privacy
breathe keeps your practice on your device. There is no account, no analytics, and no Eden server storing anything about you. This page says exactly what the app touches, why it touches it, and how to switch any of it off.
The short version. Your sessions, settings, name, avatar and app icon live only on your iPhone, in iOS's local storage. There is no breathe account, no sign-in, and no Eden server storing your data. Nothing you do in the app is uploaded to us.
The app does use a few Apple services, and they are described honestly below: Apple Health, your Apple Watch, HomeKit lights if you connect them, and Apple's iCloud to download soundscapes. None of them send your practice or your health data to Eden. One feature, described in full under The words the app writes, and Ask Eden, can send a short summary to a model provider for breathe+ members, and that section says exactly what is in it.
breathe by Eden is developed and published by Arian Rousta. In this policy, “breathe,” “we,” “us” and “our” refer to the breathe by Eden app and its developer, Arian Rousta.
A few of those numbers, your streak, your Life Force total for today, and today's breath, are shared with the widgets, the complications and the watch app through a private container that belongs to breathe on your own device. That container never leaves the iPhone either.
Delete the app and all of it goes with it. You can also wipe it any time from You → Reset all data.
breathe both writes to and reads from Apple Health. Both are optional, both are off until you turn them on, and neither ever happens at launch without you asking for it.
Completed sessions are saved as Mindful Minutes, so your practice closes the Mindfulness ring. That is the only thing breathe writes to Health.
If you enable body signals, breathe asks Apple Health for read access to:
These readings shape what the app suggests and what it shows you about yourself: the Compass recommendation, the nervous-system read on Today and You, which program it points you toward, and the short line explaining why a breath was chosen. All of it exists so the app can fit how your body is doing right now instead of asking you to guess. Sleep, resting heart rate and heart rate variability describe how recovered you are. Active energy and steps describe how much you have already spent today. Workouts are used only to notice the hour you usually train, so the app can offer a breath before it.
Nowhere. The readings are processed on your iPhone, and the most recent values are cached on your iPhone so the app is not blank when Health is slow. They are never sent to Eden, never sent to anyone else, and never leave your device.
One thing derived from Health can be sent, and only one. The paragraph above is still exactly true of your readings themselves: your heart rate, your HRV, your sleep and your blood oxygen never leave your phone. What can leave, for breathe+ members and only while both the writing feature and body signals are switched on, is a single word describing how recovered you appear, such as steady or strained, worked out on your iPhone from readings that stay on it. No number, no date and no reading is ever part of it. If you type your own readings into Ask Eden yourself, those words are sent as part of your message, the same as anything else you type.
Health data is never used for advertising or marketing, is never sold or shared with third parties, and is never used for data mining.
The Health permission prompt appears only when you tap Personalize My Guidance during onboarding, or when you turn on body signals from the Compass, or from the Health rows in the You tab. You can skip it and use the whole app without it. iOS lets you allow some categories and refuse others; anything you refuse is simply missing, and the recommendation works with less.
Compass → the body signals card → Turn off body signals stops breathe from reading. You → Sync to Apple Health stops it writing. To revoke at the system level, open Settings → Privacy & Security → Health → Breathe on your iPhone and switch off any category.
You → Reset all data clears what breathe stored. It does not delete the Mindful Minutes already saved in Apple Health, because those belong to Health, not to us. Remove them in the Health app.
If you use the breathe watch app, it reads your heart rate during a session so you can see it, and it saves the session to Health as a Mind and Body workout, which is what keeps the watch screen on for the whole practice. Same rules: on your device, in your Health silo, nowhere else. The iPhone and the watch talk to each other directly through Apple's Watch Connectivity, not through a server.
breathe can sync HomeKit lights to your session, moving their brightness and colour with the breath you are practising and restoring them when the session ends. This is off by default.
If you turn it on, breathe asks iOS for HomeKit access so it can list your lights and let you pick which ones to use. It stores the identifiers of the lights you picked, on your device. It reads nothing else about your home, and HomeKit data is never used for advertising or data mining, and is never sent to Eden or anyone else.
Revoke it from Settings → Privacy & Security → HomeKit on your iPhone, or just turn light sync off in the app.
Some content is not shipped inside the app and is fetched when you ask for it: the soundscape tracks in the music picker, and configuration files the app reads, such as the wording of its written guidance and the tunings for its shapes. These come from a public Apple iCloud database.
The connection is one way. breathe downloads; it never uploads to iCloud your practice, your settings or your health data. There is no record for the app to write to and no account for it to write under.
When music downloads. After you open the app, breathe fetches the soundscape library in the background so a track is ready when you want it, and it also downloads one immediately if you pick a track that has not arrived yet. Both happen only over Wi-Fi unless you turn on cellular downloads in Settings, and you can turn music downloads off entirely. One soundscape is built into the app, so the picker is never empty offline.
Those requests are carried by Apple's iCloud, governed by Apple's Privacy Policy.
breathe writes short lines for you: why a breath was chosen, what a reading seems to be saying, a sentence at the end of a session. It also has a conversation, Ask Eden, where you can type a question and get an answer. Where those words come from depends on your phone and on whether you are a breathe+ member.
On your phone. If your iPhone supports Apple Intelligence, the app writes with Apple's on-device model. Nothing is sent anywhere. This is what happens for everyone who is not a member.
With breathe+. Members' lines, and Ask Eden's replies, can be written by a larger model that does not run on a phone. For a written line, that means a small summary of your day is sent. For Ask Eden it means the message you typed is sent, along with that same small summary, so the answer can be about you rather than generic. Both are described in full below.
On any phone that can do neither. The app falls back to lines written by a person, in advance. Nothing is sent and nothing is missing.
For the short lines the app writes for you, the request is not a sentence and not a prompt. It is a short list of labels and small whole numbers, and the app refuses to send anything that is not one of them. In practice that is:
hrv:belowBaselineAnd that is the whole list. No heart rate. No HRV figure. No sleep duration. No dates. No name, no email, no account, no device identifier, no advertising identifier: the app has none of these to send.
This is enforced in the app rather than promised. Every outgoing request is checked against a list of allowed shapes before it leaves: strings must look like a single label, numbers must be small whole numbers, and anything carrying a date or naming a measurement is refused. A request that fails is dropped entirely, not trimmed, so what goes out is only ever the thing described here.
Ask Eden is a conversation, so the thing that is sent is what you write. There is no way to send a typed message to a model without sending the message, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up.
What goes with it is the same small summary described above, so the reply can be about your week instead of about nothing. The earlier messages in the current conversation go too, because otherwise it cannot follow what you are talking about. Your name is never included: Eden is instructed to speak to you as “you” and has nothing else to go on.
Please do not type anything into it you would not want to leave your phone. It is a breathing app, not a medical record, and the honest advice is to treat it like any other message you send over the internet.
A message about self-harm or a crisis is answered on your phone and is not sent anywhere. That check runs first, before any model and before any connection, so it behaves the same offline and the same on every device.
Both the summaries and your Ask Eden messages go to Anthropic's Claude, through a small service we run, and the reply comes back. There is no database. Our service keeps no record of your request, writes no log of what was in it, and holds no account for you, because there is no account to hold. When the reply has been written, nothing about the request remains with us. Anthropic's handling of the request is governed by their own terms.
Nothing here is used for advertising, and nothing is shared with a data broker. We do not track you across other apps or websites, we do not build a profile of you, and none of this is linked to your identity, because there is no identity in it to link to.
You can switch this off at any time in the app, on the You page, in the row directly above the Privacy Policy link. With it off, the app writes with Apple's on-device model or uses the lines written in advance, and nothing is sent at any point. Ask Eden keeps working on the phone's own model where the phone supports it.
breathe ships a motion permission for head-tracked spatial audio. That feature is switched off in this release, so the app does not read motion data and iOS will not ask you for it. If it is ever switched on, head motion is used live to keep the sound anchored as you turn, and is never recorded or sent anywhere.
breathe does not automatically send your practice, settings, Apple Health information, name, avatar or other locally stored app information to the developer. The one thing the app can send on its own is described under The words the app writes, and Ask Eden, and it goes to a model provider rather than to us.
If you email support, Arian Rousta receives your email address, the contents of your message and anything you choose to attach, such as a screenshot or screen recording. This information is used only to answer your message, provide support, investigate a problem, protect the app or maintain an appropriate record of the request.
During a TestFlight beta, Apple may provide the developer with your TestFlight email address, device and operating-system information, crash details, and feedback or attachments you choose to submit through TestFlight.
If you enable Share With App Developers in Apple’s privacy settings, Apple may provide diagnostic information such as the app version, device model, operating-system version, stack traces and technical details surrounding a failure.
This information is not sold, used for advertising or used to build a profile about you. Support and diagnostic information is kept only for as long as reasonably necessary to respond, investigate the issue, maintain appropriate records or meet a legal obligation. You may ask for information you sent directly to the developer to be deleted by emailing [email protected], subject to information that must legally be retained.
breathe+ is sold as an auto-renewing subscription, monthly or annual, through Apple's App Store using StoreKit 2.
Daily reminders are scheduled by iOS on your device. breathe has no push server and sends you nothing remotely. Turn them off in the app or in Settings → Notifications.
If you enable Share With App Developers in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, Apple may provide Arian Rousta with diagnostic and crash information. This can include the app version, device model, operating-system version, stack traces and technical details surrounding a failure.
This information is used only to diagnose and fix problems. breathe does not contain third-party analytics or crash-reporting software, and these reports do not provide the developer with access to your breathe session history, Apple Health records or other information stored locally inside the app.
During beta testing, Apple may share your TestFlight email address, device and operating-system information, crash details, and any feedback or attachments you submit with Arian Rousta. This is limited to Apple’s TestFlight beta process and is used only for testing, support and improving the app. See Information you choose to send above.
Because everything breathe stores about you is on your device:
There is nothing for us to hand over or delete on a server, because nothing about you is held on a server. The service that carries the written lines and Ask Eden keeps no record of a request once the reply has been written.
breathe is intended for users who meet the minimum age shown on its App Store listing. It is not directed to children under 13, and the app does not knowingly collect personal information from children through ordinary use.
The app has no account system and does not automatically send a child’s practice or Apple Health information to the developer. A parent or guardian can remove locally stored app information through You → Reset all data or by deleting the app. Information already written to Apple Health must be removed through the Health app.
If a parent or guardian believes a child has sent personal information to the developer by email or through TestFlight, they may contact [email protected] and request its deletion.
If we change what data breathe touches, we will update this page and the date below. For substantial changes affecting existing users, an in-app notice will appear before the change takes effect.
Questions about privacy or information you have deliberately sent to the developer may be directed to:
Arian Rousta
Developer of breathe by Eden
[email protected]
breathe by Eden · [email protected]