Privacy policy

Last updated 18 September 2026 · Applies to the Manaforge weather app for iPhone and Android, and to this website.

Who we are

Manaforge makes the app this policy covers and runs this website. For anything about your privacy, write to support@manaforge.co.

What stays on your phone

The app keeps a few small things on your phone, and only there:

• The last place you asked about — the words “your location”, the coordinates you typed, or the named place you chose — and the last few named places you chose before, so the app opens where you left it and the search offers them first.
• The last outlook it fetched, with the coordinates it was read for, so there is something to show when there is no connection, marked with when it was read.
• The map images it has drawn — the radar and wind frames for the hours around now, kept for a few days within a fixed budget so scrubbing back and forth does not fetch them twice.
• Housekeeping — your colour-scheme, text-size and units choices, which layers you turned on, whether the hours play on their own, your answer to the tracking prompt, when an ad last played, and which version of the terms and this policy you agreed to, and when.

None of this is uploaded to us, synced by us, or seen by us. Deleting the app deletes all of it. Your phone's own backup (iCloud or Google) may include the app's data, as it does for any app — that is between you and Apple or Google.

Your location

The app never reads your location on its own. When you tap Use my location, your phone asks whether the app may read it while it is open; if you say yes, the app reads it once, rounds it to about ten metres, and sends those coordinates to our weather service to fetch the outlook, the layers, the tide and the nearby reports for that spot. That is the whole of it: the coordinates go to our service and nowhere else, are not written down by us, and stay on your phone only inside the last outlook it kept, above. The place names the app offers come from a list it carries with it, so a name you type never leaves the phone. You can decline, or never tap the button, and choose a place by name or type coordinates instead — the app works the same way. You can change the permission at any time in your phone's settings.

What reaches our server

The app fetches the outlook, the layers' index, the tide and the reports near a place from our service. Each request carries the coordinates of the place you asked about — your location, or the ones you typed or chose — and, like every request on the internet, your IP address and the standard technical details a request carries. We use them only to answer you and to enforce fair-use limits, and we keep none of it: no request logs, no record of who asked about where, no accounts, no cookies, no identifiers of any kind. The fair-use limit counts requests per address for one minute, in memory, and drops the count once that minute has passed.

The map images themselves — the radar and wind frames — are fetched from a cloud storage service by the name of the frame, which says which model step it is and nothing about you; that service sees the connection details any host on the internet sees, under its own policy, and no coordinates.

Our service runs on cloud infrastructure in the United States. The companies that provide it see the same connection details any host on the internet sees and handle them under their own policies; a request from elsewhere in the world is processed there.

This website is served the same way. It sets no cookies, loads nothing from anyone else, and keeps no record of your visit beyond what is described above.

Where the weather comes from

The outlook is read from the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh and the Global Forecast System, models run by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and published as open data through the NOAA Open Data Dissemination programme; tides from NOAA's tide stations; the acts-of-nature reports from the agencies named on each one. Our service reads that public data on its own schedule; nothing about you is sent to NOAA or to any of them, and the models know nothing of who is asking.

Ads

The app shows ads from Google AdMob, a service of Google LLC. There are two places for them, and only two: an ad may play when you open Layers, and when you open Settings — pages with no weather on them — at most once every thirty minutes across both. Nothing is ever shown over the globe, the outlook, the search or the opening page. If an ad cannot load, or you are offline, the page simply opens.

Whether an ad is chosen for you or for everyone turns on one thing: what you answered when the app asked. Until you have allowed it, and everywhere you have not, the app asks Google for non-personalised ads — chosen from context, not from a profile of you. To serve an ad of either kind, Google's software inside the app receives your IP address and a coarse location derived from it, details about your phone and the app, and how you interact with the ad — whether you closed it or watched it through — and may use your phone's advertising identifier to avoid repeating ads and to detect fraud. Where you have allowed tracking, Google also uses that identifier to choose ads for you from what it knows about you elsewhere. Google describes what it collects and how it uses it in its privacy policy and in how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.

On iPhone, the app asks once, before the first ad, whether it may track you across other companies' apps and websites. Allow it, and Google may use your advertising identifier to choose ads for you; decline, and every ad stays non-personalised, Google cannot read the identifier, and ads may repeat more often. The app reads your current answer each time it opens, so you can change it at any time under Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. Apple's SKAdNetwork lets advertisers measure installs without identifying you. On Android, there is no such prompt, so the app never asks Google for an ad chosen for you there: every ad is non-personalised. The app declares the advertising-ID permission Google's ads library requires, for the repeat-avoidance and fraud checks above; you can reset or delete the identifier in your phone's Google settings, under Ads.

What we do not do

• No accounts, sign-in or profiles.
• No ads anywhere but the two pages above, and no ad network but Google AdMob, whose own policy governs what it collects for a request; we receive none of it.
• No analytics or crash-reporting libraries of our own, and no tracking beyond what you allow AdMob when asked.
• No selling, renting or trading of personal data, and no data brokers.
• No alerts and no watching: the app reads the weather when you open it, and never in the background.
• No mailing lists: the only email is the one you send us.

If any of this changes, this policy changes first.

Children

The app is a general-audience weather app. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13, or under 16 in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom; the app collects none from anyone. If you believe a child has sent us something, write to support@manaforge.co and we will delete it.

Your rights and choices

• Everything the app holds is on your phone: delete the app to delete it.
• Location: decline the permission, revoke it later in your phone's settings, or choose a place by name or type coordinates instead.
• Ads: on iPhone, decline the tracking prompt or change your answer in your phone's settings, and every ad stays non-personalised; on Android, they always are.
• If you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or another place with data-protection law, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or export personal data about you, to object to its processing, and to complain to a supervisory authority. Because we hold no personal data about you, there is usually nothing to find, but write to us and we will answer. Where a legal basis is needed: our legitimate interest in answering your requests and protecting the service from abuse, and your consent, given through your phone's own prompts, for reading your location and for personalised ads.
• If you live in California or another US state with a privacy law: we do not sell your personal information. If you allow tracking on iPhone, Google may use your advertising identifier to choose ads for you, which your state's law may count as sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising; decline the prompt, or change your answer in your phone's settings, and no such sharing happens. On Android it never does.

Security

Connections to our service are encrypted. There are no accounts and no personal data stored on our side, so there is no account to breach. No system is perfect; if you believe something is wrong, write to support@manaforge.co.

Changes to this policy

We post any change here and move the date at the top. A change that matters is also noted in the app's release notes on the App Store and Google Play, and the app opens on its first screen again, where the button is the agreement, before you go on.

Contact

Manaforge · support@manaforge.co · Terms of use · Support

If you or someone near you is in danger, call 911 in the United States, or your local emergency number. Do not wait on this app, and do not write to us: we cannot help in an emergency.