"We respect your privacy" is the most exhausted sentence on the internet. Every app says it. Most of them then load Firebase Analytics, RevenueCat, a Facebook SDK, and ship your location somewhere overseas to "improve the experience." So when we tell people Tonight's Table doesn't track anything, the natural follow-up is — fine, but what does that actually mean?
Here's the entire list of what Tonight's Table does and doesn't do with your data.
We don't run a server
There is no Tonight's Table backend. No database with your name on it, no API endpoint that logs your queries, no CDN edge worker quietly counting opens. When you tap "Find a spot," your phone talks to Apple's MapKit service directly. Your search never touches our infrastructure, because we don't have any.
This is unusual for an app with a paid tier, because most paid apps need some kind of server to validate purchases or sync data. We don't. Apple StoreKit talks to Apple, the result comes back to your device, the app updates a single boolean in iOS UserDefaults: isPro. That's it.
What lives on your phone
Your visited log, your search radius, your language preference, your last entered location, whether you have Pro — all of it is in iOS UserDefaults, which is Apple's standard small-key-value store. It's sandboxed to the app and gets deleted with the app.
None of it is synced to iCloud (we don't enable iCloud sync). None of it leaves your phone. If you delete the app, every piece of data you've ever entered is gone, instantly and irrecoverably.
No analytics SDKs. None.
This one's worth being specific about because the absence is more meaningful than the presence. Tonight's Table contains zero copies of:
- Google Analytics / Firebase
- Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, PostHog
- RevenueCat, Adapty, Qonversion
- Sentry, Bugsnag, Crashlytics
- Facebook / Meta SDK, TikTok SDK, Snap SDK
- AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch, Singular
The total third-party network calls Tonight's Table makes is two: to Apple's MapKit and to Apple's StoreKit. Both are local-to-device frameworks that you've already accepted by using iOS.
What this costs us
It's worth being honest: no analytics means we have no data. We can't tell you which features are popular, what the conversion rate from free to Pro is, which screens people get stuck on, or what cuisines people pick most. When something feels broken, we can't ship a quick log line to see what's going on — we have to wait for someone to email us.
For a small indie app that's a trade we're happy to make. For a venture-scale company it would be unworkable, which is why almost none of them make this choice.
The principle
If you don't collect the data, you can't lose the data, sell the data, or be subpoenaed for the data. The strongest privacy posture isn't "we encrypt everything" — it's not collecting anything in the first place. Tonight's Table is built around that idea. We hope more apps follow.