SnámhSnámh has no account system, no database of users and no analytics. Your swim journal, your watchlist and your location stay on your device. We never see them.
The app fetches public weather, tide and water-quality data from the organisations listed below. Those requests carry the coordinates of the beach you are looking at, never your own position.
Bathing-warning alerts are delivered through Apple's push service and iCloud, which route them without telling us who you are. We do not track you, and we do not sell or share anything with anyone. There is no advertising, crash-reporting or analytics SDK in this app.
Who we are
Snámh is published by an independent developer based in Ireland. For anything about this policy, write to privacy@snamh.ie or use the support form.
What stays on your device
All of the following is stored only on your device and, where you have enabled iCloud, in your own private iCloud account. None of it is transmitted to us.
| What | Where it is kept |
|---|---|
| Your swim journal and logged dips | App Support folder, on device |
| Your watchlist, home beach and spot order | On device; synced through your own iCloud if enabled |
| Custom spots you add yourself | On device |
| Check-ins and notes you write | On device |
| Your swimmer profile: ability and cold tolerance | On device |
| Alert preferences and quiet hours | On device |
| Your acceptance of the ratings disclaimer, and when | On device |
| Cached forecast, tide and water-quality data | On device, in the app's cache |
There is no Snámh account and no Snámh database of people. We could not retrieve your journal if you asked us to.
Location
Your location never leaves your device.
With your permission, Snámh uses your location to show swim spots near you and sort them by distance, and to record distance, pace and route while you track a swim.
That position is used on device only. It is not uploaded, not logged, and not attached to any network request. Snámh works fully without location permission; you search or browse for spots instead.
While a swim is being tracked, iOS may keep location updates running with the screen off so distance keeps accruing. iOS shows its own indicator for the whole time this happens. The recorded route is saved to your journal, on your device.
Apple Health
If you allow it, Snámh writes completed swims to Apple Health as an open-water swimming workout, together with the swim distance and active energy for that workout.
On iPhone the app reads nothing from Apple Health. On Apple Watch, while you track a swim, the app runs a workout session and reads your heart rate, active energy and swimming distance from that session so it can show them on your wrist as you swim. Those readings are displayed and then written to the workout; they are never sent to us or to anyone else.
Health data is governed by Apple's privacy protections. You can withdraw either permission at any time in Settings → Health → Data Access & Devices, and swims will still save to Snámh's own journal. Snámh does not request access to clinical health records.
iCloud
If you are signed in to iCloud, your watchlist, home beach and journal can sync between your own devices using Apple's iCloud key-value store. That data goes to your iCloud account, under your Apple Account, governed by Apple's privacy policy. We have no access to it and no ability to read it. You can turn it off in iOS Settings → your name → iCloud.
Where the app gets its data
Snámh fetches public weather, marine, tide, air-quality and bathing-water data directly from the public monitoring services that publish it. Each request carries the coordinates or station identifier of the beach being displayed, not your own location, plus the ordinary technical information any internet request includes, such as your IP address, which those services receive and handle under their own privacy policies.
Bathing warnings, and the push subscriptions that deliver them, go through Apple's iCloud under your own account; the next section explains how.
Maps and directions
Map tiles, satellite imagery and the “nearby” search come from Apple Maps, using the beach's coordinates; Apple's own privacy policy governs that. If you tap for directions, Snámh hands the beach's coordinates to Apple Maps, or opens Google Maps in your browser with the beach's coordinates in the link. Your own position is not included.
Snámh does not send your identity, your journal, your device identifier or your position to any of these services.
Warnings and push alerts
Two kinds of alert exist, and they work differently.
Local alerts for flag changes, rain risk and the sampling season are generated on your device from data the app has already fetched. Nothing about them leaves your phone.
Bathing-warning alerts tell you when a restriction or prior warning is posted for a beach on your watchlist. To make that possible, a small scheduled job of ours copies the public warnings (beach, wording, dates) from the public bathing-water service into Apple's public CloudKit database every fifteen minutes. That job handles beach data only; it never sees a person, a phone or a device token.
When you add a beach to My Spots, the app registers with Apple's push service and asks CloudKit to notify you about that beach. Apple stores that subscription under your own iCloud account and routes the notification. We cannot read your subscriptions, so we do not know which beaches you follow or that you use the app at all. Remove a beach from My Spots and the subscription is removed with it.
Sign in with Apple
Where the app offers Sign in with Apple, it is used only to establish an identifier held on your own device. Snámh keeps no user database, so no account is created anywhere, and signing in does not transmit your name or email address to us. Your data remains local either way.
Apple Watch and widgets
The Watch app and the Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets read the same on-device data as the app, through a shared app group container on your device. Nothing travels between devices except directly between your own iPhone and your own Apple Watch, using Apple's Watch Connectivity, which does not pass through us.
Children
Snámh is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from anyone. Because the app collects nothing about you, no age-specific data handling applies.
Your rights
Under the GDPR and the Irish Data Protection Act 2018 you have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection in respect of personal data a controller holds about you.
Snámh holds no personal data about you. There is nothing for us to disclose, correct or delete, because nothing reaches us.
To erase everything the app holds on your device, delete the app: iOS removes the journal, watchlist, custom spots, check-ins, profile, preferences and cached data with it. To clear only the cached forecast data, use Settings → Offline copy → Clear. To remove swims written to Apple Health, use the Health app, which owns that copy. Push subscriptions live in your iCloud account and end when you remove the beach or the app.
If you believe your rights have been infringed you may lodge a complaint with the Irish Data Protection Commission at dataprotection.ie.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and, where the change affects how the app handles your data, say so in the app.
This website
This site is static and sets no cookies. The support form is handled by Netlify, which stores the name, email address and message you send so we can reply, under Netlify's privacy policy. Fonts are served by Google Fonts, which receives the ordinary request information such as your IP address.
Snámh is a guide, not a lifeguard. Its scores, risk colours and warnings are estimates calculated from public data, and no lifeguard or agency has checked them. Conditions change faster than any app. What you can see from the shore, and what a lifeguard tells you, always outranks anything on the screen.
In an emergency dial 112 or 999 and ask for the Coast Guard.