Dayshift

📄 Overview

Dayshift is a team time-zone tracker and meeting planner built by ARRcade for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision Pro. Its privacy guarantee is architectural rather than promissory: there is no ARRcade account, no ARRcade server, and no code in the app that opens a network connection. There is nowhere for your data to be sent, because nothing was ever built to receive it.

Everything you enter — your teammates, their time zones, your projects and your planned meetings — is stored on your device by SwiftData and, when iCloud is available, mirrored into your own private iCloud database. That database belongs to your Apple Account, not to ARRcade. We cannot read it, list it, or request access to it.

📋 What We Collect

ARRcade collects nothing from Dayshift. The table below is the complete picture of every category of data the app touches and where it lives.

Dayshift bundles no third-party libraries at all. Every framework it uses — SwiftUI, SwiftData, EventKit, WidgetKit, App Intents, Foundation Models, PhotosUI and Image Playground — is a first-party Apple framework shipped as part of the operating system.

👥 Your Team Roster — Data About Other People

Dayshift is a tool for keeping track of colleagues, so the information you enter is mostly about other people. We want to be explicit about that, because it is the one category of third-party personal data the app handles.

• For each teammate you may record a name, role, email address, home time zone, an accent colour, and a photo or generated pixel sprite.
• You may also record remote stints (a temporary time zone with a start and end date) and vacation intervals. These are day-granular dates you type in — Dayshift does not detect, infer or verify anyone’s whereabouts.
• None of this is fetched from anywhere. There is no directory lookup, no contacts import, no company sign-in, no address-book access. Every field is typed in by you.
• All of it stays in your own store. It is never sent to ARRcade and is never shared with the teammates themselves — Dayshift has no way to contact them.

☁ iCloud Sync

Dayshift stores your roster with SwiftData and mirrors it to CloudKit so the same team shows up on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro. That mirroring targets the private database of an app container tied to your Apple Account.

• A CloudKit private database is readable only by the Apple Account that owns it. ARRcade cannot query it, browse it, export it or grant itself access — that restriction is enforced by Apple, not by our good intentions.
• There is no sharing, no public database and no shared zone. Dayshift does not offer a way to publish a roster or invite anyone into it.
• If iCloud is unavailable — no account signed in, iCloud Drive turned off, or a build without the entitlement — Dayshift falls back to a local-only store and works exactly the same, minus cross-device sync.
• Data held in iCloud is governed by Apple’s Privacy Policy and your iCloud terms, not by this policy. You can remove it at any time in Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → Manage Account Storage.

📅 Calendar Access

Dayshift requests full calendar access through Apple EventKit (NSCalendarsFullAccessUsageDescription). This is the only sensitive permission the app asks for, and Apple requires the full-access level because Dayshift both reads your calendar and writes a single event to it. The declared purpose string is: “checks your calendar availability to suggest meeting times and saves finalized meetings to your calendar.”

What is read. When you plan a meeting, Dayshift asks EventKit for the events in the search window you chose and keeps only the start time, end time and busy/free status of each one, so that suggested slots dodge your existing commitments. All-day events and events marked free are ignored. Event titles, notes, locations, attendees, organisers and URLs are not read, not stored and not shown anywhere in the app. The busy intervals exist in memory for the duration of the scan and are never written to disk or to iCloud.

What is written. Nothing is written until you pick a slot and confirm it. At that point Dayshift creates one event in your default calendar with the meeting title, the start and end time, a ten-minute alert, and notes containing the agenda plus each attendee’s name, email (if you recorded one) and local time for that slot. Dayshift never modifies or deletes events it did not create, and never touches any other event on your calendar.

You can revoke calendar access at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Calendars (or System Settings on a Mac). Dayshift keeps working without it — the roster, the shared-hours map and the fairness scoring are all unaffected. Only conflict-avoidance and saving to the calendar stop being available.

✨ Apple Intelligence — On Device

When you plan a meeting, Dayshift can write a short brief: a title, a three-point agenda, and a sentence on why the recommended time is fair for everyone. That text is generated by Apple’s Foundation Models framework using the on-device system language model.

• The model runs on your device. Dayshift makes no request to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, to ChatGPT, or to any other AI service — there is no code in the app capable of doing so.
• The prompt does include roster context: attendee names, roles and time zones, the topic you typed, and the candidate times with their fairness scores. It stays inside the on-device model session and is discarded when the session ends. Attendee email addresses are not included.
• Nothing from the brief is used to train any model. Apple’s on-device model does not learn from your prompts.
• Availability is checked before use. On a device or region where Apple Intelligence is unavailable or switched off, Dayshift falls back to a deterministic brief computed locally from the same fairness maths, and the feature is simply labelled “Find Fair Times” instead. The app is fully functional either way.

📷 Photos & Portraits

Every teammate gets a generated pixel sprite by default — drawn from a random seed, no image needed. You can optionally replace it with a photo, or with a portrait made in Apple’s Image Playground.

• Photos. Dayshift uses the system photo picker, which runs outside the app in Apple’s own process. That is why the app never asks for photo-library permission and declares no photo usage string: it cannot see your library. It receives only the single image you deliberately pick, which is then stored with that teammate’s record.
• Image Playground. If your device supports it, you can generate or stylise a portrait through Apple’s system Image Playground sheet. The generation is performed by the operating system and is governed by Apple’s privacy terms; Dayshift supplies a short text concept and, if you picked one, the source photo, and receives back only the finished image. The button is hidden entirely on devices where Image Playground is unavailable.
• Avatar images are stored alongside the rest of the roster and therefore sync to your private iCloud database like any other field. A small thumbnail also goes into the on-device widget container described below.

🧩 Widget & App Group

The Team Clock widget and the Mac menu-bar roster need the same data as the app, but a widget extension is a separate process. Rather than give the widget access to the database, Dayshift writes a compact JSON snapshot into a shared app-group container on the device.

• The snapshot contains only what the widget draws: teammate names, roles, time-zone identifiers, colours, sprite seeds, small avatar thumbnails and project names. Email addresses, away dates, meetings and agendas are not included.
• The app group is a sandboxed folder on your device shared between Dayshift and its own widget extension. No other app can read it, and its contents never leave the device.
• Deleting Dayshift removes the app-group container and everything in it.

🔒 Network & Notifications

Dayshift contains no networking code. There is no URLSession, no socket, no HTTP request and no hard-coded URL anywhere in the app — a search of the source for either returns nothing. It has no backend to talk to.

The only network activity associated with the app is iCloud synchronisation, which is performed by the operating system’s own CloudKit daemon on your behalf, between your device and your private iCloud database. Dayshift never sees that traffic and it never reaches ARRcade.

• No analytics or telemetry is sent on launch, in the background, or at any other time.
• No advertising networks, attribution SDKs, or third-party crash reporters are present.
• Dayshift is free of in-app purchases and subscriptions. It links to no external payment system and collects no billing information.

🏪 App Store-Supplied Data

Dayshift is distributed through the App Store. Apple receives standard anonymous app metrics — crash reports, launch counts and aggregate usage data — from every app on its platforms, subject to the analytics-sharing setting on your device. ARRcade can see these aggregated, anonymised figures in App Store Connect, but has no access through them to anything that identifies an individual user.

For details on what Apple collects, see Apple’s Privacy Policy.

⚖ Your Rights

Because ARRcade holds no data from Dayshift, you exercise every right directly, on your own device, without asking us.

• Access: everything Dayshift knows is visible in the app. ARRcade holds no copy to disclose.
• Correction: edit any teammate, project or meeting in place at any time.
• Deletion: delete a teammate or project to remove their data from your store and, on the next sync, from iCloud. Deleting the app removes the local store and the widget container; deleting the app’s iCloud data in Settings → Apple Account → iCloud → Manage Account Storage removes the synced copy.
• Portability: ARRcade holds no data to port. Your iCloud copy is under your own account’s control.
• Withdrawing permission: revoke calendar access, or turn off iCloud for Dayshift, at any time in system settings. The app continues to work.

For users in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, this design means your GDPR rights are satisfied by construction — ARRcade is not a processor of your data, because none is ever transmitted to us. Where you record details about colleagues, you remain the party responsible for that information under your own workplace obligations.

For California residents: Dayshift does not sell or share personal information, and there is no personal information for us to sell. CCPA and CPRA opt-out rights therefore have nothing to act on.

🏃 Children’s Privacy

Dayshift is a workplace productivity tool designed for adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children — and because Dayshift transmits no personal information to ARRcade from anyone, this is satisfied by the app’s architecture.

📣 Changes to This Policy

If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and note the change in the accompanying app update on the App Store.

Given Dayshift’s architecture — no accounts, no servers, no networking code and no third-party SDKs — the scope for meaningful change is narrow. Any change that introduced data collection or an outbound connection would require explicit, informed opt-in before it took effect.

✉ Contact

Questions about this Privacy Policy or how Dayshift handles data? We are happy to help.