Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 4, 2026

MTG Herald ("the app") listens for spoken Magic: The Gathering card names during your games and shows the matching card images. This policy explains what the app does — and deliberately does not do — with your data.

The short version:

On-device mode (the default, and the free tier): your voice never leaves your device. Speech recognition runs locally. No audio is recorded, stored, or transmitted.
Streaming mode (Pro / trial): audio is transcribed in the cloud while you listen. Live microphone audio is streamed to our speech provider (Soniox) for real-time transcription and is not retained by the app afterward.
We don't sell your data, and we don't build profiles of you.

What the app processes

Microphone audio

On-device mode: audio is processed in memory on your device by a local speech model and immediately discarded. Nothing is uploaded.
Streaming mode: while a listening session is active, microphone audio is streamed over an encrypted connection to Soniox, our real-time speech-to-text provider, and transcribed. The transcript is used on your device to match card names. See Soniox's privacy policy for their handling of streamed audio.
The app shows a persistent notification whenever it is listening; you can stop it at any time from the notification or the app. Sessions also stop automatically after a long period with no card activity.

Game history

The cards recognized in each session are stored locally on your device so you can browse past sessions. They are not uploaded. Deleting the app deletes them.

Entitlement data

To meter the free streaming trial and validate subscriptions, the app sends a random install identifier (a UUID — not your name, email, or any device identifier) to our backend, together with the number of seconds of streaming used and, if you subscribe, the store purchase token needed to verify the subscription. That's the entire record we keep about you.

Card images

Card images are loaded from Scryfall, a public Magic: The Gathering card database. Standard web-request metadata (such as your IP address) is visible to Scryfall when images load, as with any website.

Advertising (free tier only)

The free tier shows a banner ad served by Google AdMob. AdMob may process device identifiers for ad delivery and fraud prevention as described in Google's privacy policy. Where required (e.g. EEA/UK), you will be asked for consent before personalized ads are shown. Trial and Pro users see no ads and no ad SDK activity.

What we never collect

No account, no name, no email, no contacts, no location, no advertising profile built by us. Voice audio is never stored by the app in any mode. (A debug-only diagnostic capture setting exists in development builds; it is disabled in release builds.)

Payments

Subscriptions are processed by the platform store (Google Play / Apple App Store). We never see your payment details — only a purchase token used to verify the subscription is active.

Children

MTG Herald is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them.

Changes

We'll update this page when the policy changes and note the date at the top.

Contact

Questions or requests: support@mtgherald.com