Privacy Policy
Effective: August 8, 2026 · Applies to Pleat for iPhone.
The short version
Pleat does not collect anything. There is no account, no sign-in, no server, no analytics, and no advertising. Your photos, your words, and your zines stay on your device.
Pleat has no networking code of any kind. It cannot send your data anywhere, because it cannot send anything anywhere.
Your photos
Pleat asks to read your photo library, and here is exactly why. The first time you add photos, iOS will ask. Say yes and Pleat reads the pictures you picked straight from the library, at the size a zine page needs — about half a second each. Say no and Pleat falls back to Apple's photo picker, which runs outside the app and hands over only the pictures you tapped. Everything still works either way. The only difference is speed, and it is a large one: a photo whose full-size original lives in iCloud rather than on your phone takes roughly two minutes through the picker, because the picker delivers the whole original — often 20 MB or more — and Pleat then keeps only a fraction of it. Asking for the smaller version directly is what removes that wait.
Reading is reading. Pleat looks at the photos you pick, and nothing else: it does not browse, catalogue, index, or scan your library, it does not read location data or any other metadata out of your photos, and it has no way to send anything anywhere — there is no networking code in the app at all.
Saving your zine's pages as images runs the other direction, and uses a separate, narrower permission. To put those pages into your photo library, Pleat asks for permission to add photos — never to see, read, or list anything already there.
Photos you add to a zine are copied into Pleat's own storage on your device so your zine survives being closed. Pages saved as images go straight into your photo library, the same way a photo you take with the Camera app does. Neither is ever uploaded.
What Pleat stores, and where
All of it lives inside the app's private folder on your device:
- Your zines — the photos, the title and subtitle, any words you wrote on a page, your chosen theme, colorway, layouts and crops, and the link you put on the back cover if you added one.
- Two small settings — whether Pleat Plus is unlocked, and what Pleat learned about your printer (whether it prints double-sided, and which way you feed paper back in).
Delete the app and all of it is deleted with it. Pleat keeps no copy, because there is nowhere for a copy to be.
Printing and sharing
When you print, iOS's own print panel takes the sheet to your printer. When you share a zine, iOS's own share sheet takes the PDF wherever you send it. In both cases you pick the destination and the file leaves the app the way you told it to — Pleat has no destination of its own.
The shared PDF is named after your zine and carries your zine's title and the word "Pleat" in its file information. It contains no device identifier and nothing about you that you did not put in the zine.
The back-cover link and QR code
If you add your own link, Pleat prints it as a QR code and as readable text on the back cover. The code is drawn on your device; the link is never visited, checked, or sent anywhere by Pleat. It is printed, and that is all.
Buying Pleat Plus
Pleat Plus is a one-time purchase handled entirely by Apple. Pleat asks Apple whether you own it and asks Apple to sell it; payment details never touch the app, and Pleat never sees your name, your Apple Account, or your card. Apple's handling of that transaction is covered by Apple's Privacy Policy.
Children
Pleat collects nothing from anyone, of any age.
Changes
If Pleat's behaviour ever changes, this page changes with it and the effective date above moves. Material changes will also be described in the App Store release notes.