First Leaf

Location data

First Leaf asks for your location once, during setup, to:

• Match you to a USDA hardiness zone and elevation, used for every prediction the app makes
• Tag each observation you log with where it happened

Your coordinates are sent to a small number of scientific data sources to make predictions specific to your exact spot, rather than a generic regional guess:

• Open-Meteo, a free weather API, receives your coordinates to fetch daily temperatures used to calculate growing degree days. It does not require an API key and does not identify who is asking.
• The USA National Phenology Network receives your coordinates when checking their Spring Index model or climate normal data for your precise location.

When First Leaf checks USA-NPN's crowd-sourced observations or iNaturalist's citizen-science data for a species near you, only your state (Washington or Oregon) is sent, not your exact coordinates.

Your location is never sold, never shared with anyone for advertising, and never used to identify you personally by any of these services.

Your garden log

Every observation and photo you log is stored on your device and synced through your own iCloud account, using Apple's CloudKit. We do not run a server that stores your garden data, do not see it, and cannot access it. It syncs automatically to your other devices signed into the same Apple ID, the same way Photos or Notes does, and nowhere else.

The app asks for camera and photo library access only so you can attach a photo to something you log.

Plant photos and species lookup

When First Leaf shows a reference photo for a plant, it sends the plant's name (text only, nothing about you or your location) to Wikipedia to find a representative image.

Identifying a plant from a photo

When you add a photo while logging an observation, First Leaf tries to suggest what the plant might be. It first sends that photo to Pl@ntNet, a plant-identification service, which returns a list of possible species and how confident it is, nothing else about you or your location is sent along with it. If that service can't be reached, First Leaf falls back to Apple's on-device image classifier, which runs entirely on your phone and never sends the photo anywhere, though it can only guess a general category ("flower," "houseplant") rather than a real species name.

Either way, these are suggestions you can tap to fill in the plant name or ignore entirely, never an automatic or required step.

What is not collected

• No account or registration is required
• No name, email, or personal identifiers are collected by us
• No analytics or crash reporting SDKs are included — the app contains no third-party tracking code
• No advertising networks are used

Where the data comes from

Predictions are built from the USA National Phenology Network's Spring Index model and observation data, a US government-affiliated research program; Open-Meteo weather data; and, for species not tracked by USA-NPN, citizen-science observations from iNaturalist. Reference photos come from Wikipedia, and photo-based plant identification comes from Pl@ntNet or, as a fallback, Apple's on-device image classifier.

Children's privacy

First Leaf does not knowingly collect data from children under 13.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top of this page will reflect the revision.

Contact

[email protected] — for anything about the app, your data, or something you want removed.