Come Aside

Come Aside Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 2, 2026

Overview

Come Aside is a Catholic companion app for daily readings, journaling, devotional practice, and reminders. The core daily loop is local-first. Journal, prayer, devotion, and profile records are kept on this iPhone by default. If you explicitly sign in and choose Sync now in Settings > Account & Sync, Come Aside performs a bidirectional account merge: records already stored in that account can be merged with the active account vault on this iPhone, and the merged result can be copied to Supabase for that account. Privately personalized prayers, AI reflection suggestions, Scripture Companion suggestions, and generated review audio artifacts are optional.

Information You Provide

Come Aside may store the following information when you choose to provide it. Some journal, devotion, milestone, and onboarding content may reveal religious practice or beliefs.

How Information Is Used

Come Aside uses your information to:

Come Aside does not use your journal entries, prayers, moods or private reflection content for advertising or hidden journal analysis. Optional advertising measurement is described below and requires your permission.

Local Storage

The core app data is stored on your device. Your journal, milestones, devotions, and profile remain local to that device by default, except for operating-system services such as backup that you control through your device settings. If you explicitly sign in and choose Sync now, records already stored in the account can be merged with the active account vault on this iPhone, and the merged result can also be copied to Supabase for that account. Sync now uses only the active account vault; records retained in a separate local vault are not included. Local voice reflection files remain on this iPhone and are not uploaded by account sync.

Optional Private Personalization And AI Suggestions

When private suggestions are enabled, Come Aside can prepare an original prayer for the carrying note you submit and short, editable suggestions such as titles, summaries, follow-up questions, cleaned text, Scripture Companion passages, review notes, and memory candidates. A request is made only when you choose the carrying note, draft, saved entry, transcript text, saved review, or review date range to use. Results are not saved unless you accept or keep them.

Selected text for a private request is sent to Come Aside's backend and OpenAI to process that request. A carrying-prayer request uses only the current note, optional feeling, first name, app language, date, and liturgical season disclosed in the app. Scripture Companion requests also include Come Aside's approved passage catalog so the provider can choose one catalog ID. Come Aside does not send hidden journal history, run background AI analysis, or create a hosted vector store for private journals. Local voice recording files, photos, videos, and attachment file paths are not sent as AI source data. If you use text from dictation or a transcript, only the selected text is used for the request you choose.

When you use private personalization and no Account & Sync session exists, Come Aside may create a bounded, pseudonymous Supabase Auth session and store its token securely on the device. That anonymous session authenticates the selected request and supports abuse controls; it does not give that session access to your journal, devotion, milestone, profile records, or generated review audio. If you are already signed in to Account & Sync, private personalization reuses that account's Supabase access token instead. That account session can authorize access to records already synced to the account, but a private personalization request still uses only the source you select and ask Come Aside to use; it does not automatically read all synced or account records, run hidden journal analysis, or send hidden journal history. When you choose Delete local data, Come Aside also asks Supabase to delete the anonymous identifier when one exists.

When cloud suggestions are used, Come Aside keeps bounded server capacity metadata so admission, replay protection, daily guarantees, provider settlement, and cost controls can work. This private metadata may include a hashed request key, route, weight, allowance day, effective timezone, processing location, provider, model, token counts, cost, and outcome. It does not store raw request text, journal text, prompts, responses, source ids, or inferred vulnerability data. Existing app usage records are historical metadata for export and sync, not cloud admission authority.

AI suggestions are not a priest, confessor, therapist, spiritual director, or replacement for personal pastoral care. Come Aside applies safety checks before preparing suggestions and may decline to generate a suggestion for some requests.

Optional Review Audio Artifacts

When you create a spoken reflection or prayer song from a saved monthly or seasonal review, Come Aside uses the saved review and the details shown in the app before generation. Weekly reviews stay note-only. Song drafts are prepared locally in the app, then the audio request is sent to Come Aside's backend with provider selection handled on the server.

Come Aside may use Google Gemini text-to-speech for spoken reflections and Google/Lyria for prayer song audio. Google credentials stay in Supabase Function secrets and are not included in the app. Generated audio is stored in a private Supabase Storage bucket under your account. Come Aside stores audio metadata such as provider, model, storage path, mime type, duration when available, and an expiring signed playback URL. Backend logs for these requests are metadata-only and do not include lyrics, journal text, or request text.

Prayer songs are for private reflection. They are not liturgical music, not Mass music, and not a replacement for prayer, confession, pastoral care, or spiritual direction.

Sharing To Other Apps

When you choose a personal moment from Apple's Journaling Suggestions picker, Apple shows the picker and Come Aside receives only the moment you select. That moment stays with the reflection you save. You can remove the selected moment before saving the reflection. If the selected moment includes a place, city, workout, movement, or step-count detail, that chosen detail may be saved with the reflection.

When you choose Send to Apple Journal, Come Aside opens the native iOS Share Sheet with a text version of the selected reflection. You choose the destination and approve anything saved outside Come Aside. Come Aside does not read Apple Journal entries, write to Apple Journal in the background, or keep Apple Journal content synced with Come Aside.

When you choose Export my data, Come Aside opens the native share sheet with a text JSON copy of your profile, journal entries, devotion records, sacramental milestones, and non-sensitive settings. Local voice reflection files and generated review audio files are not included in the text export.

Mass Finder And Maps

Mass finder does not request device location permission. You may optionally type a city, postcode, parish area, or other search area. Come Aside uses that text to build a Google Maps search link, then opens the Google Maps app if it is installed or Google Maps in your browser if it is not.

Come Aside does not receive Google Maps results, store GPS coordinates, upload typed Mass finder place text, or use map searches for tracking. Google Maps handles the search after you leave Come Aside under Google's own terms and privacy policy.

Daily Email

If you opt in through the website or the app, Come Aside stores your email address and basic mailing-list state so it can send the daily email, prevent duplicate sends, and honor unsubscribe requests. Daily emails begin only after you confirm from your inbox. Every daily email includes an unsubscribe link.

The daily email contains the daily reading citations, a public-domain Scripture excerpt from the World English Bible Catholic Edition, one original Come Aside reflection, and one question for your journal. It does not use your journal entries, AI suggestion history, devotion intentions, milestones, or onboarding profile.

Come Aside uses Supabase to store daily email subscription state and Resend to deliver email.

When you play recorded narration in Come Aside, the audio file is delivered by Cloudflare, which processes your device's IP address and request details to deliver it and protect the service from abuse. These requests do not include your account, journal or other personal content.

Website And Email Analytics

When you visit the Come Aside website, Come Aside records limited first-party analytics such as page path, referrer host and path, UTM campaign fields, country and region from hosting headers, language, timezone, device/browser information, viewport size, and anonymous session and daily visitor hashes. Come Aside does not use analytics cookies or store raw IP addresses for website analytics.

When you receive the daily email, Come Aside records subscription events, send history, open and click events when email clients load images or links, delivery events, bounce events, complaint events, and unsubscribe events. Email open numbers are estimates because some email apps load images for privacy and some block images entirely.

Come Aside uses website and daily email analytics to understand whether the website and daily email are working and to improve deliverability. This information is not used for advertising or third-party ad tracking.

App Analytics

When app analytics are enabled, Come Aside sends limited product-interaction events to PostHog using a pseudonymous ID scoped to the active private vault. Events in that vault can be linked while the current identity is in use. A second vault on the same installation uses a separate ID, so events from the two vaults are not joined. Switching vaults and signing out rotate the active analytics identity and suppress queued events from the older identity generation. This ID is not linked to your sync account, private-processing session, billing or RevenueCat entitlement identity, name, email, journal, prayer, or AI identity. These events help Come Aside understand whether people are opening the app, completing onboarding, reaching the daily path, saving reflections, keeping lines, opening reviews, completing devotions, and seeing subscription screens.

App analytics send approved counts, booleans, generic screen or action names, event names, local date keys, and generic source surfaces only. Come Aside does not send journal text, kept-line text, prayer intentions, mood notes, names, email addresses, AI prompt text, generated reflection text, notification bodies, specific devotion content, specific prayer content, or whether private text triggered crisis, pastoral, or therapeutic safety handling to PostHog. App analytics are not used for advertising, retargeting, cross-app tracking, or cross-website tracking. Deleting one vault clears only that vault's local analytics identity. Delete local data clears all locally stored analytics identities and pending analytics events; later events use a new identity only after a valid vault is available. These local actions do not delete historical PostHog events, which remain subject to the provider's retention and deletion controls.

Ad Measurement

Come Aside uses AppsFlyer for ad measurement and attribution for all users. AppsFlyer receives install, session and in-app event information, including device and network information such as IP address, the vendor identifier (IDFV), operating system and app version. It can derive an approximate location from IP and receive technical performance information such as launch time or battery level. This measurement starts without waiting for Apple's tracking permission. The advertising identifier (IDFA) is used only when you allow Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) permission.

The app sends four generic milestones: first meaningful action, activation on two local days within the first seven days, trial started and subscription started. These events identify only the milestone, without details of the activity. AppsFlyer also receives the install and device information described above. Meta receives attribution through AppsFlyer and Apple's SKAdNetwork. AppsFlyer manages Apple's ad reporting. This is separate from the PostHog app analytics described above. Come Aside does not send journal entries, prayers, moods, action kinds, email addresses, contact details or account identifiers to AppsFlyer or Meta. Meta forwarding is limited to Meta-attributed data; organic/all-source forwarding, advanced matching, audiences and retargeting are disabled.

The separate account-bound commercial measurement path requires a verified account session, ATT authorization and a recorded server grant. Come Aside associates eligible billing events with the AppsFlyer installation identifier internally. The server sends only the installation identifier, first paid subscription or trial-conversion event, product, USD amount, time, operating-system version and tracking-permission status, with fixed app metadata. A previous local opt-out or retained server denial continues to suppress this separate path until a newly observed OS Allow. It does not stop the ordinary AppsFlyer measurement described above. This association does not join private journal content or the PostHog vault identity to advertising.

The quiet Ad measurement row in Settings opens iOS Settings to manage Apple's tracking permission. Declining or withdrawing permission prevents future IDFA use; ordinary AppsFlyer measurement and Apple's SKAdNetwork reporting continue. Withdrawal also requests revocation of the separate account-bound commercial path, with foreground reconciliation taking up to about 60 seconds. It cannot recall a request already sent and is not immediate deletion of provider history. Deleting your sync account queues associated, account-bound AppsFlyer installation identifiers for erasure; installations never associated with an account are not covered by that account-erasure queue. Come Aside records provider completion separately from acceptance of the deletion request. Contact hello@comeaside.app for help with a pending request.

The internal attribution-event ledger is purged after eight days. Minimal installation identifiers are retained to fulfill account deletion. A queued identifier remains until a matching completed provider-erasure response; unknown, canceled or missing responses require operational follow-up. Provider retention periods vary. AppsFlyer and Meta control their own retention and deletion under their published terms; local deletion or consent withdrawal is not proof that either provider has erased a copy.

Account & Sync

When the app language is English and an Account & Sync session is established or restored, Come Aside may also read, merge, and repair a limited set of content-free formation metadata for that account. It can include factual records that a carrying result, new journal entry, review closure or keep, knowledge interaction, encounter, Rosary completion, prayer, or devotion action occurred; it does not include journal or prayer text. While the app language remains English and the signed-in session is active, these limited records can also be written to Supabase automatically as those actions occur. This separate formation-metadata sync is not Sync now and does not automatically read all synced records or journal history.

When you explicitly sign in and choose Sync now in Settings > Account & Sync, Come Aside uses Supabase to authenticate your email address or Sign in with Apple identity and perform a bidirectional account merge. It fetches records already stored in the account, merges them with the records in the active account vault on this iPhone, copies the merged app records back to that account, and then persists the merged result locally. Depending on the records present, this can include your profile, journal entries, devotion records, sacramental milestones, saved reviews, kept lines, memory records, settings, and related app-state records. Records already in the account, including journal, devotion, milestone, and memory records, can be restored or merged onto this iPhone. Sync now uses only the active account vault; records retained in a separate local vault are not included. Local voice reflection files remain on this iPhone and are not uploaded by account sync. The anonymous private-personalization session described above is not a sync account, and the sync account is separate from the vault-scoped analytics identity.

Separately, when the app language is English, Account & Sync is enabled, and you are signed in, resetting Road to Emmaus or choosing Begin again can also trigger the same full account merge after the journey state is saved. This can fetch records already stored in the account, merge them with the active account vault on this iPhone, copy the merged app records back to the account, and persist the merged result locally. Records retained in a separate local vault are not included.

Subscriptions

Come Aside uses RevenueCat to manage subscription status and restore purchases. Payment processing is handled by Apple through the App Store. RevenueCat receives a generated app user ID for anonymous or local device startup. After you establish a verified Account & Sync session, Come Aside also uses a canonical account-bound RevenueCat identifier derived from the Supabase account UUID; it does not use your onboarding name as a billing identifier. The server receives signed RevenueCat entitlement events, stores only hashed provider identifiers and bounded entitlement metadata for AI capacity authority, and does not store the provider's raw event payload. RevenueCat's app user ID, the account-bound billing identity, entitlement projection, sync account, and vault-scoped analytics identity are kept separate. Come Aside does not send RevenueCat identifiers to PostHog or join these identities, although approved coarse subscription state and purchase outcomes may be included in Product Interaction analytics.

Notifications

If you enable reminders, Come Aside schedules local notifications on your device. You can turn these off in the app or in iOS Settings.

Data Deletion

You can remove local app data from the Come Aside Plus gate, from Settings > About > Delete local data, or by deleting the app from your device. This removes local profile, journal, devotion, milestone, reminder, local voice reflection data, local AI suggestion history, kept memories, all locally stored pseudonymous analytics identities, pending analytics events, the local measurement ledger, account session, anonymous private-processing session, and generated billing identifier from that device. It also clears the local RevenueCat installation identity and signs out of the account-bound RevenueCat identity. You can also clear AI suggestion history and kept memories from Settings > Privacy. Deleting a saved review removes generated review artifacts tied to that review. If you use Account & Sync and choose Sync now, records in the active account vault may also exist in Supabase, and records already in the account may be merged onto this iPhone. Delete local data removes the device copy of the main app data and clears the account session. When the English formation experience is enabled, it also resets that account-scoped formation metadata. If you change the app language before deleting local data, that remote formation metadata can remain in the account; use Delete sync account to delete synced account data. Delete local data does not delete the rest of the synced account data. Use Settings > Account & Sync > Delete sync account to delete the sync account and synced data; Come Aside deletes generated review audio objects before deleting the sync account and resets the active local analytics identity as part of sign-out. Deleting the sync account also removes the server-side RevenueCat identity mapping and entitlement event records attached to that account; RevenueCat and Apple may retain their own billing records under their terms. These local and account-deletion actions do not delete historical PostHog events, which remain subject to the provider's retention and deletion controls. If you receive the daily email, you can unsubscribe from any daily email. You may also contact the support address below for help with deletion requests.

Children

Come Aside is not directed to children under 13.

Contact

For privacy questions or deletion requests, contact:

hello@comeaside.app

This is the same support address used for Come Aside help and accessibility questions.

Changes To This Policy

Come Aside may update this policy when the app changes. The published policy will show the latest update date.