Wall First Privacy Policy

Last updated: 11 September 2026

Wall First has no account, no analytics, and no server of mine. Nothing you photograph and nothing you measure reaches me.

The camera

Wall First uses the camera to photograph your wall and your pictures, and to show an arrangement standing on the real wall. Everything it does with the camera happens on your device: ARKit finds the wall, reading the depth sensor on the iPads and iPhones that have one, and Vision finds the edges of a frame, so the measurements fall out of the geometry. No image and no camera feed is sent anywhere.

The microphone

When you say the name of a piece or a wall you have just captured, Wall First turns what you said into text on your device. It asks for the microphone and for speech recognition, and recognition is pinned to on-device. If your device cannot recognize your language by itself, the app says so and asks you to type the name instead, rather than falling back to Apple’s servers. The recording is not kept.

What is kept, and where

Your walls, your pieces, the photographs of them, and every layout you save live in the app’s own store on your device. A few small settings sit beside them: whether you have read the first-run sheet, whether captures go to Photos, whether you have overridden the units, and whether you have seen the tip about marking a wall.

If you are signed in to iCloud, that store syncs through your iCloud account, in its private database, so a piece captured on your iPhone appears on your iPad. It is your iCloud, under your own Apple Account, and I have no way to reach it. Without an iCloud account the app runs from a local store and tells you that sync is unavailable. The app’s push capability is used only by iCloud, to tell it something changed on your other device. Wall First sends you no notifications.

Photos

Wall First keeps a copy of each piece you capture and each wall screenshot in a “Wall First” album in your Photos library, so the work is still yours if the app goes away. It asks for access to your library for two things: adding those pictures, and importing a photo of an artwork you already have. It reads nothing else in your library.

Why it asks for full access rather than “add only”. iOS has an add-only level of Photos access, and it cannot put a photograph into a named album. An app that holds it can drop pictures into your library and nothing more, so the “Wall First” album would never be made and your captures would land loose among your own photos. Full access is the only level that can file them where you can find them. Wall First uses it for that album and for a photo you pick yourself when importing a piece, and the app says all of this on its own screen before iOS shows you the request. If you grant a selection of photos instead, captures still go to your library, but the album cannot be made.

Network

Wall First makes no network connections of its own. It has no analytics, no advertising, no accounts, and no third-party services. The only thing that leaves your device is your own iCloud sync, described above: your account, your private database, and no way for me to read it.

Contact

Questions about this policy: email me at alex@alexecollins.com.

Help with the app itself is on the support page.