Privacy policy.

The short version

Grenade has no accounts, no ads, no tracking and no analytics in the app or the daemon. We do not sell or share data about you, because we do not have it. Your terminals, prompts and speech stay between your phone and your own Mac, and everything that travels between them is end-to-end encrypted. The exceptions are services you turn on yourself with an account or a key of your own, listed under Services of Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google.

This website is the one place we measure: it counts and records visits, with a cookie, as This website below says.

What stays on your devices

On your iPhone the app keeps the Macs you paired, the key and token for each pairing, your settings and your recent folders. Keys and tokens are in the iOS Keychain, set so they never move to another device in a backup. It also keeps the transcript of your Talk conversations, which Delete transcript removes. From version 1.0.53 it keeps no API key for Talk: those are on your computer. Deleting the app removes all of it.

On your Mac (or your Linux computer: the daemon is the same there) the daemon keeps its state in ~/.grenade: its key, the tokens of paired phones, its log, your relay and push settings, the device tokens your phones gave it for notifications, the API keys you gave it for Talk, images you sent from the phone, and the pictures a session's finished turn made (the boards it saved, the screenshots it took or was shown, what you sent it), as small copies in ~/.grenade/highlights for 30 days, or until you remove one in the app. Your sessions run in tmux on your Mac. Deleting that folder removes all of it, and grenade unpair ends a pairing at once.

The Mac app talks only to the daemon on the same Mac, over 127.0.0.1. It keeps its pairing with that daemon in ~/Library/Application Support/Grenade and its window, group order and browser settings in its preferences. Its mic turns speech into text with Apple's speech recognition, on the Mac whenever the Mac supports it. It keeps the transcript of your Talk conversations beside its pairing, which Delete Transcript removes. Beside them it notes whether it last quit by itself, so that after a freeze or a forced quit it can say so and offer a report. A report goes only if you send it: Send Report opens an email to admin@holdgrenade.com in your own mail app with the report attached, and you see all of it first. It says what happened, the name of the screen that was showing (never a session's name or what was on it), the versions of Grenade and macOS, the model of Mac, anything you write, and the app's own part of the report macOS wrote about the freeze or crash.

None of this is sent to us.

What crosses a network

On your Wi‑Fi the phone talks to your Mac directly, end-to-end encrypted with a key the phone checks when you pair. Someone else on the network can see that the two are talking, and when, but cannot read anything.

Through a relay, when you turn remote access on with grenade relay on, the phone and the Mac talk through a server that forwards encrypted bytes it cannot read. The relay sees and needs:

• each Mac's name, a random relay id, its public and local IP addresses, and when it is online;
• each phone's IP address while it is connected, and hashes of the pairing keys it must check;
• how much passes and when.

The relay we run

Our main relay runs with a cloud hosting provider in the United States. It keeps each Mac's record in memory and on its disk, and forgets a Mac that has not connected for 90 days. It writes a log line when a Mac comes online or is refused, with the Mac's name, relay id and IP address. The host's router also logs each request's IP address and path. These logs are kept only in the host's short rolling buffer, and we send them nowhere else.

The relay never sees a terminal, a prompt, a session name, an image you sent or a pairing token. You can run your own relay instead (see Self-host a relay), and a Mac with remote access off talks to no server of ours.

Notifications

When an agent needs you, your Mac can send your phone a notification through a relay and Apple Push Notification service. Its text is encrypted on the Mac to a key only your phone holds. The relay and Apple see the phone's device token, the app, the time and the size, never the session or its text. The relay stores no device token, and its logs name a phone only by a short hash of it.

Notifications follow remote access: a Mac with the relay off sends none unless you run grenade push on, and grenade push off stops them. What a notification shows on the lock screen is your iPhone's setting.

Services of Apple, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google

Speech. When you talk to Grenade, the app turns speech into text with Apple's speech recognition. On iPhones that support it, this happens on the phone. On those that do not, Apple processes the audio under Apple's privacy policy. The microphone is used only while you tap or hold the mic button.

Talk. Off unless you give Grenade an OpenAI or a Google (Gemini) API key of your own. While a Talk conversation is live, in the iPhone app or the Mac app, your voice goes from the app straight to that provider, together with what it needs to tell you about your sessions: their titles, folder names, statuses and one-line summaries, and what an agent said or asked when it reads a session for you. The provider handles them under your key and its own policy (OpenAI's, Google's); with a Gemini key from a project without billing, Google may use what it receives to improve its products. The transcript of a conversation is kept on the device it was held on. None of it passes through a relay or us.

Your API keys for OpenAI and Google are kept on your computer, in ~/.grenade, and not on a phone. Each time an app opens a connection to one of them, it asks your computer, and your computer has the provider make a pass that lasts minutes; so your computer contacts the provider too, with your key and nothing else. The iPhone app before 1.0.53 and the Mac app before 1.0.78 kept the key themselves, and hand it to your computer when they are updated.

Session summaries. The daemon can write a one-line summary of each Claude Code session. It does this with the claude command already signed in on your Mac, so the text of that session goes to Anthropic under your own Claude account and Anthropic's privacy policy. Turn it off with --no-summaries or GRENADE_SUMMARIES=off.

The camera scans the pairing code your Mac shows, and takes photos you choose to attach to a session. A photo goes only to your Mac, end-to-end encrypted, and nothing else the camera sees leaves the phone. Face ID is handled by iOS; the app only learns whether it succeeded.

Installing. Homebrew, npm and GitHub serve the software for your computer, Cloudflare serves the Mac app's download, and the App Store serves the iPhone app. On Linux the installer is a script on this website; it and Grenade's own updates fetch the release from GitHub. Each follows its own privacy policy.

This website

The site is hosted by Cloudflare. To see how it is used, it sends PostHog, an analytics service in the United States, the following about each visit:

• which pages you view, where you came from, what you click or copy, and how fast pages load;
• a recording of the visit: the pages as you saw them, with your scrolling, pointer and clicks. The site has no forms, and anything typed is masked;
• your browser, device type and screen size, and the country and city your IP address maps to. The IP address itself is not kept.

For this PostHog keeps a cookie and an entry in your browser's storage on www.holdgrenade.com, holding a random id, so a later visit is known to come from the same browser. The id is tied to no name, email address or account: the site has none. The data travels to PostHog through an address of ours, pulse.holdgrenade.com, which keeps none of it. Clearing this site's cookies and storage gives you a new id, and a content blocker that blocks that address stops all of it.

Your light or dark choice is kept in your own browser and never sent. None of this applies to the apps or the daemon, which send us nothing.

Your choices

Because we hold no account and no profile of you, there is nothing for us to export or delete, apart from this website's visit data, which is tied to a random id in your browser and not to you. What else exists lives on your devices and our relay's short-lived records, and you control both: unpair a phone with grenade unpair, turn the relay off with grenade relay off, delete the app, or delete ~/.grenade on your Mac. A relay forgets a Mac 90 days after it last connected.

Children

Grenade is a tool for software developers and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone.

Changes and contact

If what Grenade sends or keeps changes, we update this page and the date at the top before that version ships.

Questions about privacy go to GitHub issues on grenade-cli.