Privacy policy

Last updated: October 18, 2026

Riff is a news reader for iPhone. It has no account and no server: your data stays on your iPhone and, if you want, in your iCloud storage. This page explains what is kept, where, and who can see it.

Who is responsible

The person responsible for Riff is Arnaud Lewis. Contact: contact@riff.watch.

On your iPhone

Your sources, categories, Playlists, settings and the articles you have already seen (identified by their link, kept for 60 days, except those still in your current mix, which stay while it does) are stored in the app’s private space. So are how far you read or listened to each article and what you did with it (opened, saved, summarized), identified by its link, with its source and category, kept for 90 days. The latest articles fetched, and a cache of the images shown with them (150 MB at most), are stored there too.

For You works on your iPhone only. It uses the language model of the iPhone to turn the titles and excerpts of the articles you read into numbers, and keeps the text it used for your most recent readings so it can do it again if the model changes. A short note is also kept for the articles that matter most to your profile (read at least halfway, summarized, explored with Subject, or marked “Fewer stories like this”), 40 at most, for 90 days: the title of the article (200 characters at most) and the start of its excerpt (300 at most).

All of this stays on your iPhone unless you turn on iCloud sync or export a backup. An AI summary stays in memory while the app is running; if you keep the article in your Watchlist, its summary is kept with it, on your iPhone, together with a copy of the article’s text. A small file with the next cards of your feed is shared with the Riff widget on the same iPhone. A backup you export contains your Playlists, not your Watchlist.

The subscription is handled by Apple: Riff checks on your iPhone, with StoreKit, whether you are subscribed, and receives neither your payment method nor your identity.

With iCloud (optional)

iCloud sync is on by default and can be turned off in Settings → General → iCloud. It copies to the private database of your iCloud account, so they follow you to your other devices: your sources, categories, Playlists and settings (appearance, suggestions, reading languages, hidden suggestions); the links of the articles you have already seen; your reading history (the progress and actions above, by link, source and category); the short notes of the articles that shape your profile, which hold the title and the start of the excerpt of each; and your Watchlist, meaning the articles you kept, each with its title, source, excerpt, link, the date you kept it and whether you read it, and, when they fit in 32 KiB, a copy of the article’s text and its AI summary (otherwise the page is read again on your other device). The Watchlist holds at most 200 articles to read: an article kept on another device that would take this one over that is not added here. The numbers For You computes, the image cache and the widget file are not synced. That database is operated by Apple under its own privacy policy; the person responsible for Riff has no access to it. Deletion markers are kept for 90 days so your other devices apply the deletions.

What Riff sends over the network

Riff has no server: your iPhone contacts websites directly, and those sites see the visit, your IP address and the usual details of a web request, as with any browser. Riff does not keep any cookie from those sites.

To refresh your mix, your iPhone fetches the feeds of the sources you follow. Unless Suggestions is set to Never, it also fetches, at each refresh, feeds you do not follow: sources of Riff’s catalogue that suggestions come from, feeds close to the categories you read most, and the general news feeds the headlines are found in. When you tap Subject, it can fetch a few more catalogue feeds close to the subject of the article. Adding a source by its address contacts the address you typed and, to find its feed, a few usual paths of that site.

So the text of articles is ready, your iPhone also loads ahead the page of the article on screen and of the next three, even if you never open them. It reads those pages without running their scripts, without images or cookies, and keeps only the text. When you keep an article in your Watchlist, its page is read the same way if the feed only gave an excerpt. If you turn on Hide paid articles (Settings → General), Riff also fetches the page of the articles up to ten ahead of the one on screen, only to look for a subscribers-only marker, and keeps nothing from them.

The photos of the cards (the one on screen and, ahead of time, the next two) and the images of the articles you read are loaded from the publishers’ servers or their image hosts, without cookies, and kept in the cache mentioned above.

The “Read on” option in a card’s menu opens the publisher’s page in the in-app browser, which follows that site’s rules and cookies.

The AI summary

The AI summary is only written when you ask for it, with the Riff logo at the bottom of the screen. It is written on your iPhone by the language model of Apple Intelligence: Riff uses no online service for summaries, so the text of the article is sent nowhere. Riff has no server and uses the summary for nothing else than keeping it with the article if you add it to your Watchlist. An AI-written summary can be wrong: the article remains the reference.

For a subscribers-only article, the summary only covers the excerpt published in the feed, and the app says so. It needs an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro or later), with Apple Intelligence turned on in Settings and a language it supports; the model may first download to the iPhone. Without it, the summary is unavailable and the rest of Riff works normally.

Reading aloud

Articles are read aloud by the voices installed on your iPhone. The text is not sent anywhere.

What Riff does not do

No account, no usage analytics, no ads, no tracking, no selling or sharing of data. The source catalogue ships inside the app: browsing it sends nothing.

Your rights

You stay in control of your data. In Settings → General:

• Backup → Export saves your settings and the sources you added yourself (JSON), and those sources alone (OPML).
• Delete iCloud data erases what Riff stored in the iCloud account that was in use when you asked, and turns sync off. If the device is offline, the deletion is kept and done once it is back online.
• Reset everything erases all app data on this iPhone, including the image cache and the widget file. With iCloud sync on, it also erases what Riff stored in your iCloud, and so the data of your other devices, Watchlist included.
• For You → Forget my reading habits erases your reading history and the article notes described above on this iPhone and, with iCloud sync, on your other devices.

Deleting the app also erases the local data. The person responsible for Riff has no access to the app data stored on your iPhone or in your iCloud; for any question, use the contact above. You may also lodge a complaint with your data protection authority.

Third-party content

Articles belong to their publishers. Riff shows titles, excerpts and links, and sends you to the original. To improve reading, Riff loads the text of article pages on your iPhone; nothing is republished.

Changes

If this policy changes in a significant way, we will say so in the app before it applies.

This website

This website (riff.watch) is a static page. It uses no cookies, no audience measurement and no third-party trackers.

It is served by Cloudflare, which processes technical logs to deliver and protect the site, under its own privacy policy.

If you write to contact@riff.watch, we receive your message and your email address in our mailbox, hosted by Apple (iCloud). We use them only to reply and keep them for the length of the exchange.