Effective Date: September 18, 2026
Last Updated: September 18, 2026
Hey Wrist ("we," "us," or "our") built Half Awake as a dream journal for iPhone and Apple Watch. You speak what you remember on waking; the app turns it into text, gives it a title, a short summary and a few tags, and files it under last night. This policy describes exactly what the app stores, what it sends anywhere, and what it does not.
In short:your dreams — the audio, the transcripts, the titles and the tags — are stored on your device and are never sent to us. We operate no server that holds them, and there is no account to create. The app does send anonymous product-usage counts to an analytics service, described in section 3, and those counts never contain anything you said or wrote.
1. What Stays On Your Device
1.1 Recordings
When you tap the capture control, Half Awake records audio to its own container on your device. Recording happens only while the capture screen is open, and it stops on its own after twenty seconds of silence. The file is written to the app's App Group container, which is shared only between the Half Awake iPhone app, its Watch app and its widgets. Recordings are never uploaded. The app contains no code that transmits audio anywhere.
If you turn "Keep the recording" off in Settings, the audio file is deleted as soon as the entry is saved. If you leave it on, the file stays until you delete the entry or use "Delete everything".
1.2 Transcripts, titles, summaries and tags
Everything derived from what you said is stored in the app's own database on your device. Nothing about an entry is transmitted to us at any point.
1.3 Speech to text
Your voice is turned into text by your own device. On iOS 26 and later Half Awake uses the system's on-device speech analyser, which downloads a language model to your phone once and then runs locally. On earlier versions it uses on-device speech recognition with the on-device requirement switched on, and it refuses to run at allwhen the language you have chosen has no on-device model — in that case it tells you so and offers you the keyboard, rather than sending your audio to a server to be understood.
The one-time download of a language model is a request to Apple for the model itself. It contains no audio and no text of yours.
1.4 Titles, summaries and tags
Where your hardware provides it, Half Awake uses your device's own on-device intelligence to write the title and summary and to suggest tags. Where it does not, the app falls back to a keyword engine built into the app itself. Both run entirely on your device. No third-party artificial-intelligence service is contacted, and no transcript is sent off the device to be analysed. Settings → About names which of the two produced the analysis on your device.
2. iCloud Sync (Optional, Off By Default)
If you turn "Sync with iCloud" on — a Half Awake Pro feature, disabled unless you enable it — your entries are mirrored to your own private iCloud databaseso your other devices can see them. That data lives in your Apple Account, under Apple's terms, and is not accessible to us: we have no credentials for it and no way to read it. Turning the setting off stops the mirroring.
3. What Is Collected
3.1 Anonymous usage analytics
Half Awake includes a third-party analytics SDK (Mixpanel). It records product-usage events so we can tell which parts of the app earn their place: which screens are opened, which features are used, when onboarding is completed, when a paywall is shown or dismissed, and when a purchase, trial or restore happens.
These events are keyed to a random identifier derived from your device's vendor identifier — an identifier that is specific to apps from this developer and is reset when you delete the app. It is not your name, your email or your Apple Account.
Analytics never receive dream content.No transcript, no title, no summary, no tag and no audio is ever included in an event. Where an event needs to describe a dream it describes it numerically — for example a word count, or how many tags were produced.
3.2 Purchases
Purchases are handled entirely by Apple. We never see your payment details. The app records which product was bought so it can unlock the right features, and reports the outcome to analytics as described above.
3.3 Development builds only
A bug-reporting SDK is compiled into internal development builds so testers can report problems. It is not present in the version published on the App Store.
4. What Half Awake Never Asks For
- No account, sign-in, sign-up, email address or password
- No location, at any precision
- No contacts, calendar or photos
- No health or fitness data, and no HealthKit access
- No advertising identifier, and no cross-app or cross-site tracking
5. Permissions
Microphone.Asked for the first time you tap the capture control, so the app can record what you say on waking. You can revoke it at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Microphone; the app still works, and you type the entry instead.
Speech recognition. Asked for only on the older fallback path described in section 1.3, and only where an on-device model exists.
Notifications. Optional. Used for the wake-window nudge and, for Pro users, reality-check reminders and the wake-back-to-bed reminder. These are local notifications scheduled on your device; nothing about them is sent anywhere. None of them is an alarm clock.
Face ID / Touch ID. Optional. Used only to unlock the journal on this device. The biometric check is performed by iOS; the app is told yes or no and never sees biometric data.
6. Children
Half Awake is rated 4+ and contains no objectionable content, but it is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. Since the app has no account and collects no personal identifiers, there is nothing to delete on our side in any case.
7. Deleting Your Data
Everything is on your device, so you control it directly. In the app, open Settings (the moon icon at the top right of the first screen), scroll to "Your data" and tap "Delete everything". That erases every entry and every audio file and cannot be undone. Deleting the app removes the same data.
If you had iCloud sync enabled, deleting entries in the app also removes them from your own iCloud database.
To stop analytics entirely, delete the app; there is no server-side profile of you to request or erase, because we hold no personal data about you.
8. Your Rights
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or erase personal data held about you. Half Awake is built so that those rights are exercised directly on the device: the journal is yours, exportable to Markdown or JSON from Settings, and erasable in one action. We hold no copy. If you believe we hold information about you and you would like it removed, write to founder@heywrist.com.
9. Changes To This Policy
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and a material change will be described in the app's release notes. Continuing to use Half Awake after a change means you accept the updated policy.
10. Not Medical Advice
Half Awake is a journal, for reflection rather than treatment. It records what you say and counts what repeats. It does not interpret dreams, predict anything, or provide medical, psychological or therapeutic advice. If your sleep or your dreams worry you, please speak to a doctor.
11. Contact
Questions about this policy: founder@heywrist.com.