Last updated: 10 October 2026. This is the privacy policy for QuietCast, the iPhone app from Quietly Useful. For the website’s own policy, see quietlyuseful.co.uk/privacy-policy.

QuietCast is published by Jacob Eells, trading as Quietly Useful, based in Somerset, United Kingdom.

The short version

QuietCast collects nothing. There are no accounts, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no third-party services of any kind. The app contains no third-party code. Quietly Useful operates no server that QuietCast talks to, and receives no information about you or what you listen to.

QuietCast talks only to the servers you type in yourself: your own Navidrome and Audiobookshelf. Everything else stays on your device. The one optional purchase in the app, QuietCast Pro, is made with Apple through the App Store, and is described below.

What is stored, and where

• Server addresses and usernames are kept on your device, in the app’s own storage.
• Passwords and access tokens are kept in the iOS Keychain, readable only after you have unlocked the iPhone at least once since it started. They are never copied off the device.
• Downloaded audio is kept in the app’s container, encrypted at rest and deliberately excluded from your iCloud backup, because the audio is already on a server you own.
• Playback positions, the queue, and recent searches are kept on your device.
• Browse results are kept in a discardable on-device cache, so the app opens on something rather than on a spinner.
• Settings are kept in the app’s preferences. That includes whether QuietCast Pro was unlocked when the app last asked the App Store, and how many of your three free downloads you have used.

Audiobookshelf exchanges your password for a token when you sign in, and QuietCast discards the password at that point rather than keeping it. Subsonic, which Navidrome speaks, re-salts a token on every request, so for Navidrome the password itself has to be kept, in the Keychain.

What leaves your device, and where it goes

Only to the servers you configured, and nowhere else:

• Signing in, browsing and searching your libraries.
• Cover art, fetched from the server that owns it.
• Audio streaming and downloads.
• Where you are in a book or an episode, sent back to Audiobookshelf so another device can pick up where you left off. Music positions are not sent anywhere: Subsonic has no concept of a resume position, so music resumes on the device you were listening on and nowhere else.
• Starring something, and finishing a track, if your server keeps favourites or play counts.

Nothing else is sent, beyond what any app says when it makes a request: that it is QuietCast, and which version. To Audiobookshelf that includes a listening session, with how long you listened and an identifier QuietCast made up for that server, so the server can tell your devices apart, as its own apps do. Your server keeps its own record of what its user played. That is your server, under your control, and outside this app’s reach.

Buying QuietCast Pro

QuietCast Pro is an optional, one-off purchase made through Apple’s App Store with your Apple Account. Apple takes the payment. QuietCast never sees your card or payment details, your name or your email address, and there is no account with Quietly Useful to attach a purchase to.

To know whether Pro is unlocked, the app asks the App Store, on your device, whether your Apple Account owns it, and remembers the answer on the device. The app sends nothing about a purchase to Quietly Useful, because it sends Quietly Useful nothing at all.

Like every developer, Quietly Useful receives Apple’s sales reports: totals by country and date, with nothing in them that identifies you. How Apple handles your purchase and payment information is covered by Apple’s own privacy policy.

Permissions

Local network access. A self-hosted server usually sits on your home network, and iOS requires an app to ask before it can reach one. Declining it means addresses like 192.168.1.10 cannot be contacted; addresses on the public internet still work.

Notifications. Optional, off unless you turn on alerts for new podcast episodes, and asked for only at the moment you do.

QuietCast asks for nothing else: not your location, contacts, photos, microphone or camera, and not permission to track you.

Certificates

Connections use HTTPS. Plain http:// is permitted only to names and addresses on your own local network, and QuietCast warns you before a password is typed into an address that would send it unencrypted.

If your server presents a certificate iOS does not recognise, which is normal for a self-hosted machine, QuietCast shows you its SHA-256 fingerprint and asks whether to trust that exact certificate for that exact address. It is never accepted automatically. A certificate you have pinned is used for everything from that server, cover art included, and for nothing else.

Other Apple devices and system features

Each of these is a system framework running on hardware you own. None of them sends anything to Quietly Useful or to any third party, and none of them changes the answer above.

• Apple Watch. The title, subtitle, chapter, position, duration, play state and a downsized copy of the cover are sent to your paired Watch, phone to watch, and only when a Watch is paired and the QuietCast watch app is installed. The cover comes from your own server and is re-encoded on the phone.
• Lock screen, Control Centre and CarPlay. The same now-playing details plus artwork are handed to iOS’s own Now Playing service, on the device.
• Siri and Shortcuts. Play, pause, skip and track changes, and playing something from your library by name. When you ask for something by name, QuietCast searches your own servers for it and hands the matching titles to Siri, which is part of iOS. Nothing is indexed in advance and nothing is donated to Spotlight.
• Notifications about new episodes. The check runs on your device against your own server, and the notification is raised by the device. Nothing is sent to anyone else: QuietCast has no server to push from.

Deleting your data

• Removing a server in Settings clears its stored password or token, its address and its cached results. Nothing on the server itself is changed.
• Removing a download deletes the audio and its record together. Your place in it is kept, and the audio stays on your server.
• Settings → Storage removes everything downloaded, in one action.
• Deleting the app removes everything it stored. Keychain items can outlive an app on iOS, so QuietCast also deletes any stored secret with no server behind it each time it starts.

Because nothing is collected, there is no copy of anything held by Quietly Useful to request, correct or erase. Your rights under UK GDPR are unaffected; there is simply nothing on this side to exercise them against.

Children

QuietCast is not directed at children and collects no information from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If QuietCast ever gains analytics, accounts, or any service operated by Quietly Useful, this page will say so before that version ships, and the date at the top will change. Questions go to the contact form.