EpicStride

Privacy Policy

Last updated 27 October 2026

The app

EpicStride collects nothing. It has no servers of its own, no login, and no analytics or advertising SDKs of any kind. There is no profile of you anywhere, and so there is nothing about you for us to sell, share, or lose. Everything below happens on your phone, or on your watch if you run with one, unless it says otherwise.

Motion & fitness

To gate the story to your movement, the app reads your motion and pace from your phone’s motion sensors while a run is active, and from your watch’s sensors if you run with one. This is processed on-device, in real time, to decide whether the narrator advances or waits, and it is never sent to us.

When a run ends, the app keeps a summary of it on your phone so you can look back on your runs: the story and the choices you made, your distance, time and pace, and your average and highest heart rate if a watch measured them. If you calibrate your stride, it also keeps the walking, jogging and running speeds it measured. A troubleshooting setting, off unless you turn it on, can keep a detailed motion log on the phone as well. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

Heart rate & health data

On Apple Watch, a run is an ordinary workout session. With your permission, the watch reads your heart rate, walking and running distance and active energy (calories) while a run is active, passes your heart rate and pace to your iPhone to pace the story, and saves the workout to Apple Health when the run ends, so it counts toward your rings like any other. With your permission, the iPhone app also reads your resting heart rate and date of birth from Apple Health, to work out the effort zones the story paces you against.

On a Wear OS watch, the EpicStride watch app uses the watch’s own fitness sensors while a run is active. With your permission, it reads your heart rate, speed, step cadence and calories, shows them on the watch, and passes your heart rate, speed and cadence to your phone to pace the story. Neither the watch app nor the phone app saves anything to Health Connect or reads anything from it. Without a watch, the Android app reads no heart rate or health data at all.

Health data stays with you: in Apple Health, under your control, and in the run summaries on your phone. A workout saved to Apple Health stays there until you delete it in the Health app. We never receive any of it, and it is never used for advertising or shared with anyone. You can decline these permissions and the story still works — it simply paces you on movement alone.

Speech recognition

Voice is optional: decline the microphone permission and you can tap your choices instead. When you do answer a fork out loud, where the listening happens depends on the microphone you answer with.

• iPhone, through the phone or your headphones. The app asks Apple’s speech framework to recognize your answer on the iPhone itself, which it does whenever the phone has Apple’s on-device English speech model. If it doesn’t, the framework can send the audio to Apple’s speech service instead, under Apple’s privacy policy. iOS won’t let an app start listening once your phone is locked, so the app opens the microphone when a run starts and keeps it open until the run ends, and iOS shows its microphone indicator the whole time. Sound only reaches the recognizer while a fork is listening; everything else is discarded as it arrives.
• Android phone. Recognition runs entirely on the phone, using an open-source recognizer (Vosk) bundled inside the app, and the microphone is open only while a fork is listening.
• Apple Watch or Wear OS watch. The app doesn’t recognize speech on the wrist. The watch records the few seconds in which you answer and passes that clip to your phone over the connection between them, and your phone recognizes it as above. Neither device keeps a copy once it has been heard.

The app never keeps a recording, and no audio is ever sent to us.

Purchases

Sagas, whether bought one at a time or all four together, are one-time purchases handled entirely by the store you bought them from — Apple through the App Store, or Google through Google Play. We never see your name, card, or payment details — the store simply tells the app whether a purchase is active. When you buy a saga, its audio downloads from Apple’s or Google’s own servers, just as the app itself did.

What the app stores tell us

Every app on the App Store gets a developer report from Apple, every app on Google Play gets one from Google, and EpicStride is no exception. Both show us aggregate figures: how many people saw the listing, how many installed it, which of our links sent them, roughly how often the app is opened, and crash reports. We can’t see who you are in any of it, we didn’t write any code to gather it, and we couldn’t switch it off if we wanted to.

You control your share of it on your device — on iPhone under Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, on Android under Settings → Google → Usage & diagnostics. What Apple and Google collect is governed by their privacy policies, not ours.

This website

epicstride.app is served by Cloudflare, and we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits. It records which pages were viewed, roughly where in the world the visit came from, and which site linked here. It sets no cookies, assigns you no identifier, and cannot follow you to any other website — there is no way for us to tell one visitor from another, or a returning visitor from a new one.

We use it to see which pages people read and roughly how many visit — nothing more detailed than that is available to us. It is never used to build an audience, target advertising, or follow you anywhere else. Cloudflare also processes the ordinary details of serving a page — your IP address and browser — as our hosting provider, in order to deliver the site and block attacks.

The website has no ads, no advertising or social-media trackers, and no fonts, scripts, or embeds loaded from anyone else’s servers. None of this touches the app, which stays exactly as described above: nothing about your runs, your voice, or your choices reaches this website or us.

Consumer health data (Washington)

Chillingworth Labs is based in Washington, whose My Health My Data Act (RCW 19.373) asks for a consumer health data privacy policy. Everything it asks for is already true of EpicStride, so here it is in that form. If you’re a Washington resident, this section is written for you; it applies to everyone, everywhere.

• What health data the app handles, and why. Heart rate, walking and running distance, active energy (calories), speed or pace, and step cadence, while a run is active, to pace the story to your effort and show your pace on the screen; your average and highest heart rate for a run, kept in that run’s summary on your phone; and, on iPhone, your resting heart rate and date of birth, to work out the effort zones the story paces you against. Nothing else, and nothing for any other purpose.
• Where it comes from. Your phone’s motion sensors, your watch’s sensors, and — with your permission — Apple Health. Each of these is a permission you grant on your device and can withdraw there.
• Who it is shared with. No one. It is never sent to us, never sold, and never shared with any affiliate, partner or third party. On Apple Watch the workout is saved to Apple Health on your own device, under Apple’s privacy policy, because you asked it to count.
• Your rights. You can see this data in the app’s run history and in the Health app; withdraw consent by turning the permissions off in your device’s Settings; and delete it by deleting a workout in the Health app or deleting the app. Because none of it ever reaches us, there is nothing we can look up, correct or delete on your behalf — but if you have a question or a request, write to support@epicstride.app and we’ll answer within 45 days.

Children

Some of the stories include mild fantasy violence and horror, so EpicStride isn’t made for young children. It collects no personal information from anyone, including children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy ever changes, we’ll update the date above. The app collects nothing today, and any change that altered that would be announced here before it shipped — not slipped in.

Contact

EpicStride is published by Chillingworth Labs, a trade name of Walla Vine LLC.