What "no account" actually means

Open most baby apps for the first time and you get a form. Email, password, your name, your baby's name, your baby's date of birth. It feels normal because every app does it.

Coffee & Cradle asks how many weeks old your baby is. That's the first screen, and as far as who-you-are goes, it's also the last one. We've said "no account" a lot in our marketing, and it's a phrase that can hide things, so this post is the long version: what it means technically, what we do hold, and what we gave up to build it this way.

The technical part

There's no sign-up. When you open the app, it creates a random anonymous identifier using Firebase's anonymous authentication, which Google's own docs describe as a way to "create and use temporary anonymous accounts" for people "who haven't yet signed up to your app." The identifier is a string of characters. It isn't linked to an email, a phone number, a name, or any account you hold anywhere else.

Everything the app stores hangs off that string, and nothing it stores can be used to work out whose string it is.

What the app does hold

We'd rather over-disclose than let "privacy-first" stand in for a list. Straight from our privacy policy, this is all of it:

• Your baby's age in weeks. Never a birth date. The app advances the age by itself, so you type it once.
• Optional context, if you want to give it. Gender, temperament, and a few yes-or-no answers like first-time parent, whether your baby has an illness or disability, whether there are siblings. Each one exists to pick better tips. Skip any of them.
• Coarse location, if you allow it. We round your coordinates to roughly an eleven-kilometer grid before storing them. That's enough to know it's a hot day where you are, so a sun-safety tip can show up the right morning, and not enough to find a household. Say no and everything else still works.
• Time zone and notification settings, including a push token if you turn notifications on, so the four o'clock tip lands at four o'clock.
• What you do in the app. Searches you type, and which tips you open, save, like, or linger on. This is how the app learns what you care about; the "why this tip" panel shows you how it was used. It doesn't log keystrokes, only deliberate actions.
• Basic usage analytics. We use Mixpanel to record events like app opens and session length, along with device model and operating-system version, so we can tell whether the app is working. These are tied to a random identifier, not to you.

That last item is why the App Store privacy label for Coffee & Cradle won't say "Data Not Collected." Apple's definition is strict, and we think it should be: "collect" means "transmitting data off the device in a way that allows you and/or your third-party partners to access it for a period longer than what is necessary to service the transmitted request." Analytics counts. We'd rather say so than game a label.

One more thing we want to say plainly. When you search, your query text may be sent to an AI provider to understand it or, when nothing in the library matches, to draft a tip. It goes without your identifier or profile attached, under terms that don't allow it to be used for training.

What we never hold

No name. No email. No phone number. No date of birth. No contacts, no photos, no precise location, no advertising identifier. There's nothing to sign up for and no password to forget. We don't sell or rent data, we don't share it with data brokers, and there are no ads.

That tip is what coarse location is for. On a hot day it moves up the list. That's the whole use.

Why we were stubborn about it

Two things about this category bothered us.

Most baby apps aren't covered by medical privacy law. HIPAA covers doctors, hospitals and insurers, not the app on your phone. In April 2024 the Federal Trade Commission finalized changes to its Health Breach Notification Rule specifically "clarifying its applicability to health apps and other similar technologies not covered by HIPAA," and made clear that a breach includes "an unauthorized disclosure," not only a hack. A regulator doesn't spell that out unless the gap is real.

The neighbors have a poor record. When the Mozilla Foundation reviewed twenty-five period, pregnancy and fertility apps and devices in August 2022, eighteen of them got its "Privacy Not Included" warning label, and its lead researcher described the apps' policies on sharing data with law enforcement as "pretty vaguely outlined." Baby-care apps are the next shelf over, and what they hold is arguably worse: a child's name and exact birth date, which together make a permanent identifier that can't be changed later.

We didn't want to be the ones holding that file. You can't lose data you never had.

What it costs

Building without accounts gives up some things, and you should know which.

• There's no password reset, because there's no password. If you delete the app, the anonymous identifier is abandoned and nothing we hold can be connected back to you. That's the design working as intended, but it also means we can't restore a profile from an email address.
• Deletion is an email, not a button. We have no contact details for you, so you write to us and we work with you to find your anonymous record and erase it. The address is in the privacy policy.
• We can't show you a big personal history, because we don't keep one. The app remembers what you saved and what you searched. It has no timeline of your baby's life, and it never will.
• We can't tell you anything about your baby we didn't learn from their age. No app should. A tip is general information about a typical week, with a source. Your pediatrician knows your actual child.

The voices

The tone you pick for notifications (Calm, Emojis, Sentient robot, Savage granny, Gandalf, or Random) is stored with the rest of your preferences. It's honestly the most personal thing the app knows about you.

Five voices, or Random. The line underneath each is the same: breast milk or formula meets all of a young baby's fluid needs, even in hot weather, and there's no need for extra water or juice before solids start. If you have a question about your own baby's hydration, especially in a heatwave, ask your pediatrician.

Read the policy

It's short, it's in plain language, and it's at coffeeandcradle.com/privacy. If anything in it is unclear, tell us. We'll fix the policy rather than explain it.

The no-feed, no-log, no-streak side of the same decision is in why we built a baby app that does less.

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Coffee & Cradle is free for the first week, on iPhone and Android, and the first screen asks one question.