Privacy
Your data
Stays on your Mac. Readdown reads your Markdown files in place. It never copies, syncs, or uploads them. Your recent documents, window positions, and preferences live in your Mac's local settings. There are no accounts.
What we collect, anonymously
- Update checks. Once a day, while Readdown is open, the app asks readdown.app whether a new version exists. The request includes the app version, your macOS version, Mac model, CPU type, RAM, and language. No identifier, no account. We use it to guide product decisions: which macOS versions and Macs to support, performance targets, language priorities, and where to focus future work.
- Feature usage, only if you opt in. If you click Count Me In when Readdown asks, or turn on Share Anonymous Usage Data in the Help menu, the app sends one small summary a day: how many times features like Copy, Find, or Show in Finder were used, plus the app version and macOS version. A complete report looks like
{"version": "1.16", "os": "26.1", "counts": {"copy_file": 3, "find": 1}}. It carries no identifier of any kind, so two reports from the same Mac cannot be linked to each other. If you decline, nothing is counted, not even locally. You can verify all of this in the source code. - Site analytics. Page views on readdown.app go through Cloudflare. No cookies, no cross-site tracking. When you click a download button, the site records the referring site, the page, and your country code, and nothing that identifies you. The download counter on the homepage reads the public GitHub release count.
What we never see
- The contents of any file you open.
- File names, paths, or which files you've opened. Usage counts are feature totals only, never tied to documents.
- Account info. There are no accounts.
- Device identifiers, advertising IDs, or fingerprints.
- Crash reports. Crashes stay in macOS's local reporter.
Opting out
Usage stats are off unless you said yes, and one click turns them off again: Help › Share Anonymous Usage Data. Switching it off also discards anything counted but not yet sent.
To stop sending update-check data: in Readdown, open Check for Updates… and uncheck Automatically check for updates. You'll also stop hearing about new versions. Grab them from readdown.app when you want.
Source code
Readdown is source-available on GitHub. Updates are handled by Sparkle, the standard open-source update framework for Mac apps.
Questions
Open an issue on GitHub or email hello@readdown.app.