Alpy — free ski app

A ski app with no server: what that actually means

Most apps’ privacy pages say some version of “we take your privacy seriously.” The claim is unfalsifiable: you can’t audit their servers. There’s a stronger position available to a small app, and Alpy takes it: have no server at all.

This isn’t a policy, it’s an architecture, and it changes what’s possible rather than what’s promised:

• GPS tracks can’t leak — they’re written only to the app’s storage on your phone. There is no upload endpoint. A breach of our infrastructure is impossible because there is no infrastructure.
• No account exists to be phished, no password to reuse, no email list to sell. The app has never asked who you are.
• No analytics — we genuinely don’t know how many users the app has beyond what Apple’s opt-in store stats show. Weather and map requests go straight from your phone to the public sources (Open-Meteo, OpenStreetMap, avalanche services) with coordinates only.
• AI runs on the device. The morning report and day summary are written by Apple’s on-device model. No prompt ever crosses the network.

What it honestly costs

No server means no cloud backup of your season (your phone’s own backup covers it), no cross-device sync, no social feed, and friend- finding that works by Bluetooth proximity rather than a live map of your crew across the mountain — physics instead of infrastructure. Apps with servers do those things well, and if they’re what you want, a subscription app is the right choice.

We’d rather be the app where the privacy claim requires no trust. “Nothing leaves your phone” isn’t in our policy. It’s in the architecture — there’s nowhere for anything to go.

Privacy policy — short, because there’s little to disclose.