Musgo — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 14 September 2026

Musgo is an Android app that helps you look after your houseplants. This page explains what it collects, what leaves your phone, and how to get rid of all of it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.

Musgo is made by João Samouco. Questions, or anything that looks wrong here: samouco@pm.me.

There is no account

Musgo never asks for an email address, a name, a password or a phone number, and there is nothing to sign up for. The first time you open it, the app creates an anonymous identity for itself — a random identifier, made by the app, connected to nothing about you. That identifier is how the server knows that your plants are yours and not somebody else’s.

Because there is no account, there is also no way for anyone — including us — to look at a collection and know whose it is.

What stays on your phone

Your plants, their species, their watering and fertilising schedules, and everything you log about them are stored on the phone itself. So are the photographs you take. Musgo works with no signal, and the copy on your phone is the one every screen reads.

Reminders are scheduled by your phone, locally. Nothing is pushed from a server, and there is no notification token to collect.

What leaves your phone

Photographs, when you ask Musgo to identify a plant. The photo is sent to Anthropic, which runs the vision model that suggests what species it might be. A copy is also stored on Musgo’s own server, in a private folder that only your identity can read, so it survives losing the phone.

A backup of your collection. When the app starts, it writes a snapshot of your plants, schedules and history to that same private folder, so a recovery key can bring them back onto a new phone. It contains no photographs of you, no contacts, and nothing you did not put into Musgo.

Correction Signals. When what you actually do disagrees with the schedule Musgo suggested — you keep watering a plant earlier than told, say — the app sends the species name and the numbers involved. It deliberately sends no identifier of any kind with them: no owner id, no plant id, no device id, and nothing you have named. A person reads these to fix the advice for that species for everybody. They cannot be traced back to you, or counted per person, by design.

A count of identifications. The server keeps a daily tally per identity, to cap what the app can spend on identification. It is a number and a date.

That is the entire list.

What Musgo does not do

• No advertising, and no advertising identifier is read.
• No analytics, no tracking, no usage measurement, no third-party SDKs of that kind at all.
• No location. Musgo works out roughly which hemisphere you are in from your phone’s time zone setting, so that “winter” means the right half of the year. That happens on the phone, and the time zone is not sent anywhere.
• No crash reporting.
• Nothing is sold, rented, or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

Who else touches it

Two companies process data in order to run Musgo, and only for that:

• Anthropic — receives a photograph when you ask for an identification, in order to answer. See https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy.
• Supabase — hosts the database and the private file storage where your backup and photographs are kept. See https://supabase.com/privacy.

Deleting everything

Open Musgo, go to Settings, and choose to delete everything. It removes your plants, history, photographs and backup from the server, and wipes the copy on the phone. It is immediate and it cannot be undone — there is no account to recover, and no recovery key will bring back a collection that has been deleted.

One honest limitation: if you delete a single plant while the phone is offline, that plant’s photograph may remain in your private folder on the server until you delete everything. Deleting everything always removes it.

Children

Musgo is not directed at children and collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.

Where your data is kept

On your phone, and on servers operated by the providers above. Identification requests are answered in the United States.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the current version is always the one at this address.

This app is in closed testing

Musgo is currently distributed to a small group of invited testers rather than to the public. If you are one of them and something here does not match what you see the app doing, that is a bug worth telling us about: samouco@pm.me.