1. Who we are
Carvia is an independent iOS app for iPhone. It is published as a free app on the Apple App Store, with one optional in-app purchase (Carvia Premium Lifetime), and is operated by its individual developer (“we”, “us”). You can reach us at support.carvia@gmail.com.
2. What Carvia does
Carvia is a private, on-device parking-memory companion for iPhone and iPad. It helps you remember where you parked your car, walk back to it (including a compass-guided “Find My Car” arrow for the last few metres), and keep a light personal history of your parking spots.
Carvia does not connect to your vehicle. Parking detection happens privately on your iPhone using location, motion, and optional CarPlay/Bluetooth signals. There is no OEM login, no vehicle account, no engine or door control, and no live vehicle telemetry.
2a. Free tier vs. Premium
Carvia is free to download and use. The free tier includes saving 1 car, manual parking save, viewing your current and last parking location, and the basic map. An optional one-time in-app purchase, Carvia Premium Lifetime (product ID com.anaskhedr.findmycar.premium.lifetime), unlocks automatic parking detection, parking history, the Find My Car compass arrow, unlimited cars, premium widgets and Live Activities, and smart reminders.
Premium is a one-time, non-consumable purchase. It is not a subscription — there is no monthly or yearly billing, no auto-renew and no recurring charge.
Free trial. New users get a 3-day free trial of the Premium features, implemented entirely inside the app: no payment information is collected, nothing is charged when it ends, and the only data involved is a single on-device timestamp recording when the trial started.
3. Data we collect
Carvia is designed to collect as little data as possible. All of the following is stored on your iPhone only, in iOS’s standard sandboxed application container (SwiftData):
- Car profile (brand, model, year, colour, body style, optional nickname) — so your garage feels personal and we can show the right car render.
- Optionally, your car stereo’s audio identity (the CarPlay / Bluetooth audio name and its system identifier) — only if you answer Yes to the one-time “Is this your car?” question. Used solely on-device to attribute parking to the right car and as a small supporting signal for detection confidence. Never required, never uploaded; answering “Not now” simply means the question is never asked again for that vehicle.
- Parking events (coordinates, timestamps, vehicle heading at park time, optional notes, optional photos) — the core history feature.
- App preferences (units, notification toggles, reminder delay, parking mode, Live Activity toggle, etc.) — your settings.
- Optionally, your first name from Sign in with Apple — only to personalise the greeting on the Garage screen.
- Premium entitlement state (a boolean — do you own Premium or not) — so the right features are unlocked. The boolean is cached locally for fast launch and re-validated against Apple’s StoreKit on every launch; Apple’s answer always wins.
3a. Purchases (StoreKit)
When you buy or restore Carvia Premium Lifetime, the purchase is processed by Apple via StoreKit 2. We never see your payment details, your Apple ID, or your receipt. The only information Carvia holds about your purchase is a single on-device boolean: does this device currently hold an active entitlement for the Premium Lifetime product? That boolean is derived from Apple’s signed transactions (Transaction.currentEntitlements) and is re-validated on every app launch.
Restore Purchases. When you tap Restore Purchases (on the paywall or in Settings → About & Legal), Carvia asks Apple to re-deliver any entitlements your Apple ID owns. This call never contacts a Carvia server (we have none) and never writes anything beyond the on-device entitlement boolean.
Promo and offer codes. Carvia does not mint or validate its own promo codes. If you redeem an App Store promo code or offer code, redemption is handled entirely by Apple’s standard sheet (AppStore.presentOfferCodeRedeemSheet). The redemption result arrives via the same StoreKit transaction stream as a paid purchase. We do not see the code text.
4. Data we do NOT collect
- We do not collect your email address.
- We do not collect vehicle credentials, OEM logins or any OEM account data.
- We do not collect vehicle telematics (speed, mileage, fuel, battery, doors, locks).
- We do not collect contacts, calendars, photo library (apart from a photo you may choose to attach to a single parking event), microphone, camera streams, health data, or browsing history.
- We do not use analytics SDKs, crash-reporting SDKs, tracking pixels, advertising identifiers or any third-party trackers.
- We do not sell, rent or share your personal data with anyone.
5. Location data
Carvia requests Location with the “Always” authorisation so iOS can briefly wake the app for low-power Visit Monitoring (CLVisit) and Significant-Location-Change events — these are the signals we use to detect parking automatically. Outside drives, Carvia does not run continuous background GPS. There are two bounded exceptions: a drive-time location session — started only when a drive is detected, always shown by the blue location indicator, and ended the moment your parking spot is saved (or on cancel, after 10 minutes with no driving, or at a hard 3-hour cap) — whose sole purpose is saving your spot within seconds of stopping instead of minutes; and a short, bounded sampling window (up to ~60 seconds) right after a parking stop is detected, in which Carvia reads GPS fixes at a higher rate purely to pin the exact parking spot before going quiet again.
- Location data is processed entirely on your iPhone.
- Location data is never uploaded to any server (Carvia has no server).
- Location data is never shared with anyone.
- A friendly “place name” may be derived for display via Apple’s on-device reverse geocoding (MapKit on iOS 26, CLGeocoder on iOS 18–25; no third-party geocoder).
6. Background location
The “Always” permission also lets Visit Monitoring (CLVisit) and Significant-Location-Change fire while the app is in the background. We use these only to write a parking event to the local database. During a detected drive, the bounded drive-time session described in section 5 may keep location active in the background — always with the blue indicator visible — solely so the stop is seen the moment it happens. Outside that session Carvia runs no background GPS, and in all cases it does not stream live location, does not log routes, and does not send any background updates to any server.
7. Motion activity
With your permission, Carvia reads motion activity (walking, driving) through Apple’s CMMotionActivity. We use this only on-device to tell a real car drive apart from simply walking around and stopping. Motion data never leaves your iPhone.
7a. Compass heading (Find My Car arrow)
When you open the Find My Car arrow screen, Carvia reads the device’s magnetic compass heading via CLLocationManager.startUpdatingHeading() so it can rotate an on-screen arrow toward where you parked. We combine the heading with the great-circle bearing from your current GPS to the parked coordinate — both computed entirely on your iPhone.
7b. Barometer (garage level)
When your drive ends near or inside a covered structure, Carvia may read the iPhone’s barometric pressure sensor (Apple’s CMAltimeter) for a short, bounded window around the parking moment. It uses the relative pressure change only to estimate how many storeys you drove up or down (shown as a “Level +1 / −2” badge on the Find My Car screen). The raw sensor readings are processed and discarded on your iPhone; only the small level estimate is stored with the parking event, and nothing is transmitted anywhere.
At the moment a park is saved, Carvia may also store the direction the vehicle was facing (from the compass when available, otherwise from the direction of travel of the last driving GPS fix) together with the parking event, so the return arrow starts correctly oriented. This heading lives in the same on-device parking record as the coordinates and follows the same rules: never uploaded, never shared, deleted with the event.
- Heading data is never uploaded and never logged.
- Heading updates stop as soon as you leave the Find My Car screen.
- The arrow is directional guidance only — not an indoor positioning system and not a claim of centimetre-level accuracy. In magnetically noisy environments (multi-storey concrete car parks, steel decks) the arrow falls back to a “hold steady” / “figure-eight calibration” hint, matching iOS’s standard compass behaviour.
8. Parking history, vehicle profile, notes & photos
Your parking events, optional notes and optional photos are stored locally in your iPhone’s SwiftData store. They are not synced to any cloud service unless you have your own iCloud device backup turned on (which is a system feature managed by Apple, not by us).
9. Notifications
Carvia schedules local notifications: a “parking spot saved” confirmation the moment an automatic detection stores your spot (new in v1.0.5 — can be turned off in Settings → Parked notifications), a “you parked a while ago” reminder (delay chosen by you), and a “you’re walking away from your car” alert. These are scheduled by your iPhone and are not sent through any push service.
9a. Live Activities & Dynamic Island
While a parking moment is in progress (your car was just parked, or you are walking back to it), Carvia can show a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. What it shows is your car’s name, the parking state, and — while returning — the remaining distance and a direction arrow. The Live Activity never carries your coordinates; only the distance and bearing numbers needed to draw the card, rendered by iOS’s ActivityKit entirely on your device (no push channel, no server). The card, the Dynamic Island and the Home Screen widgets can also show your car’s catalog artwork — an image bundled with the app and rendered on your device; it is not a photo of your actual vehicle and involves no data leaving your iPhone.
Live Activities end automatically: the “Your car is here” confirmation dismisses itself a few seconds after you arrive, and every other state has a bounded lifetime — a card can never linger. You can turn Live Activities off at any time in Carvia Settings (and iOS Settings → Carvia offers the system-level switch).
9b. Apple Watch
If you install the Carvia watch app on a paired Apple Watch, your iPhone mirrors your parking snapshot (recent spots, place names, times, your car’s display name) to the watch through Apple’s WatchConnectivity — a direct device-to-device channel handled by iOS/watchOS. No server is involved and nothing changes about where your data lives: the iPhone remains the only source of truth, and the watch keeps just a small cached copy of the last snapshot so the app isn’t blank when it opens.
The watch uses its own location only while the watch app is open, purely to show your distance and direction back to the car. It stops the moment you leave the app — no background location on the watch. Deleting parking data (or your account) on the iPhone empties the watch mirror on the next sync; removing the watch app removes its cache.
10. Apple Sign In / account data
Sign in with Apple is optional — you can use Carvia fully without signing in. If you choose to sign in: we receive only the display name you choose to share with us; your private-relay email address is not used by Carvia and is not stored; the display name is stored locally on your device, never on a server (we have none). Carvia complies with Apple’s Sign in with Apple requirements where it applies (no separate sign-in flow gates app features).
11. Analytics, crash reporting & tracking
Carvia contains no analytics SDKs, no crash-reporting SDKs, no tracking pixels, no ad networks, and no third-party identifiers. Apple may collect aggregate App Store metrics under your iOS privacy settings (managed by Apple, not by us); Carvia itself collects nothing.
If a future build introduces privacy-safe analytics events for the Premium purchase flow (paywall_viewed, purchase_started, purchase_success, purchase_cancelled, restore_started, restore_success), they will carry no personal information — no PII, no advertising identifiers, no location, no Apple ID, no receipt. No analytics events are sent in this build.
12. No vehicle access
To be unambiguous:
- Carvia has no Smartcar integration and no other OEM/vehicle API integration.
- Carvia does not authenticate to any car or vehicle service.
- Carvia does not start, stop, lock, unlock, climate-control or otherwise command any vehicle.
- Carvia does not receive engine, battery, location or any other telemetry from a real car.
- The “car” inside Carvia is a personalised reference profile only.
13. Data storage & security
- All Carvia data lives in iOS’s standard application sandbox with Apple’s file-system data protection.
- Carvia uses only Apple’s system frameworks for any network operation (none in normal use). It does not bundle proprietary cryptography.
- Carvia stores no passwords, no tokens and no credentials (because it does not authenticate to any service).
14. Data sharing
We do not share, sell, rent, or transfer your personal data to any third party. There is no third party we could share it with, because your data never leaves your iPhone.
15. Data retention
Because everything lives on your iPhone, your data is retained until you delete it: from Settings → Account → Delete Account inside the app, or by deleting the Carvia app from your iPhone. We do not retain anything on a server (we have no server).
16. Delete Account
You can permanently erase every piece of Carvia data at any time: Settings → Account → Delete Account → confirm. This immediately deletes your car profile; deletes every parking event (with notes and photos); cancels every scheduled local notification and ends any Live Activity; clears your saved preferences and the optional Apple display name; and returns the app to onboarding. The action is immediate and cannot be undone.
17. Security
Carvia inherits iOS’s app-sandbox isolation, file-system data protection and standard system permissions model. No remote authentication, no remote storage and no server-side processing means there is no remote attack surface to defend.
18. Children’s privacy
Carvia is a general-audience utility for car owners. It is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect any information from children.
19. Regional availability
Carvia is not currently offered or sold in France. Availability may vary by App Store region. Some features may be unavailable in certain countries or regions due to App Store, OS or hardware constraints.
Carvia is a Universal iOS app — the same binary runs on iPhone and iPad, and requires iOS 18 or later. Carvia also supports Apple CarPlay: when your iPhone disconnects from your car’s CarPlay, Carvia can capture a parking candidate and confirm it once you start walking. CarPlay is one optional on-device signal among several — it sends no data off your iPhone, and Carvia still never connects to, reads from, or controls the vehicle itself.
Vehicle recognition (optional). The first time Carvia sees an unknown car stereo (CarPlay or Bluetooth audio), it may ask once: “Is this your car?” If you confirm, the stereo’s audio name and system identifier are remembered on your iPhone only so future parks attribute to the right car. Carvia never scans for Bluetooth devices and uses no Bluetooth radio APIs — it only reads the name of the audio route iOS already connected. Declining leaves everything exactly as before, and the question is never repeated for that vehicle.
This privacy policy does not claim conformity with GDPR, CCPA, DPDP or any other specific regulatory framework beyond Apple’s own App Store privacy requirements; we describe what we actually do, plainly, so you can decide.
20. International users
If you use Carvia outside the country where you originally bought it, your data continues to live on your iPhone wherever you are. There is no cross-border transfer because there is no server we could transfer it to.
21. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. The current version is always available in the app at Settings → About & Legal → Privacy Policy and at the public URL printed in the footer of the in-app screen.
22. Contact
Privacy questions: support.carvia@gmail.com. We will respond as promptly as we can.