Privacy Policy

Effective September 23, 2026

Alcove is a personal ebook library manager for Mac and iPad, made by Much Better Than Cats LLC. This policy explains what data we collect, why, and how it is handled. The short version: your library is yours. We don't sell your data, and we collect as little as possible.

Your Library Data

Your book metadata — titles, authors, ratings, tags, reading status, and imported files — is stored locally on your device and, if you choose to enable it, synced across your devices via iCloud. We never see this data. Apple's iCloud infrastructure handles the sync; their privacy policy applies to that transmission.

Deleting Alcove and your iCloud container removes all library data entirely.

Alcove adds your books to your device's Spotlight index — details such as title, author, and your rating — so you can find them from Spotlight search. That index stays on your device and is never sent to us.

Metadata Lookup

When you look up book metadata or cover art, Alcove contacts free public sources — currently OpenLibrary and Apple's iTunes Search API. These requests include the book's ISBN or title and author so the source can identify it. We don't control these services; their privacy policies apply to the information they receive.

These requests also identify the app itself — they carry Alcove's name, version, website, and a support email address, which is what OpenLibrary asks of applications that use its API. They do not identify you or your device.

Metadata lookup is initiated only when you explicitly request it. No library content is sent automatically in the background.

AI Features

Alcove offers optional AI-powered features — such as tag suggestions, series inference, author deduplication, and reading a book's title and author from a PDF — that analyze your book metadata. These features work in one of three ways, depending on your device and settings. Alcove uses the first one available, in this order: your own AI provider (Bring Your Own Key), if you have set one up; then Apple's Private Cloud Compute; then on-device Apple Intelligence.

On-Device AI (Apple Intelligence)

On supported devices, Alcove can use Apple Intelligence to process your library entirely on your device. No book data leaves your device during this process. It is available at no additional cost on supported hardware, and it is used when neither of the options below applies. If you own the Bring Your Own Key unlock, the Use on-device AI only setting keeps all AI processing on your device.

Apple Private Cloud Compute

On macOS 27 and iPadOS 27 with Apple Intelligence, unless you have set up your own AI provider, Alcove uses Apple's Private Cloud Compute by default, at no cost and with no key or account. The book metadata these features need — titles, author names, tag names, and descriptions or blurbs, plus text from the first few pages of a PDF if you ask Alcove to read its title and author — is sent to Apple's servers and processed under Apple's Private Cloud Compute privacy protections. Much Better Than Cats LLC does not receive or have access to this data.

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

As an optional paid unlock, you can connect Alcove to an AI provider of your choice — such as Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, or a self-hosted model (Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible server) — using your own API key. When you use this feature:

  • Alcove sends limited book metadata to the provider you have selected and configured. This includes book titles, author names, tag names, and descriptions or blurbs. If you ask Alcove to read a book's title and author from a PDF, it also sends text from the first few pages of that PDF. It does not include any other file contents, your reading progress, ratings, personal notes, or any other personal information.
  • Your API key is stored securely in your iCloud Keychain, so it is available on your other devices signed in to the same Apple Account. It is never transmitted to Alcove's servers.
  • Much Better Than Cats LLC does not receive, store, or have access to the metadata sent to your chosen provider. You are sending data directly to a third-party service you have independently signed up for.
  • The privacy policy of the provider you select governs how they handle your data. Links to privacy policies for common providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq.

Before the BYOK feature makes its first request, Alcove will show you a one-time disclosure identifying the provider and confirming what data will be sent. You can disable BYOK at any time in Settings, which stops all further transmissions to your configured provider.

If you use a self-hosted local model (such as Ollama running on your own machine or network), no data leaves your local environment at all.

Alcove's Server

Much Better Than Cats LLC runs a small server, hosted on Cloudflare. When you open Alcove's AI settings, the app asks this server for an up-to-date list of AI models so it can suggest a good one for your provider. That request includes a random identifier that Alcove creates the first time it runs on a device. The identifier is used to limit how often a single device can make requests, and to count requests per device so we can size the service and spot abuse; it is not linked to your name, your Apple Account, or your library. What we record about a request is its kind — an ISBN lookup, a title-and-author search — never the book you searched for. The Alcove Plus services described below use the same identifier.

Alcove Plus Subscription Services

Alcove Plus is an optional subscription that unlocks enhanced features requiring a backend connection. These features route through Much Better Than Cats LLC's servers, hosted on Cloudflare's global network, before reaching the third-party service that fulfils the request.

Enhanced Metadata (ISBNdb)

When an Alcove Plus subscriber requests enhanced book metadata or cover art, the request is routed through our servers to ISBNdb, a comprehensive book database. The information sent includes the book's ISBN, title, and author — the minimum needed to identify the book. Our servers do not store this data after the response is returned to your device. ISBNdb's privacy policy governs how they handle lookup requests on our behalf.

Subscription Verification

When you use a subscription-backed feature, your device sends an encrypted receipt token to our servers so we can confirm your subscription is active with Apple. This token is issued by Apple and does not contain your name, payment details, or library data. Verification results are cached briefly to avoid checking on every request; they are not stored long-term.

Cloud AI Processing

Alcove Plus will include AI-powered library features processed through our servers. When this feature is used, your book metadata (titles, authors, and descriptions) is sent to our servers, which forward it to our AI provider on your behalf. We do not store your book metadata after the response is returned. This feature is not yet available; this section will be updated with provider details when it launches.

Aggregate Service Analytics

To improve Alcove Plus features and understand how the service is used, our servers collect anonymized, aggregate statistics from requests we process on your behalf. This data is never linked to you as an individual.

The following basic operational statistics are always collected and cannot be opted out of. They contain no information about your library:

  • Feature usage counts (how many metadata lookups, AI classification runs, etc. occur per day)
  • Performance metrics (response times, cache hit rates, error rates) used to optimize queries and infrastructure

The following content-derived statistics are collected only if you have not opted out via the Usage Analytics setting in Alcove's Settings (see In-App Analytics below):

  • Popular genres, tags, and author names across the Alcove community — derived from metadata lookups and AI requests, counted only after a minimum number of users have contributed the same term to prevent singling out any individual

Individual request records are aggregated and discarded — we do not build a profile of your personal library activity. Aggregate statistics cannot be used to reconstruct what any individual user searched for or owns.

Our servers log standard operational metadata — timestamps and response codes — for reliability and abuse prevention. These logs do not contain your book data, and they are kept for the standard retention periods of Cloudflare, which hosts the server.

In-App Purchases

Alcove offers optional paid features through Apple's App Store. All payment processing is handled entirely by Apple; Alcove never receives your payment information. Apple's privacy policy governs purchase transactions. Purchase receipts are verified with Apple's servers to confirm entitlements; this process does not transmit your library data.

Crash Reports

Alcove uses Sentry to collect crash reports and error diagnostics. When a crash occurs, Sentry may collect:

  • Device model and operating system version
  • App version
  • A stack trace describing where the crash occurred

Sentry also records app sessions, so we can see what share of launches end in a crash: each launch sends a short, anonymous note saying that a session started and whether it ended normally. On iPad, Alcove also reports when the system stops the app for being unresponsive or for using too much memory.

Crash reports do not include your name, email address, book titles, or any library content. You can opt out of crash reporting in Alcove's Settings. The change takes effect the next time you open Alcove.

Your Mac or iPad also collects performance and diagnostic reports about Alcove itself and hands them to the app through Apple's MetricKit. Alcove writes them to your device's system log; it does not send them to us. If you have chosen to share analytics with app developers in your device's settings, Apple separately gives us aggregated crash and performance reports, and Apple's privacy policy covers that.

Email List

If you submit your email address through the launch notification form on this website or the early-access sign-up form, we store it for the purpose of sending you updates about Alcove — release announcements, Alpha and Beta invitations, and occasional product news.

We use two services to do this, and they hold your information on our behalf. Addresses from the launch notification form are stored with Brevo, which we use to send email. The early-access sign-up form is hosted by Tally, which stores your answers — your email address and anything else you choose to tell us; we may also keep a copy in our own database on Cloudflare and add your address to our Brevo list so we can send you an invitation. If we invite you to test an early version of Alcove, we give your name and email address to Apple, which runs TestFlight, so that it can send you the invitation. We will never sell your email address or share it for anyone else's use. You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in any email we send.

We keep your sign-up answers until you ask us to delete them. To have your email address and answers removed from Brevo, Tally, and our own database, email privacy@alcoveapp.app.

Feedback

If you submit feedback, bug reports, or feature requests — via Report a Problem inside Alcove (delivered through Sentry), our feedback board, or direct email — that information is used solely to improve Alcove. We do not share it. A report sent from inside Alcove includes what you type, and your email address if you give one.

Alcove keeps a short history of its iCloud sync activity on your device so that sync problems can be diagnosed: internal library and record identifiers, counts, and error codes from recent launches, capped at about 1 MB. It does not contain book titles, authors, library names, file names, or reading data. It leaves your device only if you choose to — by leaving “Include sync diagnostics” on when you send a bug report from inside Alcove, or by exporting it yourself. It is never attached to crash reports.

In-App Analytics

Alcove uses TelemetryDeck to collect anonymous, aggregated usage data — things like which features are used and how often, and which app version is running. Like most analytics tools, TelemetryDeck automatically adds basic facts about the device to each signal: its model, operating system and version, processor type, screen size, time zone, calendar settings, the app's version, and which accessibility settings are on. Each signal also carries an identifier for your installation of Alcove and one for the current launch, so signals can be counted per installation. That identifier is hashed together with a secret value of ours before it leaves your device, so it cannot be tied back to you or to your Apple Account. We use this data solely to understand how the app is used and to prioritize improvements.

No personally identifiable information is collected. No book titles, authors, or library content are ever included in analytics signals. The only thing a signal says about your library is its size as a broad band — "51-100 books", for example — never an exact count.

The Usage Analytics toggle in Alcove's Settings controls both TelemetryDeck signals and the content-derived aggregate statistics described under Alcove Plus above. Turning it off stops both, starting the next time you open Alcove. Basic server operational statistics (usage counts and performance metrics) are unaffected by this setting.

Website Analytics

This website and the Alcove help site (docs.alcoveapp.app) use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views and see which sites send visitors here. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your browser, and does not track you across other websites. Cloudflare's privacy policy applies to that data. No other analytics or tracking scripts are used.

This site's typeface is served from this site itself, so your browser doesn't contact Google or any other font host. Links from this site to the early-access sign-up form note that you came from alcoveapp.app and, if you arrived here from another website, that site's name, so we can see how people find Alcove. The form itself is hosted by Tally, and Tally's privacy policy applies there.

Children's Privacy

Alcove is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children.

Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will update the effective date above. Continued use of Alcove after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Contact

Questions or requests regarding your data: privacy@alcoveapp.app

Much Better Than Cats LLC · hello@alcoveapp.app