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I purposely did not set up any infrastructure for my iOS app Reflect and made it local-first [0]. I did it so that I could make the app completely private but it’s come with the wonderful side effect that the product is easily horizontally scalable. The only overhead I have for more users is a busier discord channel and so far that community growth has felt very rewarding.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

I agree it could make sense one day but, as I mentioned in another thread, we don't have any servers and so we don't collect or host any user data (encrypted or not). In fact, I really don't want to; it's overhead and costly, and might involve compliance with HIPAA or GDPR, and I just would rather the user be in charge of their own data.

Having FHE for local data would be very interesting though.

Good question. I'm realizing I did not really communicate this well.

The full story is that we went to a conference for biohacking, spreading the word about Reflect, and businesses wanted to white label the product so that they could have the same capabilities but for their own niches.

Those businesses wanted to be able to do things like create surveys using our form building library and have users collect their own data for things like N=1 experiments with their products.

What those businesses wanted to use that functionality for was up to them and their privacy policies, but the terms we talked about were something similar to "you can't use our SDK without users explicitly opting into any data collection". We never ended up actually licensing the SDK or making any deals with any companies.

Hope that makes things a little clearer. As far as Reflect the app, that was started from the beginning with privacy in mind and local-first. I have a long blog post I've been sitting on explaining the whole story, which I will publish soon hopefully, but I've been revolted by surveillance capitalism for a long time and originally made Reflect to help my partner get off of using google forms for tracking mood.

You have a good point regarding the privacy policy. We haven't found a way to lock in that commitment, and that's obviously not ideal from a user's perspective. People do place trust in Reflect not to pull the rug out from under them.

Do you mean for menstrual data specifically?

Currently for general data there is pearson correlation, five different anomaly detection algorithms, and T tests for significance among other things.

The work in progress we have for menstrual tracking takes temperature, flow, and past grund truth data into account. I know that’s vague, and it’s because my partner is working on it, not me :)

When we release the cycle tracking we’ll have a full writeup

Yeah, there is no support for “multi-dimensional” metrics. So systolic and diastolic would each have to be their own metric. Food tracking in Reflect could use some work, but if you link with Apple Health, Reflect can pull data from Cronometer or MyFitnessPal for example.

Any particular place you thought the premium was very aggressive? I’m open to changing that, it’s not the kind of feedback we normally get. Thanks for saying so

What I mean by valid is that, without knowing all the information, skepticism is a good thing. Too many companies take a mile when you give an inch and take advantage of ambiguity.

The SDK simply doesn’t exist as a product any more and so doesn’t make sense to keep on our website as an offering. So I’m glad you brought that to my attention.

If there are any specifics about the privacy of Reflect you’d like me to elucidate, I’m happy to do that.

This is a totally valid concern. Initially we were considering augmenting our income with a B2B model to license the library we’ve built, but that didn’t pan out and our priorities have changed, so we solely work on the apps for customers now. I actually forgot this was even on our website and, since we aren’t trying to offer those services or license anymore, I’ve removed them.

That’s a tough guarantee, ultimately you’re placing trust in the device’s security once you limit your attack surface to just local data. So that’s why we’re working on encryption with key custody. Any feature like cloud backups are explicitly opt-out by default so no one is putting their data onto someone else’s servers without knowing what they’re getting into.

This is a tough problem. I’m working on an app called Reflect [1] that lets you analyze your life’s data and the temptation to draw conclusions from charts and correlations is strong. We added an experiments feature that will let you form hypotheses and it will even flag confounding variables if you track other metrics during your experiments. Still trying to make it even better to avoid drawing false conclusions.

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reflect-track-anything/id64638...

Thank you for saying so. We want to make this interface easier to get started with with something like an onboarding flow or the SwiftUI TipKit.

Without knowing exactly what you want to use the app for, I’ll link you to our help page with some tutorials: https://ntl.ai/reflect/support

Currently the flow to tracking is to create a form template (called a Reflection template) to track a category of metrics such as Mood. In that template you add metrics like Happiness, Fatigue, etc. Once the template is created you have a form available that you can fill out at your convenience. You can design another template like Supplements with metrics for specific dosages, for example. Your history can be visualized and those metrics can be correlated shortly after.

Every time you fill out an entry you have the option of adding notes, which can serve as a diary functionality. Those notes are searchable in your history.

Let us know any other feedback you have, we’d really like to make this as usable as possible.