Merit has no account system. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing that ties the app to you. One thing does leave the device: a handful of anonymous counters, and you can switch those off in Settings.
Two things, and only while the switch is on. All of this arrives with version 1.1. If you are on 1.0, nothing below is happening yet and there is no switch to find.
A random ID. Your phone makes it up the first time Merit opens. It is not your Apple Account, not your advertising identifier, not your device ID. Delete the app and it is gone, along with any link to whatever came before.
Counters. How often Merit gets opened, how long a session lasted, how many blocking sessions finished, whether the purchase screen was shown, and whether buying or restoring worked. That is the entire list.
Settings, then Share anonymous usage data, turns it off. Turning it off also deletes the random ID from the phone.
Still no sign-up and no login. None of this tells us who you are, and none of it is meant to.
Merit uses Apple's Screen Time API (FamilyControls and ManagedSettings). When you pick apps to restrict, iOS hands the app an opaque token for each selection. These tokens cannot be decoded into app names or bundle identifiers, not by us and not by anyone else. The same is true of the Study Mode allowlist, which is a second set of those tokens. Both sets live in a container shared between Merit and its monitoring extension, on your device, and neither is ever sent off it.
The usage counters leave your selections out too. Merit reports that a blocking session finished. It does not report what was blocked, for how long, or how much you used anything.
With your permission, Merit reads four things from Apple Health: step count, exercise minutes, stand hours, and sleep analysis. It uses them for one purpose, which is converting your activity into screen-time credits, and it does that calculation on your device.
Merit has one optional in-app purchase, a one-time unlock. The payment is handled entirely by Apple through the App Store, so we never see your card number or your Apple Account. Whether you buy or not, all we get from Apple is the same anonymous, aggregate sales report every developer gets.
Whether you own the unlock is checked against the App Store on your device. Merit stores that answer as a single yes-or-no value on the phone and sends it nowhere.
Merit contains no advertising SDK, no crash reporter, and no third party analytics. The counters described above go to a server we run ourselves, at admin.wuyuxai.com, and stop there. Nothing goes to ad networks or data brokers, nothing is used to target ads, and nothing follows you into other apps. Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt never appears because there is nothing here to ask about.
Merit is a self-management tool for the owner of the device. It is not designed for children and is not a parental-control product. It does not knowingly collect information from anyone, including children.
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new date. The August 2026 update was the first real change: version 1.1 added the anonymous counters described above, which earlier versions did not have.
Questions about privacy, or anything else: wuyuxai@gmail.com. A person reads this address and will reply.