Can the developer read your recovery notes?
If you write something painfully honest in a recovery app, a fair question is whether the people who built it can read it. For a lot of apps the honest answer is that you are trusting them not to. For Escape it is different, and it is not a matter of trust. There is no pipe that carries your notes to us in the first place.
Where your notes actually live
Journal entries, reflections, voice notes, and the things you write in the practice screens are stored locally on your phone, in Apple's secure storage. They sit on your device, not on a server we run, because we do not run a server that holds your content. When you write something in Escape, it does not travel anywhere to get saved.
What “no pipe” means
There is a real difference between “we promise not to look” and “we cannot look.” Most apps could look, because your entries sit in their database behind an account. Escape has no account and no such database. Your notes never reach us, so there is nothing on our side to read, to leak in a breach, to hand over if someone demanded it, or to sell. When a company holds nothing about you, a request for your data can only be answered one way, which is that there is nothing to give.
What about iCloud sync?
If you turn on iCloud, a subset of your data, the text of your journal entries and your streak but not the voice note audio, syncs across your own Apple devices so your iPhone and iPad stay in step. That sync runs through your own iCloud account, encrypted by Apple. We have no access to it. It is your iCloud, and the keys are Apple's and yours, not ours. You can turn it off at any time in your device's iCloud settings.
The one honest caveat
Because your notes live on your device, the real exposure is not us, it is anyone who picks up your unlocked phone and opens the app. That is worth taking seriously. Use a device passcode, and turn on Escape's PIN lock so the app asks for a code before it opens. That closes the gap you actually control. For the bigger picture of on-device versus server storage, the piece on on-device versus cloud goes deeper.
Escape blocks porn in Safari for free, extends to every browser with Deep Block, and adds a 90-second urge ritual, practice games that retrain how you meet an urge, and 27 short courses on identity and the long arc of recovery. No account, no personal tracking.
More on this topic in Privacy in recovery apps, or go deeper with the Who you became in private course.