Curio: Privacy Policy

Last updated October 5, 2026

The short version

Curio is an alarm clock. It keeps your data on your device, apart from the challenge results described below, and does not sell it or share it for advertising. There is no account and no sign-in. This policy explains what the app touches and why.

The voice you hear

The voice that reads your question aloud is synthetic, not a recording of a person. Most questions play a clip that was generated ahead of time and ships inside the app, so it works with no internet connection and nothing about your question is sent anywhere to produce it. Anything without a prepared clip is spoken by your iPhone's own built-in speech, which also runs on the device.

Location and weather

If you allow it, Curio uses your approximate location, at reduced accuracy, to show the local temperature on the home and wake screens. Those approximate coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo, a weather service, to look up the temperature. Curio does not store your location or attach it to any identity, and there is no account to attach it to. You can decline it and the app still works; you just will not see the temperature.

Alarms, answers, and stats

Your alarms, your answer history, and your points and stats are stored locally on your device using standard iOS storage. They are not sent to any server. Removing the app removes this data.

Challenges you send

When you share a trivia, its link carries a code made on your phone. When somebody plays it, on curioalarm.com or in Curio, their result is sent to Curio's server so it can reach you: the name they gave, if any, their tries, time and points. To deliver it, the server keeps a random id for your copy of Curio, which trivia you shared with your own result, and, if you allow notifications, the token Apple provides to reach your phone. It never receives your name, email, Apple ID or contacts. Results are kept until you erase them in Settings, or deleted after a year without opening Curio.

Challenges you play

If you play a trivia somebody sent you, your result goes to them the same way: the name you enter (optional), your tries, time and points. On curioalarm.com, the page keeps a random id in your browser so playing it twice counts once. Your network address is stored only in scrambled form, to stop one person flooding results.

Coming from a challenge link

If you played a question on curioalarm.com before installing Curio, the page can put your name, your points, and your head-to-head record on your clipboard so the app can carry them over. Curio never reads your clipboard on its own. It checks only whether a link is likely to be there, which iOS answers without revealing the contents, and it reads nothing unless you tap the button offering to bring your record over. iOS shows its own paste confirmation at that moment, and declining costs you nothing but the record.

Purchases

Curio's subscription is sold through Apple's App Store using StoreKit. Apple processes the payment and shares only what is needed to grant your subscription. Curio never sees your card or payment details.

Analytics

Curio uses PostHog to understand how the app is used, so it can be improved. What is sent is anonymous: there is no account, no name, no email, no advertising identifier, and no attempt to recognize you in any other app. PostHog does generate a random id for your installation so that repeat events can be counted as one person rather than many; it is not linked to your name or your Apple ID, it is shared with nobody, and deleting and reinstalling Curio replaces it. The events record things like which topic an alarm uses, whether an answer was right, and how long the wake screen took to pass. Each event also says whether this copy of Curio came from the App Store or from a test build, so our own testing can be kept out of the numbers; that describes the app, not you, and Settings has a switch to mark a phone as ours. Two of those matter most and explain why this exists at all: how long it takes to answer, and how often the alarm has to repeat, because together they say whether the app is actually waking people up.\n\nWhat is never sent: the answer you gave, your name, your alarm labels, your location, or the temperature. If you rate how hard a trivia was, that rating is sent with which trivia it was.\n\nEach event also carries the hour and minute on your own clock, because a wake-up app has to know what 6am looks like where you are rather than where a server is. That is a time of day, not a place. You can turn analytics off entirely in Settings, and nothing further is sent from that moment.

Advertising and tracking

Curio contains no advertising and does no cross-app tracking. Nothing it collects is used to build a profile of you, sold, or shared with data brokers.

Children

Curio is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the date above will be updated and the new version will appear here.

Contact

Questions about privacy can be sent to support@curioalarm.com.