Privacy

No account, no telemetry.

Last updated: 12 September 2026

VortexFlow has no account, no analytics, and no telemetry. There is no account or telemetry server. The contents of your windows, your screenshots, and what you type into the overlay stay on your Mac, and because the source is public, every sentence on this page is something you can check rather than something you have to take on trust.

The short version

• No account, no sign-in, nothing to register. The app has no notion of who you are.
• No analytics, crash reporting, or usage data. Nothing is sent to us as telemetry, because there is no telemetry server to send it to.
• Window titles, search queries, and thumbnails stay on your Mac and are never written to disk.
• The app talks to the network for site icons, described below, and to check https://vortexflow.io/appcast.xml for a newer signed build. Never for a private window. Never to profile you.

What the app stores

Your settings, which button opens the overlay, the shortcut, the layout you chose, and the apps and links you pinned, live in a single macOS preferences file at ~/Library/Preferences/io.vortexflow.Vortexflow.plist. Nothing else is written anywhere: no caches, no logs on disk, no database. Diagnostic messages go to the macOS unified log, which stays on your machine and is yours to read in Console.

The favicon network call

To show the icon of a site open in your browser, VortexFlow fetches that icon from that site's own address. The request is unauthenticated, uses a throwaway session, sends no cookies and nothing identifying, and refuses redirects to any other host. It is never made for an incognito or private-browsing window. If you deny the app network access, cards still work; they just will not show site icons. The code for this is BrowserFaviconService.swift.

Update checks

VortexFlow talks to https://vortexflow.io/appcast.xml to see if a newer signed build exists. That feed is a static file on this site. The app downloads the enclosure only if you agree. There is no account, no telemetry, and no system profiling in that check. Sparkle is the library that does it. The code lives in the Vortexflow executable, not in VortexflowCore.

Web and assistant search

If you type something the spiral cannot match and choose to search the web or send it to an assistant, the app opens that query in your default browser. It is your browser making the request, under your own accounts and settings; the app sends nothing itself and does not keep the query.

What the permissions can see

macOS will ask. Each permission is optional. The app runs with any subset. Details: Permissions.

• Input Monitoring. Which mouse button you pressed, so the overlay can open. Not a keylogger. It does not record or transmit what you type.
• Accessibility. The list of windows, and raising the exact one you pick. Without it, whole apps come forward instead of specific windows.
• Screen Recording. Window thumbnails, captured on demand when the overlay is up. They are not saved and not sent as telemetry. Icon View needs none of this.
• Automation. Asked later, the first time tab search or site icons need it. Used to read tab titles and URLs from browsers you use, on your machine.

What the app never touches

• Keychain, clipboard, contacts, calendar, location
• The files on your disk

This website

vortexflow.io is a static site. It does not set marketing cookies. If the host provides privacy-preserving request analytics with no cookies, that applies to the website only. The download and GitHub buttons ask GitHub's public API for the latest release version and star count; that request goes to GitHub under GitHub's privacy statement, and the page works without it.

Contact

Questions about this policy: privacy@vortexflow.io, or an issue on GitHub if you have found something that contradicts it.

Changes

If this document changes, the date at the top changes with it, and so does the history of this page, which is in the same repository.