Baby Steps — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 9 September 2026
Baby Steps is an app for keeping track of a child's health: doctor visits, vaccinations, medications, growth, teeth, symptoms, the papers a clinic hands you, and reminders.
This policy describes what happens to the information you put into it. It is short because the app does very little with your data — by design.
The short version
- Everything stays on your phone. Baby Steps stores your records in a database on the device and nowhere else.
- There is no account. You do not sign up, sign in, or give us an email address.
- We do not collect anything. No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, no usage tracking.
- Nothing is sent to a server. Baby Steps has no server.
- We never sell or share your child's health data, because we never receive it.
- There are no ads.
What Baby Steps stores, and where
Everything you enter is written to a private database inside the app's own storage on your device. Both platforms protect that storage so other apps cannot read it: Android through app-private storage, an iPhone through the app's sandbox.
What is stored:
| Information | Why |
|---|---|
| Child's name, nickname, date of birth, gender, blood type | The date of birth drives the vaccine schedule, the growth percentiles and the age shown. Gender selects the correct WHO growth reference. |
| Country of residence | It selects which national vaccination schedule the app builds. |
| A profile photo of your child, if you add one | So you can tell profiles apart when you are tracking more than one child. |
| How your baby is fed, when it changed, and when solids started | Asked during setup and editable later, and more than one way can be true at once. It is context for the growth record and for what a doctor may ask at a visit. Not shared, and not used for anything else. The app does not record individual feeds. |
| How your child seems, if you note it | Optional. One of six words — happy, settled, sleepy, fussy, clingy, off colour — and when you noted it. It is your own note: it creates no reminder and no alert, and nothing in the app treats it as a medical finding. |
| Doctor visits, questions, diagnoses, notes, follow-ups | The visit record. |
| Vaccinations: dates given, place, batch number, reactions | The immunisation record. |
| Medications: names, dose instructions, schedules, and what was given, skipped or missed — and, if you say so, which condition it was prescribed for, which visit prescribed it and which filed prescription it was written on | The dose log, which is what answers "did I already give it?" The three links are optional and are only ever set by you; they are what lets a condition show its treatment and a visit show what it prescribed. |
| Growth measurements, teeth, symptoms — and, for a symptom, any photographs you attach and the visit you say it was discussed at | The health record. A photograph of a rash is stored the same way any other paper is, in the app’s own storage on your phone. |
| Photos of papers you file — prescriptions, lab results, scans, clinical notes — with the title you give each one, which kind of paper it is, the date printed on it, and which visit, health episode or symptom it belongs to | The documents shelf, so a prescription can be found again without going through a camera roll. The picture is copied into the app's own storage. Baby Steps does not read the page: nothing is extracted from it, and every one of those details is one you typed or chose. |
| Health episodes: a name for a stretch of illness, when it started and ended, and your notes on it | Named by the diagnosis you write up after a visit, and only created if you ask for one, so the papers belonging to one illness are filed together rather than scattered by date. |
| Medical history: allergies, chronic conditions, past illnesses and surgeries, and whether you marked one serious | The history a doctor asks for at the start of a visit. Anything you marked serious is shown first on your child's profile, so somebody holding the phone can see it. |
| Development milestones you tick off, and when | Your own record against published checklists. **Nothing records that a milestone was not reached** — there is no "not yet" and no failed state, because an empty box means nobody has said anything, which is not a claim about a child. |
| Optional routine times (usual wake-up and bedtime) | Only to suggest kinder medication times. This is a setting, not a sleep tracker. |
| Your own name, how you are related to the child, and a phone number if you add one | Asked at setup so the record of your consent can say who gave it, and editable later under More → About you. Nothing dials the number; it is there for your own reference. |
| Your acceptance of this policy and the medical disclaimer, when, and who accepted it | So we can show you what you agreed to, and ask again if the wording changes. Agreements recorded before the app asked for your name are shown as "not recorded" rather than filled in afterwards. |
| App settings: your theme choice and unit preference | So the app looks and reads the way you left it. |
We do not receive any of it. It is on your device, in your control.
What Baby Steps does not do
- It does not create an account or a profile on any server.
- It does not upload, back up or synchronise your data anywhere, and it switches off the operating system's own backup so that the phone cannot do it either: Android's automatic backup to Google Drive is disabled for this app, and on an iPhone the records are excluded from iCloud and from encrypted computer backups. Your child's records are not copied anywhere — not even by the operating system.
This cuts both ways, and you should know which way. Because nothing is backed up, a lost or reset phone takes the records with it. The app's Export everything (More → Data and privacy) is how you keep a copy, and it is the only way there is.
- It does not use analytics or crash-reporting services.
- It does not contain advertising, and does not use health data for marketing.
- It does not read your contacts, your photo library, your location or your microphone. On an iPhone it asks for the camera, and only to take a photo you asked it to take — see Permissions below.
Permissions, and why each one exists
Baby Steps asks for as little as it can.
| Permission | Where | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Notifications | Android and iPhone | To show medication and vaccine reminders. |
| Alarms and reminders (exact alarms) | Android only | So a dose reminder arrives at the dose time rather than whenever the system gets round to it. iPhones have no equivalent setting; a reminder there arrives at the time it was set for. |
| Run at startup | Android only | Reminders are cleared by a restart. Without this, restarting your phone would silently stop your reminders. |
| Vibrate | Android only | Part of how a reminder notification is delivered. Added by the notification library the app uses. |
| Camera | iPhone only | Asked for the first time you tap Take a photo, and only then. See below — this is the one place the two platforms genuinely differ. |
| Time-sensitive notifications | iPhone only | So a dose reminder is delivered while a Focus — including Sleep — is switched on. Not a prompt: it is granted with notifications, and you can switch it off per app in Settings. |
Baby Steps never has access to your photo library, on either platform, and never asks for it.
When you add a photo — an attachment on a visit or vaccination, or a profile picture for your child — you can either pick an existing one or take a new one:
- Choosing an existing photo opens the phone's own photo picker — Android's photo picker, or the iPhone's Photos picker. Both run outside the app and hand it the single file you chose and nothing else. Neither needs, or asks for, permission to your library. The app also deliberately declines the picture's embedded metadata, so the location the photo was taken at is not copied in with it.
- Taking a photo differs, and this policy would rather say so than round it off:
- On Android, it opens your phone's own camera app, which returns just the photo you took. Baby Steps never sees the camera, which is why no camera permission is asked for and none is declared.
- On iPhone, the camera runs inside the app, and iOS requires your permission for that. You will be asked once, the first time you tap Take a photo, and you can refuse — everything else in the app keeps working, and you can still attach a photo you have already taken. The camera is opened at no other moment.
Either way, only that one file is copied into the app's own storage. A profile picture is scaled down to at most 512 pixels on its longest side before it is copied, because it is only ever drawn small.
Everything copied in is included when you export, and removed when you delete the child it belongs to or delete everything.
Children's data
Baby Steps holds health information about children, which both Egypt's Personal Data Protection Law (No. 151 of 2020) and the GDPR treat as sensitive.
The app is used by a parent or caregiver, not by the child, and the records are entered by that adult about their own child. Because nothing leaves the device, that information is never processed by us or by anyone else.
Your data is yours
From More → Data and privacy you can, at any time and without asking anyone:
- Export everything. Every record the app holds, as a single file you can keep or send on. The file is not encrypted once it leaves the app, so keep it somewhere you trust.
- Delete everything. Permanently removes every record for every child. There is no copy anywhere else, so this cannot be undone and we cannot restore it for you.
You can also remove a single child's records from their profile.
Uninstalling the app also removes its data from your device.
Medical disclaimer
Baby Steps is an organiser, not a medical device and not a source of medical advice.
- Vaccine dates come from your country's schedule as reported to the World Health Organization, and growth percentiles use the WHO Child Growth Standards. Both are shown with their source.
- Reminder timing, and the suggestion of kinder dose times, are the app's own scheduling convenience — not medical guidance, and labelled as such where they appear.
- Percentiles describe where a child sits among children of the same age. They are not a score and not a diagnosis.
- Always follow your doctor's instructions. If you are worried about your child, contact your doctor rather than relying on this app.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, the app will ask you to read and accept the new version rather than quietly updating it. Your previous acceptances remain visible under More → Data and privacy.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about your data:
Because the app holds no data of yours on any server, we cannot look up, change or delete anything on your behalf — everything is in your hands, on your device.