Privacy policy
Last updated: October 19, 2026
Perzine (personal zine) is made by Mason Garcera d/b/a Smidgecraft.
The short version
- No account, no sign-in, no ads, no analytics, no trackers.
- Your pages are stored on your phone and mirrored to your own private iCloud database. Nobody else can read them, including us.
- Photographs use Apple's photo picker, and a sticker is cut out of a photo on your phone by Apple's Vision framework.
- Your feedback is emailed to one person.
- The app is free and there is nothing to buy.
No account
There is no sign-up, no password, no profile, and no screen to log in to. Nothing identifies you to Smidgecraft, because nothing of yours reaches Smidgecraft.
Where your pages are stored
Perzine writes your pages to storage on your phone and mirrors them to your own private iCloud database, so they survive deleting the app and arrive on your other devices signed in to the same Apple Account. A private iCloud database is not a server we operate: Apple holds it on your behalf, inside your account, and the contents are unreadable to anyone but you. We cannot see a page, a title, a sticker or a photograph, and there is no screen anywhere that would allow it.
If there is no iCloud account on the phone, or iCloud is switched off, Perzine keeps writing to the same storage on the device with mirroring off. The pages stop being backed up, however, they do not stop existing. The next launch with an account picks the mirroring back up.
Photographs and stickers
A cover can be a photograph and a sticker is a subject cut out of a photo. Choosing either opens Apple's own photo picker, which runs outside the app and hands back only the picture you picked. Perzine is never given access to your photo library and never asks for it.
The cut-out is made on your phone, by Apple's Vision framework, which finds the subject and removes the background. No photograph is uploaded anywhere to be processed, and the only copy kept is the one on the page, which travels with the page into your own iCloud.
If you have copied a subject in Photos or Safari, Perzine can paste it onto a page. It checks whether the clipboard holds an image so it can offer the paste, and reads the image itself only when you tap it. It keeps no record of what has been on your clipboard.
If you send feedback
The settings menu on any page has a feedback form. It is the only place Perzine sends anything anywhere, and only when you tap Send. What goes is what you wrote, the mood you picked if you picked one, your email address if you chose to give one so a reply can reach you, and the app version, device model and iOS version so a described bug can be reproduced. It is delivered as an email by Formspree, a form-to-email service, and it is read by one person. Nothing from your pages is attached, and the form is never sent on its own.
What Perzine doesn't do
- No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no tracking of any kind.
- No third-party SDKs. Perzine is built from Apple's frameworks and Smidgecraft's own shared code, and nothing else.
- No advertising identifier, and no tracking prompt, because there is nothing to track.
- No in-app purchases and no subscription. The app is free and there is nothing to buy.
- Nothing sold, and nothing shared with anyone not named on this page.
Children
Perzine is not directed at children and collects nothing that could identify anyone, of any age.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top will change as well.