Last updated 5 September 2026
Snail is a game. A virtual snail follows your real position, and walking is how you keep it away. To do that the app needs to know where you are and how much you have walked. This policy explains exactly what that means.
Your location, including in the background. Latitude, longitude, and how accurate the reading was. Snail asks for background location because the game continues while the app is closed: the snail keeps moving toward you whether or not you are looking at your phone, and without a current position it walks to wherever you were last seen. You can grant location only while the app is open instead, or refuse it entirely. The game still runs; it simply uses your last known position.
Your step count. Snail reads the number of steps your iPhone has already recorded in Apple Health. It reads daily totals and nothing else.
A notification token. If you allow notifications, Apple issues a token that lets our server send a message to your device. It identifies the device, not you, and is used only to send you alerts about your own game.
Your time zone. Used to work out which day a walk belongs to, when a new snail hatches, and when to send you a daily message in your own evening rather than someone else's.
That is the complete list.
Snail has no accounts in the ordinary sense. There is no sign up, no email address, no password, no username. Your device is issued a random identifier and that is the only thing linking you to your game.
Snail does not collect your name, email address, phone number, contacts, photos, or address book. It does not read your weight, height, heart rate, calories, workouts, sleep, clinical records, or any health data other than step counts. It does not write anything to Apple Health.
There is no analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, and no third party trackers.
Only to run the game: to work out how far away the snail is, to credit the distance your walking has earned, to send you the alerts you asked for, and to tell you when the game is over.
Your health and location data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with third parties. It is not used to build a profile of you or to market anything to you.
Game data is stored on Supabase, a hosted database provider, on servers in Canada. Supabase processes this data on our behalf and does nothing else with it. Notification tokens are passed to Apple Push Notification service in order to deliver a message to your device.
Your step data also remains in Apple Health on your own device, where Apple's privacy terms apply. Snail only reads from it.
Open Snail, go to Settings, and tap Reset.
That permanently deletes your snail, your walking history, and your location history from our servers, along with the anonymous identifier itself. It is immediate and it cannot be undone. There is no backup and no recovery, and afterwards we hold nothing that refers to you.
You can also revoke Snail's access to your steps at any time in Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices › Snail, and its access to your location in Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services. The game will keep running; the snail will simply keep closing.
Until you delete it. Snail keeps your game data while you are playing so the game can continue between sessions.
Snail is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If Snail ever starts collecting something new, that will be stated here before it happens.
Questions about this policy or about your data: [email protected]