It's Dinnertime! privacy policy

Effective September 7, 2026 · It's Dinnertime! is made by Smart Home Life LLC.

The short version

We keep no record of who you are or what you do. The app has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising, and no tracking. Your recipes, plans, lists, photos, ratings, notes and past grocery orders live on your device and, if you use iCloud, in your own private iCloud storage that only you can read. The one thing our own service remembers is which stores are near a zip code, for a day, so the store finder stays fast - a fact about a place, never about you.

What stays on your device or in your iCloud

Recipes you save, weeks you plan, your grocery list, dish photos you take, your ratings and notes, your settings, and your past grocery orders - if you connect a store, what the app reads from your order history (items, prices, totals) is stored on your device and in your own iCloud, and never reaches us. If iCloud is on, Apple syncs these between your devices through your private iCloud database. We cannot read it: it belongs to your Apple Account, not to us.

Your grocery list is kept in Apple's Reminders, in a list you choose, so you can share it with your family the way you already share Reminders. That data is governed by your device and your Apple Account, not by us.

Apple Health

Two optional connections, each off until you turn it on.

Sending your dinners. If you turn on "Send cooked dinners to Apple Health" in Settings, the app writes the nutrition figures for each dinner you finish to Apple Health on your device. Figures the app estimated are marked as estimates in Health. Nothing it writes is read back.

Seeing the rest of your day. If you tap "Connect Apple Health" on the week's totals, the app reads today's calories, protein, carbohydrates and fat that other apps have logged in Apple Health, and shows them beside your dinner. What it reads is displayed on your device and then forgotten: never stored, never synced to iCloud, never sent anywhere. It leaves out what this app itself wrote, so a dinner is never counted twice. You can turn sending off in the app's Settings, turn either connection off in iOS Settings (Privacy & Security, Health) or in the Health app, and manage or delete what was written in the Health app itself.

What leaves your device, and what it carries

• Fetching a recipe you asked for. When you paste or share a recipe link, the app fetches that page directly from that website, the same way a browser would. The website sees an ordinary page request from your device. Browsing the starter-recipe catalog goes through our own service instead, which passes the request along and keeps nothing; the starter recipes' photographs load from TheMealDB directly, like any picture on a web page.
• Store prices (Pro). When you look up prices, the app asks our price service for a product search at your chosen store. The request carries the search words and the store, and for the store picker your zip code. It never carries your name, an account, or anything that identifies you. Our service keeps no record of who asked or what anybody searched; the one thing it does keep is a shared day-long note of which stores are near a zip code, so the store finder does not have to ask the catalog twice. Price data comes from the store's own public catalog service. Requests also carry a proof that they come from a real copy of this app (Apple's App Attest) - it says nothing about you, and our service checks it and keeps nothing.
• Signing into a store's website (optional). If you connect a store - Kroger, Walmart, Whole Foods, Publix, Costco, or an Albertsons-family store - you sign into that store's own website in a secure web view on your device. Your sign-in belongs to that store; we never see or store your credentials, and their privacy policy governs what they do. With a store connected, the app can read prices and your own order history from the store's pages, on your device; what it reads stays on your devices and never reaches us. To keep you signed in, the app keeps the store's sign-in cookies in your device's Keychain for up to 30 days - on that device only, never in a backup, and removed when you disconnect the store.
• Signing into Instagram (optional). To read the full caption of an Instagram post you saved, you can sign into Instagram on its own page, in a web view on your device; we never see or store your credentials, and the post is fetched from Instagram the way a browser would. Instagram's sign-in cookies stay on that device only, until you tap Forget in Settings, Integrations. Nothing read from Instagram reaches us.
• Scanning a barcode. When you scan a product, the app asks Open Food Facts, a nonprofit open food database, what that barcode is. The barcode digits are all that go; no account, no device, nothing about you, and nothing about anything else you have scanned. It comes back with a product name, which is what lets the app search your stores for the right thing. If the database does not know the barcode, the app says it could not confirm it rather than guessing.
• Sending your list to your Kroger cart (Pro, optional). If you connect your Kroger account for the cart, Kroger's sign-in hands the app a connection code, and our service exchanges it with Kroger for the app - that is the one moment it passes through us, it is not logged or kept, and the resulting connection lives only in your device's Keychain.
• Sharing a recipe to the swap (optional). If you share a recipe to the swap, the recipe itself - its name, ingredient lines, steps, yield, time, category, and your own photo of the dish if you added one - is posted to the app's public iCloud database, where anyone using the app can read it and save it. Nothing about you goes with it: no name, no email, no location, no notes, no ratings, and no link. Apple's iCloud notes which iCloud account posted it as an opaque identifier that we cannot turn into a person; we see that identifier only in Apple's developer console, and use it for nothing but removing a post. Reading the swap sends nothing. You can remove your own post at any time from its page, and we remove anything reported that is not a recipe. If you report a recipe, the report (which post, your reason, and any note you type) is written to the same public iCloud database so we can read it in Apple's developer console; write nothing personal in the note. Hiding a cook's recipes sends a report the same way.
• AI planning. Meal planning and substitutions run on Apple Intelligence, on your device or on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, which is designed so that nobody, including Apple and including us, can read your requests. If you paste your own Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini key, the request goes to that provider instead, under its terms and your own account, and that is your choice each time. What is sent is the week the app is planning or the recipe it is writing: your saved recipes' names, which dinners you marked liked or disliked, what your household does not eat, and a recipe's own lines when you ask for one to be completed; never a link, and never your key to us. On Google's unpaid Gemini tier, Google's terms allow it to use what you send to improve its products and to have people read it; a key billed to a paid Google account is covered by different terms. The app says this beside the key field.
• Purchases. Pro is bought through Apple. We receive no payment details. The app verifies your purchase with a signed receipt; our service checks the signature and keeps nothing.

What we collect

Almost nothing, and nothing about you. On the App Store label we declare three things, because honesty beats a cleaner badge: a coarse location (the zip code you give the store finder, remembered by place for a day), search history (the product words that pass through our price service, kept by nobody), and user content (a recipe you choose to share to the swap, and only that). None of it is ever linked to you, and nothing is used for tracking. We run no analytics and no crash-reporting SDKs. If you choose to share diagnostics with Apple, Apple may show us standard crash reports under Apple's own privacy terms; these contain no recipes, plans, or identities.

Data retention and deletion

We hold no data about you, so there is nothing for us to retain or delete. (The store finder's zip-to-stores note expires on its own within a day.) A recipe you share to the swap stays on the swap until you remove it or we do. If you turn on the swap digest in Settings, the app checks the swap in the background the way it does when you open it, and posts a note on this phone; nothing about you leaves it. Everything the app stores is yours to delete: remove recipes and photos in the app, remove the app to delete its local data, and manage or delete its iCloud data in Settings > iCloud > Manage Storage on your device.

Consent

The app asks permission before using the camera (scanning barcodes or cookbook pages), photos (dish pictures), Reminders (your grocery list), and location (finding stores near you, only if you use "Use current location"). Every feature has a path that works if you say no, and you can change any of these later in Settings.

Children

It's Dinnertime! is made for adults who plan and cook meals. It is not directed at children, and the three things we declare above (a zip code, product search words, and a recipe you choose to share, none linked to anyone) are the same for every user; we knowingly collect nothing further from anyone, children included.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted at this address with a new effective date. Because the app collects nothing, changes would most likely narrow, not widen, what is described here.

Contact

Smart Home Life LLC · anthonyharmond@smarthomelifellc.com
Support for help with the app.