Privacy Policy

Effective date: 13 November 2026

1. Who we are

Smible (the mobile app, the church dashboard and this website) is provided by Atmond Limited (“Smible”, “we”, “us”), 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom. We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy. You can contact us about privacy at hello@atmond.com.

2. What we collect and why

Your account

• Anonymous account. When you first open the app we create an account identified only by a random ID. It contains no name, email or phone number.
• Optional sign-in. If you choose to sign in, we store the details needed for that method:
  • Email: your email address. We send a 6-digit code to it to confirm it is yours.
  • Sign in with Apple: an identifier from Apple and, if you choose to share them, your name and email address (which may be an Apple private relay address).
  • Google: an identifier from Google and the name, email address and profile picture on your Google account.
  When you sign in, what you did as an anonymous user moves into your signed-in account.
• Session. Your sign-in session is kept in your device’s secure storage (the iOS Keychain or Android Keystore). On our servers we record each session with the IP address and device or browser type it was created from, to keep your account secure.
• Your name. You can choose a name in Settings → Your name. It is what other people see: your groups, your church and your league. If you haven’t chosen one, people in your groups and your church see the name from your sign-in (never your email address), or “Smible member” if you haven’t signed in. Leagues only ever show a name you chose, or “Smible member”. Names you choose are checked by our automated filter (see “Automatic content check” below).

Your setup answers

During setup we ask who will use the app, which church you attend (or that you watch online, or none), your usual service time, how often you want to review, and we record your time zone. We use these to schedule lessons and notifications and to tailor the app.

Sermon recordings, transcripts and lessons

When you record a sermon, the recording is saved on your phone. Nothing is sent unless you have turned on Notes and lessons with AI (you are asked first, and can turn it off any time in Settings). When it is on:

1. On iPhones with iOS 26 or later, the recording is first transcribed on the phone by Apple’s built-in speech recognition. The audio does not leave your phone; only the transcript is sent to our servers and goes straight to Anthropic (step 5). If the phone’s transcript is too incomplete to use (for example, the speaker was too quiet or far away), the app falls back to the next steps.
2. Otherwise (on Android, older iPhones, or the fallback above), the recording is uploaded to our servers.
3. It is sent to AssemblyAI, our speech-to-text provider, to produce a transcript. After transcription (or if it fails) we delete the audio from AssemblyAI.
4. We delete our own copy of the audio as soon as it has been transcribed, or if processing finally fails.
5. The transcript is sent to Anthropic (the provider of the Claude AI model) to write the sermon summary, your lessons and questions for group discussion.
6. We keep the transcript, summary, lessons and the Bible references detected in the sermon, so you can read them in the app.

Turning the setting off stops future uploads. It does not delete sermons already processed; you can delete those by deleting your account.

Importing a podcast episode

With Smible Plus you can paste a link to a podcast (for example, your church’s sermon podcast). Our servers read the podcast’s public feed and download the episode’s audio from the podcast’s own server, so the podcast sees a request from our servers, not from your phone. The audio then goes through the same steps as a recording (steps 3 to 6 above, which need “Notes and lessons with AI” to be on) and is deleted from our servers once it has been transcribed. We use the episode’s link only to import it.

Ask Puff

When you ask Puff a question about a sermon, your question and that sermon’s transcript are sent to Anthropic to write the answer. We don’t store your chats. We record that a question was asked (not what it said) to apply the daily question limit. If you report an answer, we store that question and answer, and the reason you gave, so our team can review it.

Reading plans

Reading plans (such as “Luke in 30 days”) use public-domain Bible text. Their lessons are written once by Anthropic’s Claude for everyone who follows the plan, so none of your personal data is sent to AI for them. We store which plan you are following and how far you have got.

Your learning progress

We store your memory verses (the reference and verse text), your lesson results, your reading-plan progress, and the activity that earns XP and keeps your streak (including streak freezes and the church-day pass). For journal entries we only receive the fact that you saved an entry (to award XP), never what you wrote.

Encrypted journal backup (optional)

Your journal stays on your phone unless you turn on Journal backup in Settings, which needs a signed-in account. Then your phone encrypts each entry before it leaves, with a key made from a passphrase you choose. We never receive the passphrase or the key, so only you can read your journal: not us, not our hosting providers, and not anyone who got into our servers. We store:

• the encrypted entries (unreadable data, one item per entry), when each was last changed, and which ones you deleted;
• your voice notes, encrypted the same way, only if you turn on “Back up voice notes too” (off by default);
• your key, locked with your passphrase, and the settings needed to unlock it with the right passphrase.

We can see how many items there are, their size and when they changed, but not what they say. Because we can’t unlock your backup, we can’t recover it if you forget your passphrase. On each phone where you’ve unlocked it, the key is kept in the phone’s secure storage (Keychain on iPhone, Keystore on Android). Turning backup off, or deleting your account, deletes the encrypted copy from our servers.

Groups and the prayer wall

You can create or join a group with an invite code or link. To create, join or post in a group, you first agree to our Community Guidelines and pass a short age check (see section 9); we record when you did. For each group we store its name, its members and who leads it, and the prayer requests posted in it. Members of a group can see:

• the group’s name and its members’ names (see “Your name” above), never their email addresses;
• whether each member has done a lesson today and this week, and the group’s weekly lesson goal;
• prayer requests and how many people have prayed for them. If you post a prayer request anonymously, other members see “Anonymous”; we still store who wrote it, so our moderators can act on reports.

Nudges. A group member can send you a reminder to do your lesson (at most one per person per day). A nudge is a fixed message: the sender can’t write their own text. You can turn nudges off in Settings → Nudges from my groups.

Invite links. A group invite link contains only the group’s code. Opening it shows the group’s name, member count and church in the app.

Friends feed, reactions and comments

Your “friends” are the people you share a group with. If Share my activity with friends is on (it is on by default; you can turn it off in Settings), they see in their feed when you finish a lesson (for example “Lesson 3 of 6”, not the sermon’s title), when you reach a streak milestone, and any Bible verse you choose to share. They can react (Amen, heart, cheer) and comment, and you can do the same on theirs. We store these items, reactions and comments. Your journal, notes and recordings are never shared. When sharing is off, nothing new of yours is posted and your earlier items are hidden from your friends.

Leagues

Leagues are a weekly XP leaderboard with no prizes. If you are in one, the other people in your league (who may be strangers) see the name you chose in Settings (or “Smible member”), your XP for the week and your rank. We store which league you were placed in each week. You can turn leagues off in Settings → Show me in leagues, and you then appear in no leaderboard.

Automatic content check

Before anyone else sees them, prayer requests, comments, verses you share, group names and the names you choose are sent to Anthropic (Claude) to check them against our Community Guidelines. Only the text being checked is sent, not your account details. If the check fails or can’t be completed, the text isn’t posted. We count each check (not its content) to apply daily limits.

Reports, blocks and crisis care

• Reports. When you report something, we store a copy of what you reported, who wrote it, and the reason you chose, so our moderators can review it. The person you reported isn’t told who reported them.
• Blocks. When you block someone, we store that, and hide your posts and theirs from each other.
• Crisis care. If the automatic check sees that a post suggests someone may be in danger (for example thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or abuse), the post stays up. The person who wrote it is shown support phone numbers, the group’s leader is asked to check in (for prayer requests), and a copy of the post goes to our team so they can follow up.

Family mode (child profiles)

See section 9.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, your phone schedules your lesson reminder itself. We also send a few notifications from our servers: when your sermon notes are ready, when your group has been doing its lessons, a Saturday recap, and nudges from group members. To do this we store your device’s push token (a random address for your device), whether it is an iPhone or Android phone, and a record of each notification we sent and whether you opened it (so we can send fewer if you ignore them). Notifications contain only fixed messages, never your journal, notes or transcripts. They are delivered through Expo’s push service (run by 650 Industries), which passes them to Apple or Google to reach your phone. Signing out removes your phone’s push token. You can turn notifications off in your phone’s settings.

Your church

If you choose a church, that church’s staff can see, on the Smible church dashboard: your name (as described in “Your name” above), when you joined, how many lessons you completed this week, your current streak and the day you were last active. They never see your email address, your answers, your journal or your recordings.

Each church has a public page on this website (reached from its QR code or invite link) that shows only the church’s name and the title, Bible passage and date of its latest published sermon.

Finding a church near you. If you tap “Use my location” in the app, your phone sends an approximate position to our servers once, to list the churches nearby. We never store your location or keep it in our logs. You can always search by name, town or postcode instead.

If you run a church’s dashboard, we store your name, email address, your role and position, and the church details you enter: its name, address, town and postcode, denomination, website, service times, UK charity number (if given) and logo. Other members of your church’s team can see your name, email address and role; your church’s members can’t. We look up the church’s address with OpenCage to store its map coordinates, so members can find it under “Churches near me”. A church’s name, town, denomination, logo and whether it is verified are shown to everyone in the app. Sermons you upload there go through the same AssemblyAI and Anthropic steps as above. If your church connects its own YouTube channel, we store the channel’s name and ID and a sign-in token from Google (encrypted), and use Google’s YouTube service to import the captions of videos you choose. Church plans are paid on the web through Stripe, which processes the payment details; we don’t see full card numbers. We keep only the church’s Stripe customer ID and its plan’s status and dates, and the email of the owner who first subscribed goes to Stripe for receipts.

Purchases

Subscriptions in the app are bought through the Apple App Store or Google Play, which handle payment. We never see your card details. RevenueCat processes your purchase receipts and your Smible account ID so we know which features you have unlocked. From RevenueCat we keep only whether you have Smible Plus, until when, the product and the store.

Crash reports

If the app crashes, it may send a crash report to Sentry (such as the error, device model and operating system version) so we can fix the problem. Crash reports don’t include your account ID, name, email, screenshots or what you were writing, and the app sends none at all while a child profile is in use. We don’t use analytics or advertising SDKs. We look at the activity we already hold (such as lessons completed) only in summary, to understand how Smible is used and improve it.

When you contact us

If you email us, we keep your message and email address so we can help you.

Information about your faith and health

Using Smible may show that you are a Christian or attend a particular church, and prayer requests can mention health or other sensitive matters. We use this information only to provide the features you choose, and we never use it for advertising or share it beyond what this policy describes.

3. What stays on your phone

• Your journal entries and your Bible highlights are stored on your device. Your journal is never sent to us unless you turn on encrypted journal backup, and then only in a form we can’t read (see Encrypted journal backup). If you dictate or talk through a journal entry, your phone turns your speech into text on the phone itself, and only where the phone can do that. A voice note you record in your journal is saved on your phone only, unless you choose to include voice notes in your encrypted backup.
• Journal prompts are made on your phone: from a built-in list, or on iPhones with Apple Intelligence by Apple’s on-device model, using only the sermon’s title and key points and the mood you picked. Nothing you write is sent to any AI.
• Sermon recordings are stored on your device, and only leave it as described above. On iPhones with iOS 26 or later they are normally transcribed on the device too.
• A copy of your sermon notes and transcripts is kept on your phone so you can read and search them offline. It is wiped when you sign out or delete your account.
• Bible reading, search and read-aloud, widgets, share cards and Siri Shortcuts all work on the phone. A share card is only shared if you choose to share it.
• Your lesson reminders are scheduled locally on your device.

The app asks for microphone access to record sermons and journal voice notes, speech recognition to transcribe and dictate on the phone, and notification permission to send reminders. You can change these in your phone’s settings.

4. Our legal bases (UK and EU users)

• Contract: to provide the app and the features you use, including your account, lessons, progress, groups, feed, leagues, notifications and purchases.
• Consent: to upload and process your sermon recordings and imported podcasts with AI. You can withdraw consent any time by turning off “Notes and lessons with AI”.
• Legitimate interests: to keep Smible secure and safe (including the automatic content check, reports, blocks and crisis care), fix crashes, show your church its member activity, and understand basic usage so we can improve the app.
• Legal obligation: where we must keep or disclose information by law.

5. Who we share data with

We share personal data only with providers who process it on our behalf to run Smible, and only what each one needs:

Licensed Bible translations (such as NKJV or NLT) are fetched by our servers from API.Bible (American Bible Society); no personal data is sent to them.

Church map coordinates come from OpenCage and are based on data © OpenStreetMap contributors (openstreetmap.org/copyright).

Other Smible users see only what is described in section 2: people in your groups see your name, lesson activity, prayer requests, shared items and comments; people in your league see your chosen name, weekly XP and rank; your church’s dashboard staff see the limited member information described under “Your church”.

A small number of authorised Smible staff can access account data when needed to give support, handle reports and deletion requests, and check the quality of AI-written notes. Our staff tools show a sermon’s summary and lessons but not its audio or full transcript, and that access is logged.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or as part of a merger or sale of our business (in which case this policy will continue to apply to your data).

We do not sell your personal data, share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, or track you across other companies’ apps and websites. Anthropic and AssemblyAI may not use your data to train their AI models.

6. International transfers

Some of our providers process data in the United States and other countries outside the UK and EEA. Where they do, we rely on safeguards recognised by UK and EU law, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or an adequacy decision.

7. How long we keep data

• Sermon and podcast audio: deleted from our servers as soon as it is transcribed (or if processing finally fails), and deleted from AssemblyAI after transcription.
• Push tokens: until you sign out, delete your account, or the token is replaced by a newer device (we keep at most 10 per account).
• Prayer requests, comments and shared items: until you delete them or your account, or a moderator removes them. A group and its prayer wall are deleted when its last member leaves.
• Accounts you never signed in to (used without an email, Apple or Google): deleted automatically after 90 days without being opened if they hold nothing, or after one year without being opened if they hold sermons, lessons or memory verses. Sign in to keep your account for as long as you like.
• Everything else on our servers: kept until you delete your account.
• When you delete your account in the app, we permanently delete it and everything we store about you on our servers, including your child profiles and any encrypted journal backup, and the app wipes your recordings, journal, highlights and offline notes from the phone at the same time. See Delete your account.
• Some records are held by others or kept for legal or safety reasons: purchase records held by Apple, Google and RevenueCat; billing records for church plans that we must keep by law; crash reports, which Sentry deletes after its retention period; copies of your posts in reports other people made about them; and our internal log of staff actions, which refers to accounts only by their random ID.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live (including under UK and EU GDPR and US state laws such as the CCPA), you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you.
• Export it: use Settings → Export my data in the app. The export is a file with everything our servers hold about you: your account and sign-in methods, sessions, setup answers, sermons with their transcripts, summaries and lessons, lesson results, XP, streak freezes, memory verses, reading plan, groups, prayer requests, feed items, comments and reactions, the people you blocked, leagues, notifications and devices, reports you made, and your child profiles and their stickers. If you use encrypted journal backup, the export includes the encrypted copy exactly as we store it; we can’t decrypt it, so it stays unreadable outside the app. Your highlights and recordings are on your phone, not on our servers, so they aren’t in it.
• Delete it: use Settings → Delete account in the app.
• Correct data that is wrong.
• Object to or ask us to restrict some processing, including processing based on legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent to AI processing at any time in Settings.
• Not be treated differently for using these rights.

To use any right that isn’t built into the app, email hello@atmond.com. We may need to confirm the request comes from the account holder. We reply within one month.

You can also complain to a data protection authority. In the UK this is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk). In the EU, it is the authority in your country.

9. Children and family mode

You must be 13 or older to use groups, the friends feed and comments. We don’t knowingly let children under 13 do so. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal data, contact hello@atmond.com and we will delete it.

Age check. Before you first use groups, friends’ activity, comments or prayer posts, the app asks your phone’s platform for your age range where it can (Apple’s Declared Age Range on iOS 26 and later; Google Play Age Signals on Android). We store only the range (under 13, 13–17, 18+ or unknown), where it came from and the date of the check, never your birth date. If it says you are under 13, those features stay off, and saying you are 13 or older later won’t turn them on; Smible’s personal features, like your lessons, notes and journal, still work. Where no age range is available, you confirm you are 13 or older instead.

Family mode lets a parent or guardian add child profiles to their own signed-in account, so their children can use Smible on the parent’s phone. When adding a profile, the parent confirms they are the child’s parent or guardian. For each child we store only:

• a first name or nickname (letters only), an age range (4–6, 7–9 or 10–12) and a picture chosen from Smible’s built-in set;
• the stickers they have earned, and for which sermon.

We never ask for a child’s email, birth date, photo or location, and a child has no login of their own.

• Never shared. A child’s profile is seen only by the parent in the app. Children can’t use groups, the friends feed, comments, leagues, Ask Puff or sharing, don’t appear to anyone else, and don’t earn XP or streaks. Our servers refuse those features while a child profile is in use.
• Never sent to AI. The children’s stories and quizzes are written by Anthropic’s Claude from the notes of the parent’s sermon (its title, passage, summary and key points) only, never with anything about the child. A story is written once per sermon and shared by all children who read it.
• No crash reports are sent while a child profile is in use.
• A parent can delete a child’s profile at any time in family mode, which deletes their stickers too. Deleting the parent’s account deletes all their child profiles.

10. Security

We protect data with measures including encryption in transit, secure storage of sign-in sessions on your device, encryption of sign-in tokens from Apple, Google and YouTube on our servers, and restricted, logged staff access with two-step verification. No system is perfectly secure, so please keep your phone locked.

11. This website

This website does not use cookies, analytics or trackers. A church’s page asks our servers for the church’s name and latest sermon; our servers briefly keep your IP address (for up to an hour) only to stop the page being misused. The church dashboard uses a cookie only to keep you signed in.

12. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the effective date above, and tell you in the app before significant changes take effect.

13. Contact

Atmond Limited, 3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom. Email: hello@atmond.com.