No ads. No tracking. No third-party SDKs.

The promise list

• No banner ads. No interstitials. No video ads to "unlock" anything.
• No analytics SDKs. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Amplitude, no Heap, no Plausible, no Fathom.
• No crash reporters. No Sentry, no Crashlytics, no Bugsnag, no Rollbar. Apple\'s built-in opt-in crash reporting is the only path, and I see aggregated patterns, not individual users.
• No ad networks or attribution. No AppsFlyer, no Adjust, no Branch, no Singular, no Kochava, no Tenjin.
• No advertising IDs. Tideward never asks for IDFA permission because Tideward never has any use for it.
• No third-party fonts, no third-party JS frameworks in the app. Pure SwiftUI for UI, SwiftData for storage, CloudKit for sync.
• No telemetry of any kind. No "anonymous usage data" claim because there is no usage data of any shape.
• No website tracking. Google Analytics 4 was removed on May 1, 2026. The site has zero cookies, no consent banner needed.
• No accounts. CloudKit identifies your save by Apple ID. No login, no password, no email signup, no "sign in with Apple" prompt to bypass.
• No microtransactions, no subscription, no premium currency. Single one-time purchase, period.

The architectural proof

The simplest test: open the App Privacy Nutrition Label on Tideward\'s App Store listing. It will read "Data Not Collected." That label is filed under Apple\'s App Privacy framework and is contractually enforceable — false claims trigger app removal. Most premium iOS games don\'t earn that label because they bundle at least one analytics SDK. Tideward earns it because the binary literally has no SDK to disclose.

The deeper test: the project\'s Swift Package dependencies. There aren\'t any beyond Apple\'s. No Package.swift dependencies, no third-party CocoaPods, no Swift Package Manager external imports. The full source tree could be inspected by Apple\'s reviewers in minutes — there\'s nothing to find.

Why this stance is structural, not just preference

Most privacy-positive games still ship analytics SDKs. The reasoning is reasonable: "we need to know what features players use." The cost is also reasonable: the SDK adds 50-200 KB to the binary, opens at least one network connection on app launch, sends anonymized event data to a third-party server, and creates a paper trail that someone (you, the developer; the SDK vendor; their downstream partners) is responsible for.

Tideward\'s decision was different: I don\'t need to know what features players use. The Discord community gives me direct, qualitative, voluntary feedback that\'s 10× more useful than a Mixpanel funnel chart. The TestFlight invitation cohort tells me retention. The App Store Connect crash dashboard tells me stability. None of those involve a third-party SDK in the binary.

The trade-off is real: I have less data than a F2P competitor would. The trade-off is also worth it: the binary is smaller, the architecture is simpler, the privacy claim is honest, and no third-party vendor has any tendril into your data. For an indie game played by people who care about this, that\'s the whole point.

The website honors the same stance

On May 1, 2026, Google Analytics 4 came off the marketing site. This page (and every other page on tideward.app and manugames.com) has:

• Zero third-party JavaScript except the YouTube trailer embed on the homepage and the Beehiiv newsletter form on /blog. Both use the privacy-friendly variants (youtube-nocookie.com; Beehiiv\'s no-tracker form).
• Zero cookies set by Tideward. The browser may set its own cookies for session management; nothing comes from us.
• No consent banner. There\'s nothing to consent to.
• No fingerprinting. No identifying headers. The CDN (Fastly fronting GitHub Pages) sees IP addresses for routing; Tideward sees nothing about who visited.

What I do use: Google Search Console (free, cookieless), Bing Webmaster Tools (same), and the build/deploy logs. That\'s the full analytics stack. It\'s thinner than what most marketing sites use; it\'s also enough.

What about iOS\'s own data?

Apple\'s framework-level data is governed by Apple\'s policies, not mine. CloudKit syncs your save through Apple\'s servers — those bytes are end-to-end encrypted by Apple and Apple cannot read them. iCloud backup, if you have it on, includes Tideward data — encrypted by Apple. App Store Connect aggregated stats (install count, crash rate, device breakdown) are visible to me but never identifiable per-user.

For the full surface, see the privacy policy. The short version: I get nothing about you that Apple doesn\'t mediate, and Apple\'s mediation is anonymous-by-default.

Frequently asked about Tideward\'s privacy stance

Is "no ads, no tracking" really architectural, or is it just marketing?

Architectural. Tideward ships with zero third-party SDKs in the binary — no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising network, no attribution library, no Firebase. You can verify this yourself: Apple's App Privacy Nutrition Label on the App Store listing literally says "Data Not Collected." That label is contractually binding under Apple's App Store Review Guidelines.

How does Tideward handle crash reporting if there's no third-party SDK?

Apple's built-in crash reporting. If you opt in via iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → Share with App Developers, anonymized crash logs go to me through App Store Connect. I see aggregated patterns, not individual user data. If you don't opt in, I see nothing. The choice is yours, mediated entirely by Apple.

Where does my save file actually live?

Locally on your device, plus your private CloudKit container. CloudKit uses the same end-to-end encryption Apple provides for the rest of iCloud. I cannot read your save. Nobody at Manu Games can. There is no Tideward server holding your character data — no service to breach, no database to leak, no backup of mine to lose.

Are there ads, ever?

No, and there never will be. Not banner ads, not interstitials, not "watch a video to double your reward," not affiliate links inside the game, not anything. This is structural to the business model: Tideward will be a one-time premium purchase, not an ad-supported F2P game. The math only works without ads.

What about microtransactions?

No. No premium currency, no gacha, no loot boxes, no battle pass, no skins shop. The plan is a single up-front purchase that unlocks the full game on every Apple device. Possibly an optional "support the dev" tip jar later for players who want to chip in, but never as a gate on content.

Why did you remove Google Analytics from the website too?

On May 1, 2026, GA4 came off the website (manugames.com / tideward.app). The reasoning: my "no third-party SDKs" claim should apply to the website too, not just the app. Without GA4 the site has zero cookies, no privacy banner needed under EU/UK ePrivacy rules, and no third-party requests except the YouTube embed on the homepage and the Beehiiv newsletter form. Search Console (Google) and Bing Webmaster Tools cover the analytics I actually need, and they don't set cookies.

Are crawlers and search bots tracked?

They're served the same anonymous bytes everyone else gets. The site's robots.txt allows major search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot) and AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) to crawl freely. None of them get any user-tied data because there is no user-tied data to give them.

Do you have an analytics dashboard internally?

For the app: only what App Store Connect shows me — aggregated install counts, crash rates, device breakdowns. No per-user data, no in-game telemetry. For the website: Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools + the build/deploy logs. That's it.