Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 21, 2026

Marshmallow is an iPhone app that helps you spend less time on distracting apps. You choose the apps you want to stay off, set a schedule or start a focus session, and Marshmallow blocks them for you while a marshmallow character grows as a reward.

This policy covers the Marshmallow iOS app, the Marshmallow website at themarshmallow.app, and the waitlist. It describes what we collect, why, and what we deliberately do not collect.

The short version

• Your Screen Time data never leaves your device. Which apps you block, and how long you spend in them, are not transmitted to us or to anyone else.
• We do not sell or share your personal information.
• We use one product-analytics service to see how the app is used, including masked recordings of app screens. It never receives your Screen Time data.
• We do not use advertising networks or attribution SDKs.
• We do not build advertising profiles or track you across other apps and websites.
• We store an account (your email address) and your Marshmallow progress so it survives reinstalling the app or switching phones.

Screen Time, app blocking, and Apple's Family Controls

Marshmallow uses Apple's Screen Time APIs — Family Controls, Managed Settings, and Device Activity — to block apps at your request. This is the most sensitive information the app touches, so we are specific about how it is handled.

• Marshmallow authorizes for individual use only. The app requests Screen Time authorization for the person using the device, for their own apps. It does not enroll children, does not pair with a parent device, and does not request or receive access to anyone else's device.
• We cannot see which apps you pick. App and category selection happens inside Apple's own picker, which runs outside our app's process. iOS hands Marshmallow only opaque tokens. Those tokens contain no app name, bundle identifier, or icon that our code can read; only the operating system can resolve them, and only on your device.
• Those tokens stay on your device. They are stored in the app's local App Group container so the blocking, shield, and widget extensions can use them. They are never uploaded to our servers, never included in a backup we control, and never shared with a third party.
• Usage figures stay on your device. The charts in the Stats tab are drawn inside Apple's Device Activity Report extension. iOS sandboxes that extension so its contents cannot be read by the rest of the app or sent over the network — by design, we could not transmit those numbers even if we wanted to.
• No Screen Time data is used for advertising, profiling, analytics, or model training, and none of it is sold or shared.

When a blocking schedule syncs to your account so it survives a sign-out or a new phone, we store the schedule itself — its name, days, start and end time, duration, and focus mode — together with the number of apps, categories, and website domains it covers, and a positional placeholder for each one (for example app_1, cat_2). A placeholder records only that a selection occupied a slot in a list. It carries no app identity, and it cannot be resolved back to a real app by us or by anyone who obtained the row.

Your account

Creating a Marshmallow account is required to save progress across devices. Depending on how you sign up we store:

• Email and password. Your email address, and a password that is salted and hashed by our authentication provider — we never see or store the password itself.
• Sign in with Apple. The identifier Apple returns and the email address you choose to share, including a private relay address if you elect to hide your email.
• Profile. A username and display name you choose, and the colour and accessories you pick for your marshmallow.

What you create in the app

• Focus sessions and blocks. When each session started and ended, how long it ran, how much of it you completed, which focus mode you chose, and the growth it earned.
• Timed Block schedules. As described in the Screen Time section above.
• Stats preferences. Your daily goal, the date you started, and your personal bests.
• Onboarding answers. The goals you selected, an age range (a band such as “25 to 34”, never a date of birth), and your current and target daily screen time as you estimated them. These are used to personalise the app's targets and encouragement.

Friends

If you add a friend, both of you can see the other's profile and completed focus sessions — duration, focus mode, and growth earned — so you can encourage each other. Friends cannot see which apps you block, your schedules, your sleep window, or the sessions you abandoned. Removing a friend ends that access.

Subscriptions

Marshmallow Premium is an auto-renewable subscription sold through the App Store. Apple processes the payment; we never receive your card number, billing address, or Apple ID password. We record only whether your account has an active subscription and which plan it is on, so Premium features work on all your devices.

Notifications

Marshmallow schedules notifications locally on your device to tell you when a block starts and ends. There is no push server and no device push token is collected. You can turn notifications off in iOS Settings at any time.

Analytics and tracking

Marshmallow uses PostHog for product analytics, so we can see which parts of the app people use and where they get stuck. It receives the screens you open inside the app, taps on interface elements, when the app is opened, the random identifier of your account, your platform, and which method you signed in with.

It does not receive your email address, your name, your password, or any authentication token. Properties whose names look like one of those are removed before an event is sent, and the sign-in screens are left out of screen tracking entirely.

Session recordings. PostHog also records a replay of the app's screens so we can see how a flow behaves in practice. Text you type and images are masked before a recording leaves your device, and Apple's sandboxed views — the app picker and the usage charts in Stats — cannot be captured at all, by the operating system's design. Other text drawn on screen, such as a friend's username, can appear in a recording.

Screen Time data stays out of analytics. The events the Stats tab sends carry buckets, identifiers and yes/no values only — never an app name, never a duration, never a usage figure. Nothing in this section changes what the section above says: which apps you block and how long you spend in them are not transmitted to us or to anyone else.

We do not use the App Tracking Transparency identifier, we run no advertising or attribution SDK, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites. Write to hello@themarshmallow.app if you want the analytics tied to your account deleted; deleting your account stops any further collection.

The website and waitlist

If you join the waitlist we store the email address you provide, an optional referral source (for example from a ?ref= link), and the time you signed up, and we use it only to contact you about Marshmallow's availability. The marketing site sets no advertising or tracking cookies.

Where your data lives

Accounts and app content are stored with Supabase, which hosts our database and authentication, product analytics are processed by PostHog, and the website is served by Vercel. They process data on our behalf under their own security commitments and do not use it for their own purposes. Data is encrypted in transit, and access rules on our database restrict every row to the account that owns it.

How long we keep it

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. Delete your account and the account and everything attached to it — sessions, schedules, stats, friendships — is deleted from our systems. Waitlist emails are kept until launch invitations are finished or you ask us to remove yours.

Your choices and rights

• Revoke Screen Time access at any time in iOS Settings → Screen Time. Blocking stops; the rest of the app keeps working.
• Delete your account from Settings in the app, or by emailing us at the address below.
• Access, correct, or export your data, or object to how we use it, by emailing us. Depending on where you live — including the EEA, the UK, and California — you may have these rights by law, and we honour them regardless of where you live. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

Children

Marshmallow is a self-control tool for its own user, not a parental control product, and it is not directed to children. It is not intended for anyone under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your data we will update this page and the date at the top. Material changes will be announced in the app before they take effect.

Contact

Questions, requests, or privacy concerns: hello@themarshmallow.app. We reply to privacy requests within 30 days.

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