KidneyKind™ is operated by KindSoft LLC ("KindSoft," "we," "us"), a Florida limited liability company. KindSoft LLC is the developer of record on the App Store and the entity responsible for this privacy policy.
KidneyKind is built on a simple privacy principle: your health data belongs to you, and only you. This policy explains what data the app uses, where it is stored, and what we never do with it.
What Data KidneyKind Collects
KidneyKind only stores the health and wellness information that you explicitly enter into the app, including:
- Your profile (optional) — name, preferred name, sex, and date of birth, used to personalize the Home dashboard greeting, the Visit Summary PDF, and sex-aware lab reference ranges for hemoglobin and creatinine
- Dialysis session logs (PD exchanges, cycler sessions, home hemodialysis, clinic hemodialysis)
- Daily vitals (blood pressure, weight, fluid intake, urine output, pulse, temperature, notes) and individual fluid intake entries with timestamps for the quick-add audit trail
- Structured symptom entries (name, 1–5 severity, timestamp, trigger tags, notes) for the symptom frequency chart and trends view
- Lab results you manually enter (creatinine, BUN, eGFR, hemoglobin, hematocrit, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, sodium, albumin)
- Medications, dosing schedules, take/skip history, and refill information
- Appointments you create (title, date, time, location, notes, reminder preference)
- Your clinic hemodialysis treatment schedule (treatment days, start time, duration, clinic name) — for clinic HD patients only
- Care team contacts you create (name, role, practice/clinic, phone, email, office location, notes)
- Transplant journey records — your current phase, transplant center and coordinator info, key dates (referral, first visit, committee review, listing, wait-time start, transplant date), the evaluation checklist items you work through, and your PRA/cPRA history
- News articles and recipes you bookmark from the Explore tab
- Your dialysis modality preference, optional fluid limit, measurement unit preferences, and appearance (light/dark) preference
Where Your Data Is Stored
All data entered into KidneyKind is stored in your private iCloud account using Apple's CloudKit service. This means:
- Your data is stored on Apple's servers, associated with your personal Apple ID
- Data syncs automatically across your iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch — all reading from the same private iCloud container
- KidneyKind's developer has no ability to access your data — it is stored in your private iCloud container, not ours
- Apple's iCloud Privacy Policy governs how Apple stores and protects this data
What We Do NOT Do
- We do not collect, transmit, or store your health data on any server we control
- We do not sell, share, or license your data to third parties
- We do not use your health data for advertising
- We do not use analytics SDKs that track your behavior
- We do not require an account or email address
Online Content & Network Connections
KidneyKind makes outbound HTTPS requests to a small number of public sources to fetch content for the Explore tab and Home dashboard. These requests carry only the URL of the resource being fetched and a standard browser User-Agent header. No personal or health information is ever sent with these requests.
- Kidney health news — KidneyKind fetches RSS/Atom feeds from five public sources: National Kidney Foundation (kidney.org), NIDDK (niddk.nih.gov), PKD Foundation (pkdcure.org), ScienceDaily, and Renal & Urology News. Which articles you read or bookmark is never logged or transmitted.
- Kidney-friendly recipes — DaVita (davita.com) — KidneyKind fetches publicly available recipe pages from DaVita and parses the schema.org JSON-LD structured data that DaVita publishes on each recipe page. Each provider's recipes are cached on your device for 24 hours so the app does not re-request the same content on every launch.
- Kidney-friendly recipes — Kidney Kitchen (kitchen.kidneyfund.org) — KidneyKind discovers recipes through the public WordPress REST API published by the American Kidney Fund's Kidney Kitchen, filtered to low-phosphorus and low-sodium recipes via the site's nutrient taxonomy. For each discovered recipe, KidneyKind fetches the public recipe page and extracts the ingredients and instructions from the page's HTML structure.
- Kidney-friendly recipes — Spoonacular (api.spoonacular.com) — Optional, off by default. If you enable Spoonacular in Settings → Recipe Sources and supply your own free API key from spoonacular.com, KidneyKind will query Spoonacular's recipe search using kidney-friendly nutrient filters (max sodium, potassium, and phosphorus). Your API key is stored only on your device, is sent only to Spoonacular's own servers as part of the API request, and is never seen by KidneyKind's developer. No shared API key is bundled into the app — every user supplies their own. Without a key, the Spoonacular provider stays inactive and makes no network requests.
You can toggle each recipe source on or off independently in Settings → Recipe Sources. Each source has its own 24-hour cache, so disabling one doesn't affect the others. The 15 built-in recipes work entirely offline as a fallback. If your device is offline, KidneyKind silently falls back to its built-in content and your local data continues to work normally.
iOS Calendar (EventKit)
If you use the Appointments feature or set up a Clinic Hemodialysis treatment schedule, KidneyKind can mirror those events into your iOS Calendar so you and your caregivers see them everywhere your calendar appears. KidneyKind uses Apple's EventKit framework with full event access, but only because edit and delete sync require looking up events that KidneyKind itself previously wrote. The privacy guarantees are enforced in the app code:
- KidneyKind only ever reads events it created itself, looked up by the identifiers stored on its own internal records. It never enumerates your calendar, never reads events it didn't write, and never uses calendar data for anything other than keeping its own appointments in sync.
- KidneyKind can create, update, and delete the appointments and treatment-schedule events that it writes — and only those.
- None of your calendar data ever leaves your device or is shared with anyone, including the developer.
- The permission is optional and is requested the first time you save an appointment or treatment schedule.
- If you decline, appointments still save inside KidneyKind and reminder notifications still fire — they just won't be mirrored to your iOS Calendar.
iOS Contacts (Care Team Sync)
If you save a care team contact (your nephrologist, PD nurse, dietician, transplant coordinator, etc.) in Settings → Care Team and turn on the Sync to iOS Contacts toggle, KidneyKind will mirror that single contact to your iOS Contacts so you can call, text, email, and get directions from the system Phone, Messages, Mail, and Maps apps. The privacy guarantees are enforced in the app code:
- The sync is opt-in per contact. The toggle defaults to OFF on every new contact. Nothing leaves the app until you flip it on.
- Sync is strictly one-way out. KidneyKind never reads, scans, or imports from your iOS Contacts. We only ever read the specific contact records that this app itself wrote, looked up by the identifiers stored on KidneyKind's own internal records.
- Toggling Sync OFF on a previously-synced contact removes the iOS Contacts mirror. Deleting a contact in KidneyKind also removes its iOS Contacts mirror (when one exists). The two sides stay honest.
- Contacts written by KidneyKind get a "Synced from KidneyKind" marker appended to the iOS Contacts notes field so you can tell at a glance which entries came from the app.
- None of your contact data ever leaves your device or is shared with anyone, including the developer. The same iCloud-only storage rules apply.
- The Contacts permission is requested the first time you save a contact with sync enabled. If you decline, contacts still save inside KidneyKind — they just won't be mirrored to your iOS Contacts.
Apple Watch Companion
KidneyKind includes a real Apple Watch app that installs automatically on your paired Apple Watch when you install the iPhone app. The watch app reads and writes the same SwiftData store as the iPhone app, syncing through your private iCloud account using the same iCloud.com.kidneykind.app CloudKit container — no separate cloud, no separate account, no third-party server. Logging a fluid drop or marking a dose taken on the watch syncs to the iPhone within seconds via CloudKit, and vice versa.
The watch also ships with two watch face complications (Fluid Intake gauge and Next Medication Dose), which read from a small local cache file in the watch's app group container — same architecture as the iOS Home Screen widget, but per-device. The watch widget never makes network requests and never reads anything beyond the small cache file. All your health data stays in your private iCloud, period.
Home Screen Widgets
When you add a KidneyKind widget to your Home Screen, Lock Screen, or Today View, the widget needs a small amount of app state to render — today's fluid intake, your next medication dose, your next upcoming appointment, and (when set) your current transplant phase. To make this work without putting the app's full database inside the widget extension, the main app writes a compact local cache file containing just those few pieces of state to a shared App Group (a private sandboxed container that only the KidneyKind app and its widget extension can read). The widget reads from this cache on every refresh.
Privacy guarantees:
- The shared App Group cache lives entirely on your device. It is not synced to iCloud, is not uploaded anywhere, and is not readable by any other app.
- Widgets do not make network requests. They render purely from the local cache. No new data is collected, and nothing about what you see on your Home Screen leaves the device.
- The cache only holds the exact fields the widgets need to display — it is not a full mirror of your health data, and does not contain your dialysis session history, lab results, care team contacts, or transplant checklist items.
- Tapping a widget opens the main KidneyKind app via a
kidneykind:// URL scheme registered only for this app. The URL carries no personal information — just which tab to open.
Location Search (MapKit)
When you attach a location to an appointment or set the address of your clinic in the treatment schedule, KidneyKind uses Apple's MapKit framework to search for matching places. The search query (the text you type) is sent to Apple's mapping service via the on-device MapKit framework — no third party sees your search, and KidneyKind never sends your name, health data, or any other personal information with the query. Once you pick a place, KidneyKind stores its name, street address, and coordinates locally on your device (and syncs them via your private iCloud, just like everything else).
KidneyKind does not request or use your current location. The location picker is a pure text search — there is no "Use my current location" button and no CoreLocation permission prompt. Tapping "Open in Apple Maps" launches the Maps app with directions, and Maps handles its own location permissions independently.
Apple Health (HealthKit)
If you turn on Settings → Apple Health → Sync with Apple Health, KidneyKind will read these data types from Apple Health on launch and merge them into your daily vitals:
- Vital signs: blood pressure, body mass, heart rate, body temperature
- Symptoms: fatigue, nausea, headache, dizziness, shortness of breath
It will also write back the same data types when you log a vital manually, so other apps that read Apple Health (your Apple Watch, third-party trackers, doctor-share apps) see the same numbers. Three of KidneyKind's eight built-in symptoms (cramping, swelling, low BP episode) have no HealthKit equivalent and stay app-only. Privacy guarantees:
- The sync is opt-in. iOS will show you the standard HealthKit permission sheet listing each data type individually. You can grant some, deny others, or revoke any data type later in iOS Settings → Privacy → Health → KidneyKind.
- KidneyKind only reads the data types listed above — nothing else. It does not read steps, sleep, workouts, menstrual data, or any other Health category.
- KidneyKind never re-imports samples it wrote itself. The read pipeline filters out any sample whose source bundle identifier matches KidneyKind, so the round-trip never creates duplicates.
- Manual entries you typed in KidneyKind are never overwritten by an automatic import. If today's vital already has a weight you typed, an imported weight sample for the same day is silently skipped. Symptoms are merged with set-union semantics — if "Fatigue" is already there, importing it again is a no-op.
- None of your HealthKit data ever leaves your device or is shared with anyone, including the developer. The same iCloud-only storage rules apply.
Notifications
KidneyKind sends local notifications for medication doses, appointment reminders, and clinic hemodialysis treatment reminders. All notifications are generated entirely on your device using Apple's UNUserNotificationCenter and are never routed through external servers. No notification content leaves your device. The notification permission is requested the first time you set up a feature that uses it, and is optional.
Subscription & Payments
KidneyKind is offered as a subscription with a 14-day free trial (see our Terms of Service for pricing details). All payment processing is handled by Apple via the App Store. KidneyKind never sees, stores, or has access to your payment information — credit card numbers, billing addresses, and purchase history all remain entirely within Apple's ecosystem.
The App checks your subscription status through Apple's StoreKit framework on your device. Your current entitlement (trial / subscribed / expired) is stored locally on each device and is not synced through our iCloud storage. Apple, not KidneyKind, is the authoritative source for your subscription state.
Disclaimer & First-Launch Acknowledgement
On first launch, the App presents a disclaimer explaining that KidneyKind is a personal tracker and not medical advice, and asks you to acknowledge it before proceeding. The acknowledgement timestamp is stored on your profile (and synced through your private iCloud to your other devices) so you are not re-asked every launch. You can re-read the full disclaimer any time at Settings → Legal → Disclaimer & Terms within the App.
Children's Privacy
KidneyKind is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children.
Changes to This Policy
If this privacy policy changes materially, we will update the date above and note the changes in the App Store release notes.
Contact
Questions about this privacy policy? Email us at [email protected].