The Short Version
Dial Log keeps your collection on your device. It has no telemetry, no crash reporting and no advertising identifiers, and nothing about you is shared with other apps or sites. If you have an account, three things are recorded about how you use Dial Log: the date you first opened the app, if yours was the first account used on that device, which your free trial can be counted from; the dates on which you opened the Friends tab (not what you did there), so we can tell whether the social side is worth keeping; and, for a day only, how often your account looked up its purchases. Everything an account holds is listed in full under "What we collect".
If you make an account, a copy of your collection is also kept on our server, so a new phone is not an empty one. Without one, your watches, wear history, prices, serial numbers, valuations and the photos you attach are not transmitted anywhere.
If you buy Dial Log, Apple takes the payment; we never see your card. We receive a record that you bought it — which product, and when it renews or ends — and a company called RevenueCat handles that record for us. The iPhone app checks with RevenueCat each time it opens, with or without an account, so RevenueCat also knows when the app was last opened on this device, under a random identifier rather than your name; nothing from your collection goes to it. If you have an account, the purchase record is kept with it, together with the date you first opened the app, if yours was the first account used on that device.
There is one exception, and it only happens if you use it. The watch-box scan sends the photo you take to an outside service that identifies the watches in it. Nothing goes with that photo — not your collection, not your name, nothing that says who you are. To stop the scan being misused, our server counts scans by a one-way code made from your network address, kept for a day; never the address itself. It's described in full below.
The trade-off is that your data's safety is in your hands. If you delete the app or clear its data, or lose the device, your collection goes with it. Use the Vault to export backups regularly.
Privacy Policy
What we collect
No telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers and no third-party analytics of any kind — nothing about you is collected for anyone but us, and nothing follows you across other apps or sites. Without an account there is no database with your name on it, and we do not know who you are or what is in your collection. In the iPhone app, the purchase check described under "Purchases" does tell us, through RevenueCat, when the app was last opened on a device — not who opened it.
With an account, one more thing is measured. When you open the Friends tab, we record that you opened it and on what date — one row for each person for each day. Not what you looked at, not what you did there, not how long you stayed and not the times you opened it while offline. It exists to answer one question: whether the social side of the app is worth keeping and worth paying for. It is not used for advertising, it is not sold and it is not shared with anyone.
Your trial and your purchase. Without an account, your 14-day free trial is counted on your device alone, from the day you start it. With an account, we keep the date you first opened Dial Log, if yours was the first account used on that device. Your 14-day free trial counts from that date or from when you made your account, whichever is earlier. On a device where another account was used first, or one you used before paid launch, we keep no such date, and your trial counts from when you made your account. If you buy the app, we keep which product you bought, whether it is active and when it renews or ends. We never receive your card, your billing address or your store account — Apple keeps those.
With an account, our server also counts how often in a day your account asks it to look up your purchases, and refuses more than 5 in a minute or 50 in a day, so the look-up cannot be misused. It keeps a one-way code made from your account, not the account itself, and the count is deleted the next day.
With an account, we know the things an account is: your email address and username, the display name, country and profile photo you choose to add, the account's settings (whether it is private, and whether it can be found in search), when it was made and when its username last changed, whether moderation has suspended it, your friends and the people you have blocked, the collection you back up, the wear you share with friends, the network address and browser or device type of each signed-in session and any report you make or that is made about you. The app also records what you did — a watch added, a wear started or ended, a trophy earned, a figure or photo you chose to share — because that is what your friends' feed is made of. Photos are never sent automatically; you are asked each time, and you can decline. It is your activity, shown to the people you chose.
Two things reach our infrastructure: a watch-box scan photo, forwarded and not kept by us, with a day's count of scans under a one-way code; and — if you have an account — your collection, stored so you can get it back. Both are described in their own sections below.
Where your data lives
Stored so that only your account can read it. That is access control, not encryption: we could read it if we chose to, and so could anyone who obtained our database credentials or compelled us by law. We do not, and nothing in the app looks at it — but "private" here means "not shown to anyone else", not "unreadable".
Everything you enter is stored on your device, in the app's own storage (in a browser, its storage for this site) — your watches and wishlist, photos you attach, wear and service logs, straps and pairings, valuations, serial numbers and settings. It stays on that device unless you export it, use the watch-box scan or make an account — an account keeps a copy on our server.
Photos your friends share are kept on your phone so they load faster, and are removed when you sign out, delete your account, or that person is no longer your friend.
Camera and photo access
When you attach a photo, the app opens your device's standard file picker or camera. Dial Log never accesses your camera or photo library on its own — only when you tap one of those buttons, and only for the image you choose.
Where a photo goes depends on whether you have an account. Without one, a photo you attach stays on this device with the rest of your collection. With an account, it goes to our server in two forms, for two different jobs: a full-resolution copy in your private backup, which only your account can read and which is what a restore rebuilds from; and, for a watch you have not marked private, a smaller copy your friends' app reads to draw your collection. A photo you share to the feed is a separate act, asked each time, described above.
The watch-box scan
The scan runs only when you tap it. Making an account turns on the backup, and from then on it runs in the background without being asked.
You photograph your watch box; the app resizes that single photo and sends it to Anthropic's Claude API, which reads it and returns a list of the watches it can identify. The request goes by way of a small function on our host, Netlify, which exists only to hold the API key so it isn't exposed inside the app.
Nothing accompanies the photo. Not your collection, not your other photos, not a name, not an identifier. Nothing in the request says who you are or which device it came from; the network address it arrives from is used only for the count below.
We store none of it. Our function keeps the image only in memory while it forwards it, writes nothing of it to any log, and has nowhere to put it. Netlify records that a request happened, and where it came from, not what it contained (what its logs keep, and for how long, is under Third-party connections).
What is counted, so the scan cannot be misused. The function counts the scans that come from each network address in a day, and refuses more than 10 in a minute or 100 in a day. It does not keep the address: it keeps a one-way code made from it, which changes every day, so one day's count cannot be matched to another's, and the counts from earlier days are deleted. The app also counts its own scans, on your device only, and stops at 30 a day. Either way you can still add watches by hand.
Anthropic then processes the image to answer it. Under its published API terms, what is sent to the API is not used to train models, and the image and the answer are deleted after a limited period those terms set — kept longer only if Anthropic's safety systems flag them as breaking its usage policy, or if the law requires it. Its privacy policy and commercial terms are the authority on this, and those terms can change — we point you at them rather than restate periods here that might quietly go out of date.
The scan is optional. Every watch can be added by hand, and the app is complete without it. During your 14-day trial, and afterwards, nothing you enter or photograph leaves this device unless you create an account or use the watch-box scan. Buying Dial Log does not require an account; an account is what carries your purchase and your collection to another device, and it keeps a copy of your collection on our server — described under "Where your data lives" above. The Vault exports everything whether you continue or not.
Purchases
Dial Log is free to try for 14 days. After that you can buy an annual subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase through the App Store. Apple takes the payment; we never see your card, your billing details or your store account.
What we receive. A record of the purchase: which product, whether it is active, when it renews or ends and the store's identifier for the event. It reaches us through RevenueCat, a service that handles in-app purchase records on behalf of apps and acts for us as a processor.
What RevenueCat receives. Each time the iPhone app opens, it asks RevenueCat what this device has bought, with or without an account. The first time, RevenueCat makes a random identifier for the app on this device; once you sign in, your Dial Log account id is used instead. With each request it receives what a server receives from any app: the network address it comes from, the app's version, the iPhone's model, its iOS version, language and App Store country, and an identifier Apple gives the app on this device, which is not an advertising identifier. It keeps a record under that identifier, including when the app last checked in. When you buy or restore, it also receives the App Store's signed record of the purchase. It receives nothing from your collection, and not your name or your email address. Its privacy policy is the authority on what it keeps.
Why an account matters for a purchase. You can buy without one. An account is what lets the purchase follow you to another phone, because the record is kept with your account rather than with a device.
If you stop paying, your collection stays exactly where it is: readable, exportable and yours. Adding to it and sharing are paused; on a device you used before paid launch, adding to that device's collection carries on, and only sharing and backup pause. Nothing is deleted.
Third-party connections
On the web, no third party sees you visit. The fonts, the charting library and the database client all come from our own origin. The iPhone app also talks to RevenueCat — each time it opens, to check what this device has bought and to load the plans, and when you buy or restore a purchase — and to Apple's App Store, which handles the payment itself. Our host, Netlify, serves the web app and dial-log.app, and runs the small server functions the app calls (the scan among them); like any host, it sees the network address each request comes from, with the browser or device type, and its access logs keep them for up to 30 days. The logs of our own server functions keep only what those functions write, which is never your network address, for up to 7 days.
If you have an account, that server is Supabase, which hosts the database and the file storage your backup lives in. It sees your account's data because it stores it; that is what it is for, and the section above says what "only your account can read it" does and does not mean. Like any host, it also sees the network address each request comes from, and its request logs keep that address for up to 7 days. When you sign in, it also keeps the network address and the browser or device type with that sign-in's session, until you sign out or delete the account. Without an account, nothing here is contacted at all.
If you have an account, two more services each carry one kind of message for us. Resend delivers the emails that confirm a new account and reset a password; it receives your email address and the message itself, which carries a one-time link. ntfy delivers each report of a user to us, so that it can be acted on; it receives the reported person's display name and username, the reporting person's display name (or username, if they have none), the reason chosen, when the report was made and identifiers for the report and the reported account. Neither receives anything from your collection.
In the iPhone app, RevenueCat checks what this device has bought each time the app opens and handles the purchase record for us, as described under "Purchases" above.
The watch-box scan is the one other thing that leaves the device, and only when you tap it. It has its own section above.
The app functions offline once loaded.
Your rights
Without an account, your collection never leaves your device, so requests to access, correct, export or delete it are things you do directly and immediately: the Vault exports everything as JSON, and "Clear the Vault" erases it. With an account you can still do all of that yourself, from the app, and deleting the account removes our copy.
Deleting your account removes your profile, your shared watches, your wear history, your trophies, your record of opening the Friends tab and your backup from our database immediately. Nothing of it is retained afterwards except your username, which is held for 30 days so that nobody else can take it straight away; the hold keeps only the name and the date, not your account. Photographs are removed by the app as part of deletion; if that step is interrupted, some may remain in storage until we sweep them.
If an account that has been suspended for breaking our rules is deleted, we keep a one-way hash of its email address, and nothing else, so that the same address cannot be used to sign up again and escape the suspension. The hash is removed if the suspension is lifted.
It removes our record of your trial and your purchase too, and asks RevenueCat to delete the purchase record it holds for us. If RevenueCat cannot be reached at that moment, your account is still deleted; write to us at support@dial-log.app and we will repeat the request. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel any time in your iPhone's Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Once the account is deleted, the app on that device goes on checking with RevenueCat under a new random identifier.
A scan photo is not part of your collection and is not kept by us at all; for anything Anthropic holds, their privacy policy sets out how to ask.
Children
Dial Log is not directed at children under 13, and is not intended for them. It is a tool for cataloging a watch collection, and nothing in it is aimed at children.
Without an account, everything you enter stays on your device. The watch-box scan, only when you use it, sends its photo through our server to Anthropic to be identified; we do not keep it, and Anthropic keeps it only for the limited period its API terms allow, described in the scan section above. Our server also counts the scans from each network address for a day, under a one-way code made from the address, never the address itself. And the iPhone app checks with RevenueCat each time it opens, so RevenueCat keeps a record under a random identifier it makes, not your name: when the app last checked in, the device details described under "Purchases" and the store's record of any purchase. With an account it holds the things an account is — your email address and username, the display name, country and profile photo you choose to add, the account's settings (whether it is private, and whether it can be found in search), when it was made and when its username last changed, whether moderation has suspended it, your friends and the people you have blocked, a backup of your collection, whatever you have chosen to share with friends, any report you make or that is made about you, the dates on which you opened the Friends tab, the date you first opened the app, if yours was the first account used on that device, the network address and browser or device type of each signed-in session, a record of the purchase if you bought it and, for a day only, a count of its purchase look-ups. That is the whole of it, and it is the same whoever uses the app.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and a child has made an account, deleting it removes everything held with it immediately — your own account screen does this, and the section above describes exactly what goes. If you cannot use the app, write to us at support@dial-log.app from the account's email address and we will delete it on your behalf.
Changes
An earlier version of this policy promised that any feature transmitting data off your device would be described here before that feature shipped. The watch-box scan shipped before that was done, and this document was wrong about it in the meantime — it said plainly that nothing was ever transmitted, while the scan was uploading a photo. That was our mistake, and correcting it is why this version exists.
The commitment stands, and it is the reason this section is here. If Dial Log adds any feature that sends your data somewhere new, this policy will say so before it ships, and the change will be made obvious in the app — not buried in a revised document.
Contact
Dial Log is produced and run by Shelden Enterprises LLC. Questions about this policy, or a request about your data: support@dial-log.app.
Terms of Use
What this is
Dial Log is produced and run by Shelden Enterprises LLC, which is who "we" and "us" are in these terms and in the Privacy Policy.
Dial Log is a personal tool for cataloging a watch collection, for your own record-keeping. It is free to try for 14 days; after that, continuing to add to your collection and to share needs a subscription or a one-time purchase, described below. Reading and exporting what you have added never does.
Subscriptions and purchases
What you can buy. An annual subscription, which renews every year until you cancel it, or a lifetime purchase, paid once. Both unlock the same thing: adding to your collection and sharing it, on every device where you sign in to the same account. Prices are shown in the app before you buy, in your currency, and are set by us through the App Store.
Who you pay. Apple takes the payment and processes it under its own terms. We never see your card or your store account.
Free trial. Dial Log is free for 14 days from the day you start the free trial, which the app offers the first time you open it. With a Dial Log account, the 14 days count from that day or from the day you made the account, whichever is earlier; an account made on a phone where another account was used first, or on one used before paid launch, counts them from the day it was made. There is no other free trial: a plan is charged when you buy it.
Auto-renewal. An annual subscription renews automatically unless you turn auto-renew off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. The renewal is charged to your store account within the 24 hours before the period ends, at the price then in effect. Cancel any time in your iPhone's Settings → your name → Subscriptions. It is managed there, not in Dial Log.
Canceling. Canceling stops the next renewal. You keep everything you paid for until the end of the period you are in.
Price changes. If the price of a subscription changes, the store tells you before it applies and, where the law or the store requires it, asks you to agree.
Refunds. Refunds are the store's to give, under its own policy: ask Apple. A refunded purchase no longer unlocks adding to your collection; nothing you have added is removed.
Restoring a purchase. Reinstalling or moving to a new phone does not mean buying again: use Restore Purchases in the app, signed in to the same store account. With a Dial Log account, the purchase follows your account.
Family Sharing is not offered for either product.
When a subscription or trial ends
Nothing is deleted and nothing is locked away. Your collection stays on your device, readable, and the Vault exports all of it as a file, as it always has. What pauses is adding to the collection and sharing it. Closing an open wear session, making a watch private, removing something you shared, blocking or reporting somebody, restoring your own backup and deleting your account all keep working — they are yours, whether you are paying or not. Buying again, or renewing, resumes everything at once.
On a device you used before paid launch, adding to that device's collection carries on whatever happens to a subscription; it is sharing and backup that pause.
Accounts that existed before paid launch
If you created your Dial Log account before paid launch, you keep full access to the app, without paying, for as long as Dial Log is offered.
Promotional codes
We may offer codes through the App Store that give a discount or a free period. A code is redeemed through the store, under the store's terms, may expire and cannot be exchanged for money.
Valuations are estimates, not appraisals
This is the most important limitation to understand. Any figure shown in this app — catalog estimates, market values, totals, gain and loss — is an informal estimate or a number you entered yourself. None of it is a certified appraisal, a guarantee of value or an amount any insurer, buyer or auction house will honor.
Watch values move constantly and depend on condition, provenance, completeness and reference specifics this app cannot assess. For insurance, estate, tax or sale purposes, get a qualified independent appraisal. Do not rely on Dial Log's numbers for any decision that matters financially.
Catalog information
The built-in catalog of brands, models, references and specifications is assembled from public sources for convenience and identification. It may contain errors, omissions or outdated figures, and is not endorsed by or affiliated with any manufacturer. Verify anything that matters — particularly reference numbers and specifications — against the manufacturer directly.
Service reminders
The service-due prompts use a simple time interval, not any knowledge of your specific watch. They are a nudge, not horological advice. Follow your watchmaker's guidance over this app's.
Your data is your responsibility
Without an account, everything is stored only on your device, and data loss is a real risk: deleting the app or clearing its data, device failure, loss or theft will take your collection records with it, and we cannot recover them for you. Export backups from the Vault regularly and keep them somewhere safe. With an account, your backup can restore your collection to a new device.
No warranty
The app is provided without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for lost data, inaccurate valuations, missed service intervals or any loss arising from your use of it.
Your content
Your collection data and photos are yours. We claim no rights over them. With an account, we hold a copy of your collection so that you can get it back; only your account can read it, and holding a copy so you can get it back is not a claim on it. A watch-box scan photo you choose to send is forwarded to be read and is not kept by us.
Sharing with other people
An account lets you share watches, wear and photographs with people you have added as friends, and lets them share theirs with you. Anything you put in front of somebody else is covered by the two rules below.
Zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive behavior
There is no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users. Do not share anything pornographic, violent, hateful, harassing, defamatory, illegal or that is not yours to share. Do not choose a username or a display name that is any of those things. Do not use the app to harass, impersonate or abuse anybody.
Every profile carries a Report button, and reporting asks what the problem is. We review every report and act within 24 hours. Acting means removing the content, suspending the account or both.
A suspended account stops being visible to anybody else and can no longer share or react. It is not a deletion: the collection on the device stays where it is, it keeps working and the Vault export keeps working. You can also block somebody yourself at any time, without reporting them — blocking takes effect immediately and does not wait for us.
You must be at least 13
Dial Log is not for children under 13, and by using it you confirm that you are 13 or older. If we learn that an account belongs to somebody younger, we will remove it.
Contact
Dial Log is produced and run by Shelden Enterprises LLC. Questions about these terms: support@dial-log.app.
Copyright & Notices
Trademarks
All watch brand names, model names, reference numbers and logos are the trademarks of their respective owners. They appear here for identification and cataloging purposes only. Dial Log is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any watch manufacturer or retailer.
Open-source components
- Chart.js — charting, MIT License
- Bodoni Moda, EB Garamond, JetBrains Mono — typefaces from Google Fonts, served from our own origin, under the SIL Open Font License
Your photos
Photographs you add remain your own.