Last updated 13 October 2026
Privacy Policy
Crate has no accounts, no servers, no ads and no analytics. Your library, your crates and your listening stay on your devices and in your own iCloud. This page lists every place Crate sends anything, and why.
What stays with you
- On your iPhone and iPad: Crate's copy of your library, your play history, your crates, mixtapes, notes and pins, what it has learned about how your songs sound, and the requests you give the Clerk.
- In your own iCloud: your crates, mixtapes, notes, pins and play history sync between your devices through your iCloud account. It's Apple's storage, tied to your Apple Account. We can't see it.
- Nothing comes to us. The developer never receives your library, your listening, your requests, your location or anything else. There's no Crate server for it to go to.
Services Crate talks to
To do its job, Crate asks a handful of services for information. Each request comes straight from your device. Like any request on the internet, it shows that service your IP address. Crate never sends your name, email or Apple Account to any of them.
| Service | When | What Crate sends |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Music | Always | Crate reads the Music library on your device and asks Apple's catalogue for covers, previews and albums you don't own. Apple's privacy policy applies. |
| Apple Intelligence | When you ask the Clerk for a playlist | Your request is read on your device. Harder requests may go to Apple's Private Cloud Compute, which Apple designs so that no one, including Apple, can keep or see them. |
| Last.fm | Your account only if you connect it | Your Last.fm username, to read your scrobbles; with your permission, the songs you play in Crate are scrobbled to your account. Without an account, Crate still asks Last.fm about songs and artists by name: how listeners describe them (moods and genres), how many people play them, and their write-ups for Pop-Up Facts. Nothing about you is sent. |
| MusicBrainz | Artist pages, covers, the Tour Bus and the Friday Box | Artist and album names, to sort a discography, find who wrote a song and where an artist comes from. For the Friday Box, the names of record labels, players and artists from your records, to find the week's new releases connected to them. If you add a contact email in Settings, it's sent to MusicBrainz only, as their rules ask. |
| Cover Art Archive | The Friday Box, and covers Apple doesn't have | Nothing about you. Crate asks for an album's cover by its MusicBrainz number. |
| Wikidata | The Tour Bus | Nothing about you. Crate asks where a town is (its place on the map), for towns your artists come from. |
| ReccoBeats | Learning how your songs sound | Song identifiers (the song's ISRC code), to look up tempo, key and energy. |
| Pitchfork and Wikipedia | The Back Room, Reviews, Liner Notes and Pop-Up Facts | Nothing about you. Crate reads Pitchfork's public review feed and Wikipedia's articles: review scores, the story of an album, and facts about songs, artists and towns, asked for by their names. |
| The publication that ran a review | Only when you open a review to read it | Nothing about you. Crate opens the review's page, as Safari would, and shows its text; that publication's own privacy policy applies to the visit. |
| LRCLIB | When you open lyrics | The song's title, artist and length. |
| Open-Meteo and Apple Maps | Only if you let Crate use where you are | Your location, rounded to about a kilometre, for the weather. Apple Maps tells Crate what kind of place you're in (a park, a beach), so Home can suggest music for it. You can turn location off at any time in Settings. |
What Crate doesn't do
- No tracking across apps or websites, and no advertising identifiers.
- No analytics or crash-reporting services.
- Your information is never sold, rented or shared for marketing.
- No account to create, and nothing to delete on our side, because we hold nothing.
Your choices
- Location, Apple Music and Siri access are Apple permissions you can change in the iPhone or iPad Settings app.
- You can sign out of Last.fm in Crate's Settings. To stop syncing through iCloud, turn Crate off under your name, then iCloud, in the Settings app.
- Deleting Crate removes everything it kept on that device. What's in your iCloud can be removed in Settings, under your name, then iCloud.
Children
Crate is a general-audience music app. It doesn't knowingly collect anything from anyone, children included.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes too, and the new version is posted here before it applies. Questions are welcome on the Help & Support page.