Most apps start with a sign-up screen because the company needs it: to sync, to sell, to measure, to come back to you later. Longnote starts with your first tracker, because none of those reasons applies to a private symptom record, and each of them would make the record less private.
What “no account” rules out
No account means no server that knows who you are. Without that server there is no sync service of ours, no password to reset, no profile to breach, no data to subpoena, no partner to share with, and no profile of you to build. It also means we cannot read your entries, which is the property that matters: a promise can change with a terms update; an architecture cannot.
What it costs
It costs us the usual conveniences. There is no cross-device sync of your record through Longnote, no web dashboard, and no way for us to recover your data if you lose the phone and had no backup. Each of those is a real limitation, and we chose it on purpose. The place we put the effort instead is backup: an encrypted file in your own iCloud Drive, created automatically, with restore built in, so losing a phone does not mean losing years of notes.
What talks to anything at all
A few optional features contact Apple, and each has its own switch. If you type a region for weather, Apple Weather is asked for that region’s history. If a workout from Apple Health has a route, Apple Maps is asked for tiles of the area so a small map can be drawn. If you turn on Save symptoms to Health, the symptoms you log in linked trackers are written into Apple Health. Purchases go through Apple. One more connection is ours: the app sends usage statistics to TelemetryDeck, a processor with servers in Germany, so we can see which screens and features are used and where errors happen. They carry an installation identifier with no name, email or Apple Account, and never what you record. Your entries are not sent to us, because there is no server of ours to send them to. The privacy policy lists exactly what the statistics contain.
Why this is the right trade for a symptom tracker
A symptom record is read in two places: on your phone, in the moment, and in an appointment, as a summary. Neither needs a server. The one thing people reasonably want across devices, the record itself, travels as a backup file or a CSV export, both under your control. The things a server would add are things a health record should not have.