Privacy

Hatch Dept is a trading name of Poach Apps Ltd. We make small apps, and we build them to collect as little as possible. There is no shared account system and no cross-app tracking. This page covers our apps; each section below is specific to the app named.

Safepaws

Safepaws answers one question — is it safe to walk your dog right now — and to do that it needs to know the weather where you are.

Location

With your permission, Safepaws reads your device location and sends the coordinates to Open-Meteo to fetch a local forecast. That is the only reason it is used. Open-Meteo’s own privacy policy governs that request; Safepaws sends no identifier of any kind alongside it — no device ID, no account, no advertising identifier. The one other place your coordinates go is Apple’s geocoding service, to turn them into a place name — described under “Place name lookup” below.

Safepaws keeps a copy of the last coordinates it used on your device. It needs to: the home-screen widget fetches its own forecast while the app is closed, and the app keeps the most recent reading so it can still tell you something useful when you have no signal. That copy never leaves your device — it is not logged, not sent to anyone, and not transmitted anywhere other than the weather request described above. Deleting the app removes it.

You can avoid sharing your device location entirely. In Settings, you can pin any town or city by name. If you do, Safepaws uses that place instead and never asks for your device location at all.

What Safepaws stores on your device

Saved locally on your device. None of it is sent to us, and none of it reaches PostHog — the only thing that ever leaves your device is the coordinates, in the weather request described above:

• Your temperature unit (Celsius or Fahrenheit)
• Your wind speed unit (km/h or mph)
• The place you have pinned, if any
• The last coordinates and place name used, shared with the home-screen widget so it can fetch the weather while the app is closed
• The most recent forecast, and the coordinates it was fetched for, so a reading is still there when you have no connection

These stay on your device and are removed when you delete the app.

Analytics

Safepaws uses PostHog, hosted in the EU, to count how the app is used so we know what to improve. It records which of the three screens you open, when the app is launched or updated, whether a forecast loaded or failed, and basic context — app version, language, timezone and device type. It is attached to a random identifier generated on your device, not to you; there are no accounts to attach it to.

Your location is never sent to PostHog — no coordinates, no place names. Neither is anything personal. There is no session or screen recording, no advertising identifier, and nothing that follows you into another app.

What Safepaws does not do

• No account or sign-up
• No advertising or advertising identifiers
• No session or screen recording
• No selling or sharing of any data
• No cookies
• No collection of personal information, contacts, photos, or health data

Place name lookup

When showing the name of your location, or when you search for a place to pin, Safepaws asks iOS to turn coordinates into a place name and back. That lookup is handled by Apple’s geocoding service rather than by us — it is a network service, not an on-device one, so the coordinates or search term go to Apple — and it is subject to Apple’s privacy policy.

Perch

Perch has a privacy policy of its own at hatchdept.com/perch/privacy. The short version: bird identification happens on your phone, no audio is recorded, and there is no account. Perch uses PostHog for limited usage analytics and diagnostics, including app activity and feature results.

Poach

Poach has its own privacy policy, kept alongside the app at poachapp.com/privacy. It is the authoritative one for Poach; nothing on this page overrides it.

App updates

Safepaws can pick up small fixes without a trip through the App Store. To do that, it checks Expo’s update service on launch to see whether a newer bundle exists for the version it is running. That check carries nothing about you — no identifier, no location, no contents of the app — beyond what any web request necessarily includes.

Children

Our apps are not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children. The usage analytics described above are anonymous and are not tied to an identity, because there are no accounts.

Changes

Any future change to this policy will be published at this URL with an updated date above.

Contact

Questions about privacy in any Hatch Dept app: privacy@poachapp.com.

A note on accuracy

Safepaws provides general guidance based on published veterinary advice about heat risk and pavement burns. It cannot see your dog. Breed, age, coat, weight and health all affect what is safe, and none of them are known to the app. It is not veterinary advice and should not be relied on as a substitute for it.