Looya
Privacy Policy
Last updated 22 September 2026
Applies to Looya for iPhone and iPad. Provider: Appè Latte Limited (“we”, “us”), Alberta, Canada.
The short version
Looya asks for your location to show you your weather. There is no account, no sign-in, and no profile: we have no way to know who you are.
On every tier, your phone talks to Apple for the forecast and for the name of your city, and it checks in with our own server twice — once with RevenueCat to see whether you have a subscription, and once to fetch the list of city events shown on the Today screen. Neither of those two carries your location. Our server does see the internet address your phone is connecting from, the way every website does.
If you turn on alerts, a copy of each place you asked us to watch — its name and coordinates rounded to about a kilometre — goes to the alert service we operate, so it can reach your phone while the app is closed. From that point our server asks Apple about your place around the clock on your behalf, with the app shut.
On Premium and Plus+, and only after you say yes to a prompt that asks first, a fact sheet built from your forecast goes to our server and on to Anthropic’s Claude, which writes the forecaster’s briefings. On Plus+, Ask Looya sends your typed question and the recent turns of that conversation the same way, and your coordinates go to Open-Meteo for air quality, the longer forecast and the model comparison.
We don’t run analytics. We don’t serve ads. We don’t track you across apps or websites, we hold no advertising identifier, and we don’t sell or share your data with data brokers. There is exactly one third-party SDK in the app, and it is the one that handles subscriptions.
The AR camera view is never recorded, stored, or sent anywhere.
What Looya collects, and why
Location
- What: Your device location, and any cities you choose to add yourself.
- Why: To retrieve the forecast for where you are.
- Permission: When In Use only. Looya never requests Always or background location, and does not track your movement.
Where it goes:
- To Apple, at full precision — to WeatherKit for the forecast, and to MapKit for reverse geocoding, so your city can be named and its time zone found. Apple’s handling is governed by Apple’s own privacy policy.
- To our alert service, only while an alert switch is on, and rounded to about a kilometre — the name, the rounded coordinates and the two-letter country code a government alert feed needs.
- To Open-Meteo, on Plus+ — for air quality, the days beyond Apple’s ten-day limit, and the side-by-side model comparison.
- Asked on your behalf, with the app closed. This is the part people are most often surprised by, so it is stated plainly. Once an alert switch is on, our server — not your phone — asks Apple WeatherKit about your watched places on a repeating schedule, using our own developer credentials, whether or not the app is running. Apple’s API carries the coordinate in the web address itself, so your rounded coordinates necessarily appear in Apple’s request logs and in our own hosting provider’s. Switch every alert off and that stops.
Where it’s stored: Your saved places and their most recent forecast are stored on your device, in a shared container so the widgets can draw without a network. Places held by the alert service are described under Alerts.
If you decline: Looya still works. A default city is shown, and you can add cities by hand in the Places tab.
Alerts
This covers rain alerts (the Lock Screen storm activity) and the Premium alert switches: Storm, Wildfire and Air Quality.
Read this before you allow notifications. On Premium, the severe-weather switch is on by default. If you allow notifications during setup, the alert registration described here begins straight away, without you touching a switch. Every switch can be turned off afterwards in Settings, and turning them all off stops the app sending anything further.
What: When any switch is on, Looya registers with an alert service we operate and sends:
- the places you asked it to watch — up to seven, each as a name and coordinates rounded to about a kilometre, plus the two-letter country code a government alert feed needs;
- which of the four switches are on;
- the anonymous push tokens iOS issues for this install — one for the Lock Screen storm activity, one for ordinary notifications;
- your time zone, so an alert that can wait is held until morning rather than waking you at 3am;
- a random identifier generated once for this installation, and a one-bit note that you have at least one custom rule enabled.
To confirm the switches are paid for, the app also sends the anonymous RevenueCat subscription identifier described under Purchases. The service checks it, keeps only the resulting tier and the date it runs out, and discards the identifier — so what you pay for is not stored beside where you are.
Why: So the service can watch on your behalf and reach your phone while the app is closed. A wildfire at 3am is the reason this feature exists, and a phone that only checks when you open it cannot tell you about one.
What is never sent: Your custom alert rules. A rule says where you are, what you care about and when you are there, which is a sentence about a person rather than a fact about a place, so rules are evaluated only on your phone and no part of one — its condition, threshold, time window, weekday or target — ever reaches us. Also never sent: any account, name, email, advertising identifier, or identifier that follows you to other apps. We keep no history of where you have been — only the current list of places you asked us to watch, overwritten each time the app checks in.
Where it’s stored: On infrastructure we operate, running on Vercel with Upstash for short-term storage. Both act as our processors.
Retention, stated plainly. A registration expires by itself 14 days after the app last checked in. Deleting Looya stops the check-ins, so the record lapses within 14 days — but it is not erased at the moment you delete the app, and this version of Looya has no in-app control that erases it sooner. If you want it gone now, email us at the address at the foot of this page and we will delete it. One thing is kept separately: a list of the alerts already sent to your device, held for 7 days, so that switching an alert off and on again does not re-announce something you have already read. Those entries contain the alert’s identity — which includes the place’s name — and nothing else.
If you decline: Everything else works. Alerts are still raised while the app is open or refreshing; they just cannot reach you when it is not.
Purchases and subscriptions
What: If you subscribe to Premium or Plus+, our subscription provider RevenueCat receives your transaction and subscription status, together with a randomly generated, anonymous app user identifier. RevenueCat’s SDK is the only third-party SDK in the app, and it runs on every tier — including Free, where it is what establishes that you have no subscription. Like most such SDKs it also reports your app and OS version and the per-vendor identifier iOS issues to us.
Why: To validate your subscription and unlock paid features. Our own server checks that identifier with RevenueCat before it will write a briefing or answer a question, so that a paid feature is actually paid for. The identifier is never sent to Anthropic.
What we do not receive: We never receive or store your payment card details. Payment is handled entirely by Apple.
RevenueCat acts as our data processor. See RevenueCat’s privacy policy: revenuecat.com/privacy.
City search
When you search for a city to add, your search text is sent to Apple MapKit to return matching places. We do not log or retain your searches.
The city events list
On every launch, and each time you return to the app, Looya asks our server for the list of city events shown on the Today screen. The request carries no location, no identifier and nothing about you — but our server, and the hosting platform it runs on, sees the internet address your phone connected from, as any web server would. This happens on every tier, including Free.
What Looya does not collect
Looya contains no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no crash reporting service, and no third-party tracking of any kind. Specifically:
- We do not collect your name, email address, phone number, or contacts.
- We do not use the Advertising Identifier (IDFA) and do not participate in App Tracking Transparency, because we do not track.
- We do not build advertising or marketing profiles about you.
- We do not sell, rent, or share personal data with data brokers.
- We hold nothing in your Keychain, nothing in iCloud, and we never read your clipboard.
Calendar
Optional, and off until you turn it on.
What: Weekend Watch can read the events in your coming weekend so the forecast can be set against your plans. Looya explains what it wants before iOS ever shows its prompt.
Access is read-only in practice. Looya never creates, changes or deletes an event. iOS asks for full calendar access because that is the permission the system offers for reading events in this way; the app uses only the reading half of it.
Where it goes: nowhere. Events are read while the screen is open and discarded when you leave it. Nothing is written to disk, nothing is shared with the widgets, and no title, location or attendee leaves your device — including to the forecaster, on-device or Claude, which is handed the weather and the time, never your plans as text to rewrite. If you share a weekend brief with the share sheet, the text you send carries the forecast and the verdict, and no event from your calendar.
Camera
Camera access is used only by AR Sky View, and only while that screen is open. The feed is rendered live to your screen and nothing else: the app creates no photo, video, or data output from the camera. No frame is ever saved to disk or transmitted off your device.
Photos
Looya only ever writes to your photo library, and only when you tap “Save to Photos” to keep a Sky Poster. Looya never reads, browses, or scans your photos.
Siri, Shortcuts and Spotlight
Looya offers four shortcuts you can run by voice or from the Shortcuts app: asking whether you need a jacket, making a sky poster, opening the Time Machine, and setting a skin.
- When you invoke one by voice, Apple handles the speech, under Apple’s own terms. We never receive audio.
- A shortcut speaks or shows your place name and the weather for it, which means that information can be read out or displayed outside the app.
- Running a shortcut can cause a fresh forecast request to Apple, at full precision, even when the app is not open.
- A sky poster handed to the Shortcuts app arrives as an image file whose name contains your place name and the date. Once your own shortcut has it, what happens next is governed by that shortcut, not by Looya.
Notifications
Alerts reach you one of two ways, and which one depends on whether the alert service is watching that place for you.
Raised on your device. Custom rules, always — they never leave your phone. Storm, wildfire and air quality alerts too, whenever the service has not confirmed it is watching: Looya then checks while it is open or refreshing and posts a local notification, which sends nothing anywhere.
Pushed from our service. Once it confirms it is watching a place, the service composes storm, wildfire and air quality alerts from the same public sources and pushes them to your phone, so they arrive with the app closed. Only one of the two raises any given alert, so you are not told twice.
A push may be marked time-sensitive — which lets it through a Focus — for an extreme or immediately urgent government warning, or a high-confidence satellite heat detection within 10 km. Everything else waits until 7am in your own time zone and is re-checked against fresh data before it is sent. Looya never uses Critical Alerts, so nothing it sends can override your mute switch, and nothing it sends should be treated as an emergency warning.
What appears on a locked screen. An alert, and the storm card on the Lock Screen, show your place name and the headline of the government warning. Anyone who can see your screen can read them without unlocking the phone.
Premium subscribers can switch each of these off in Settings. Switching them all off stops the app sending anything further; the registration then lapses on the 14-day schedule described under Alerts.
Motion
Motion and orientation data (from the gyroscope and compass) power the parallax effect and AR Sky View’s sky tracking. It is used in the moment, on device, and never stored or transmitted.
The forecaster and Claude
Nothing is sent until you say yes. Before the first fact sheet leaves your phone, Looya shows a prompt explaining what is sent and where it goes. Until you accept, nothing goes to our server or to Anthropic, and the forecaster falls back to writing on your device. You can decline and keep using everything else.
Free: the Desks are written by Apple’s on-device model. Nothing leaves your phone to produce them.
Premium and Plus+: the briefings are written by Claude, a model made by Anthropic. Your phone builds a plain-text fact sheet from the forecast it already holds — the name of the place, the part of the day, the temperatures, conditions, wind, rain chance, UV or moon phase, the title of any active government weather alert, and the forecaster’s own suggestion, tomorrow and weekend lines. That sheet goes to our server and on to Anthropic, which writes the prose and sends it back. The app checks every number in the reply against the fact sheet and throws the reply away if a number was invented.
Plus+ / Ask Looya: your typed question, the forecast for the place on screen, and the recent turns of that conversation — both your earlier questions and the earlier answers — are sent the same way, so the answer can follow what you asked before.
What is never sent, on any tier: your coordinates, your calendar, your camera, your photos, your motion data, your city searches, or anything the fact sheet does not carry. Claude has no tools, no web access and no other source of data — it sees the fact sheet and nothing else. Your subscription identifier is checked by our server and is not passed on to Anthropic.
Retention: Your questions are not stored by us. A written briefing is kept on our server for two hours, so that two people looking at the same forecast for the same place do not each cost a fresh call; it is keyed by the content of the fact sheet, not by you. A per-day count of Ask Looya questions is kept against your anonymous subscription identifier for up to 36 hours, to enforce a daily limit. Anthropic processes what it receives as our subprocessor under its own terms.
Open-Meteo (Plus+)
On Plus+, your coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo, a weather service based in Germany, to return air quality, the forecast days beyond Apple’s ten-day limit, and the side-by-side model comparison. Open-Meteo receives no identifier and nothing else about you.
The aurora index
The Viewer la Aurora desk needs the global Kp index, a single number describing geomagnetic activity everywhere on Earth. Normally our server fetches it. If our server cannot be reached, your phone asks the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration directly. On that path NOAA sees your device’s own internet address, as any website would. The request says nothing about where you are, and the number that comes back is the same for everyone.
What Looya keeps on your device
Most of what Looya holds never leaves your phone, but it is still worth knowing it is there:
- Your places and their latest forecast, in the shared container the widgets read.
- A forecast ledger — a dated record, kept for about 60 days per place, of what the forecast said would happen against what later arrived. It is how the app learns to say “warmer than it promised” rather than repeating a number. It names the places you looked at, so it is the most revealing thing the app holds, and it is excluded from your device backups.
- A small set of past phrasings the on-device forecaster keeps for about 30 days so it does not repeat itself.
- Ordinary web caching. Responses from the weather services are cached by iOS itself, as they are for any app.
This version of Looya has no button that erases these. Deleting the app removes all of it.
Third parties who receive data
| Party | What they receive | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Apple (WeatherKit), from your phone | Coordinates, at full precision | Return your forecast |
| Apple (WeatherKit), from our server | Your watched places’ rounded coordinates and country code, on a repeating schedule while an alert switch is on | Watch for severe weather and rain with the app closed |
| Apple (MapKit / geocoding) | Coordinates, city search text | Name your location, find cities |
| Apple (Siri / Shortcuts) | Your spoken request, handled under Apple’s terms | Run a Looya shortcut by voice |
| RevenueCat | Anonymous user ID, subscription status, app and OS version, the per-vendor device identifier | Manage your subscription. Runs on every tier |
| Looya alert service (ours; Vercel + Upstash) | The places you asked it to watch (name + rounded coordinates + country code), which switches are on, the anonymous push tokens, your time zone, and your anonymous subscription ID — which it checks and then discards | Watch on your behalf and reach your phone with the app closed — only while an alert switch is on. Never receives your custom rules |
| Looya city-events service (ours) | Nothing about you, but it sees your connecting IP address | The city events list on Today. Every tier, from first launch |
| NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center | Nothing about you. On the fallback path it sees your device’s IP address | The global Kp index, read by Viewer la Aurora |
| NASA FIRMS | The centre of a roughly 11 km cell, never your coordinates | Satellite heat detections, for the fire card and — when Wildfire Alerts are on — for the alert service’s hourly look (Premium) |
| Looya intelligence service (ours; Vercel + Upstash) | The forecast fact sheet, your anonymous app user ID and, for Ask Looya, your question and recent conversation | Have the briefing or answer written — Premium and Plus+, after you consent |
| Anthropic (Claude) | The forecast fact sheet, and your question and recent conversation for Ask Looya | Write the briefing or the answer. Never receives your app user ID |
| Open-Meteo | Coordinates | The longer forecast and the model comparison (Plus+). Air quality, from your device (Plus+) and — when Air Quality Alerts are on — from our alert service, which sends the centre of a roughly 11 km cell rather than your coordinates (Premium) |
We have no other data recipients.
Data retention and deletion
Your places, cached forecasts, forecast ledger, poster collection, and settings live on your device. Deleting Looya removes all of it.
The one record we hold is the alert registration, and only while you have alerts switched on. It expires by itself 14 days after the app last checked in — so deleting the app lapses it within 14 days rather than erasing it at once. To have it deleted sooner, email the address below and we will remove it.
To delete subscription data held by RevenueCat, contact us and we will action the request with our processor.
Your rights
Looya is operated from Alberta, Canada, and we handle personal information under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA).
Depending on where you live — including under the UK and EU GDPR and California’s CCPA/CPRA — you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or port your personal information, to withdraw consent, and to object to or restrict processing. You also have the right to complain to a regulator: in Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta; in the UK or EU, your national supervisory authority.
Because Looya keeps its data on your device and holds no account for you, most of these rights are satisfied by deleting the app — with the one exception named above, the alert registration, which lapses within 14 days or can be deleted on request. For anything concerning subscription records, contact us and we will help. We will not charge you for exercising these rights, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
Legal bases (UK/EU): we process your location under your consent, which you may withdraw at any time in iOS Settings; we process the fact sheets sent to Claude under the separate consent you give in the app, which you may withdraw in Settings; and we process subscription data to perform our contract with you.
International transfers. Our servers and processors are located outside Canada, including in the United States and the European Union. Where personal information is transferred out of the UK or EU we rely on the appropriate safeguards our processors put in place.
Children
Looya is a general-audience weather app. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child. Ask Looya is an open-ended conversation with a language model, and we would not recommend it for young children unsupervised. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
Security
Data in transit is protected with encryption (HTTPS/TLS). Data at rest on your device is protected by iOS’s own file protection. We hold no user accounts and no history of your weather or your movements.
The credentials that let our server speak to Apple, Anthropic, NASA, Open-Meteo and RevenueCat — and the key that lets it send you a push notification — are held only on the server and are never present in the app on your phone.
We do hold one short-lived record per device, and only while you have alerts switched on: the alert registration described under Alerts — the places to watch, the switches, the push tokens, the time zone, and the subscription tier without the identifier it came from. It carries no name, email or account. That is the whole of what a breach of our own infrastructure could reach.
Changes to this policy
If we change how Looya handles data, we will update this page and change the “Last updated” date. Material changes will be surfaced in the app.
Contact
Appè Latte Limited. Questions about this policy or your data? Get in touch.
privacy@appe-latte.ca