changes, the new version will be published on this page with an updated effective date.