Privacy Policy
Strobe has no accounts, no sign-in and no analytics. Your swings are recorded, stored and analysed on your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded unless you ask for a coaching review, and the app asks you first.
Last updated September 12, 2026
The short version
- Video, pose data, metrics, drawings and notes live on your device. Nothing leaves it unless you ask for a coaching review, and the video leaves only if you additionally switch on Send the clip to the coach.
- There is no Strobe account and no sign-in. The one Strobe server is the coach server a Strobe Pro review passes through, and it stores no swing data.
- No analytics, no crash reporting SDKs, no advertising, no tracking of any kind.
- AI coaching is optional and off by default, and there are two ways to have it. With Strobe Pro, the request goes to Strobe’s coach server, which checks your purchase and passes the swing to Google’s Gemini model; the server keeps no swing data. Or you connect an API key of your own, and the app sends the request straight from your iPhone to the provider that key belongs to, with no Strobe server in between. Either way what is sent is swing metrics, a few still key frames and your recent notes — not the video, unless you switch on Send the clip to the coach, which is also off by default and offered only where the coach reads video (Google’s models, including the one behind Strobe Pro).
- Before the first review, the app shows you what it is about to send and where it goes, and asks you to agree. It asks again if you switch to a different coach or switch the clip on. Decline and nothing is sent.
- Your API key is stored in the iOS Keychain on that one device and never synced.
What Strobe stores on your device
Recorded and imported swing videos, with their audio, the analysis produced from them (tracked body positions, detected swing phases, the club’s path, metrics), any lines and angles you draw, your notes, your session names, club selections and camera-angle choices, your app settings, and any coaching results you saved. The typical bands the You screen shows are computed from those same stored metrics each time, not kept anywhere else. All of it is kept in the app’s own storage on your iPhone. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
What Strobe collects about you
There is no analytics SDK, no telemetry, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier, no fingerprinting and no third-party tracking in the app. Nobody, including the developer, can see your swings, your library or the fact that you opened the app.
One feature is the exception, and only when you use it. If you buy Strobe Pro and ask for a coaching review, that one request goes to Strobe’s coach server, which checks your purchase and passes the request to Google’s Gemini model. What that server keeps afterwards is a count: the App Store transaction identifier for your purchase and how many reviews it has used this month, so the monthly allowance can be enforced. It expires after about ten weeks. The swing you sent is not stored, and the identifier is not tied to your name, your email or any account with the developer, because the app never asks you for one.
If you download the app from the App Store, Apple provides the developer with its own aggregate, anonymised sales and crash reporting. That comes from Apple and is governed by Apple’s privacy policy, not by anything in this app.
What the App Store privacy label says
The App Store listing for Strobe discloses three data types — Photos or Videos, Fitness and Purchases — all collected for App Functionality, not linked to your identity and not used for tracking.
Photos or Videos and Fitness refer to one thing: the still key frames and swing metrics that a coaching review sends, described below. Purchases refers to the App Store transaction that proves you own Strobe Pro, which the coach server checks and counts against your monthly allowance. If you never ask for a review, none of the three is ever sent. Nothing else in the app is disclosed, and nothing is marked as tracking.
Camera, microphone and photo library
The camera is used to record swings, and only while the record screen is open. The microphone is used while you record, so the app can hear the strike: that sound is how a recording stops itself after impact and how a clip is cut to the swing. The audio is kept inside the clip, on the device, and analysed there. Record audio can be switched off in Settings, and then the microphone is not used at all. Photo library access is used to import clips you pick and, if you export, to save a clip back. Media captured or imported this way is written to the app’s own storage; it is not sent anywhere. The Apple Watch app only starts and stops a recording on the phone; it reads no sensors and stores nothing.
Optional AI coaching
Coaching is off until you choose one of two ways to have it, and every other feature works without either.
Before the first review, the app shows you what it is about to send — the frames and the measurements — and where they go, and asks you to agree. Nothing leaves the phone until you do; if you decline, nothing is sent. It asks again whenever the destination changes: moving between Strobe Pro and a key of your own, changing provider, or switching on Send the clip to the coach. Switching the clip back off does not ask again, because less is leaving than you already agreed to. The same disclosure sits in Settings under Coach, as What leaves the phone, where you can also withdraw your agreement so the app asks you again.
With Strobe Pro. The request goes to Strobe’s coach server over HTTPS, carrying the signed App Store transaction that proves the purchase. The server verifies it against Apple’s published keys, forwards the swing to Google’s Gemini model, and streams the answer back. It keeps no swing data. The model that wrote the review is named on it when it arrives.
Or with an account of your own. Add an API key for an account you already hold with Anthropic, OpenAI or Google, and the app calls that provider directly from your iPhone using your key, with no Strobe server in between. Your usage is billed by that provider to your account. A connected key runs only when you pick it in Settings, so buying Strobe Pro never quietly spends your own credit.
What is sent
- The metrics and swing-phase data the on-device analysis produced for that one swing (tempo, angles, estimated speeds, frame indices, club type and camera view).
- Four to six still key frames from that swing, resized, as images — for example address, top and impact.
- Your most recent notes from the Notes tab, as text, so the coach knows what you are working on and what you have been told. A few hundred words at most, newest first.
- The coaching instructions the app builds around them.
If you switch on “Send the clip to the coach”
This setting is off on every install, and it appears only when your coach is running on a Google account — Google’s models are the only ones of the three that read video, and Strobe Pro’s coach can as well. With it on, one thing changes: instead of the still frames, the request carries a trimmed copy of that swing — from just before address to just after the finish, re-encoded small, with no audio track. It goes the same way the rest of the request goes and nowhere else, and it is not stored by the coach server. Everything on the list below is still never sent.
What is never sent
- The swing video itself, in whole or in part, at any frame rate — unless you have switched on Send the clip to the coach, above.
- Your other swings, sessions, drawings or library contents.
- Your name, email address, device identifiers or location — the app has none of these to send. On the Strobe Pro route the request carries your App Store transaction, which proves the purchase and identifies nothing else about you.
Either way an AI provider receives that request, and their own terms and privacy policy govern what they do with it, including how long they retain it and whether it may be reviewed. On your own account those are your account’s settings to read; on Strobe Pro the provider is Google, whose Gemini model the coach server forwards to and which is named on each review. The app asks providers not to store the request where that option exists. If you would rather send nothing at all, leave coaching off — every other feature works without it.
Your API key
Your key is stored in the iOS Keychain with device-only accessibility: it does not sync to iCloud, does not appear in backups that leave the device, and is never transmitted anywhere other than to the provider it belongs to, as the authentication header on your own requests. You can delete it in the app at any time, which immediately turns coaching off.
Face data
Strobe does not collect face data. The pose tracking that draws the skeleton and measures your positions runs on the device, using Apple’s Vision framework body-pose request. It returns seventeen body landmarks, of which five sit on the head: the nose, the two eyes and the two ears. They are used for two things — placing the head on the drawn skeleton, and measuring posture, meaning where the head sits relative to the body — and never to recognise anyone. There is no face recognition, no Face ID, no ARKit face tracking, and no facial features or biometric template of any kind are computed or stored.
Those landmarks are a handful of coordinates. They live in the clip’s analysis file in the app’s own storage on the device, and they are deleted when you delete the clip or the app. They are never sent anywhere: a coaching review carries numeric swing measurements, not landmark coordinates.
What can show a face is the imagery a coaching review sends. The still key frames — or, with Send the clip to the coach switched on, the trimmed clip — show the golfer’s whole body, and so they can show the golfer’s face incidentally. They are sent only after you agree on the screen described above, and only for that one review: with Strobe Pro, to Strobe’s coach server, which forwards them to Google’s Gemini model and keeps no copy; with a key of your own, straight to the provider you connected. Strobe retains none of it. The provider processes the request in order to write the review, under its own terms.
On the device, those frames and the clip they came from are kept until you delete the clip or the app. Nothing else goes with them — the list under What is never sent, above, is complete.
Sharing and export
When you export an annotated clip or a whole session, iOS hands the file to whatever destination you pick in the share sheet — Messages, Photos, a file, another app. Where that file goes and who can see it after that is up to you and to that destination. Strobe is not involved once you have shared it.
Children
Strobe is not directed at children and collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If the app’s handling of data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. Material changes will also be described in the App Store release notes for the version that introduces them.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything the app does with your data: stathis.alexander@gmail.com.