Doodl leaves you alone.
Most apps collect as much about you as they can. Doodl collects only what it needs to work.
I'm Stephanie, and I built Doodl by myself. From the start, I decided it would never be an ad platform, an algorithm, a data broker, or AI training data. This page shows exactly how I keep it that way.
No lawyers were harmed in the making of this page. (The lawyer version can be found on our Privacy Policy page, and it says the same thing in more words.)
Things Doodl will never do:
Sell your data
Not to advertisers, not to brokers, not to "trusted partners." There is no version of Doodl where that's the business model. Doodl is paid for by small in-app purchases, and people who chip in because they like it.
Show you ads
No banners, no pop-ups, no sponsored doodls sliding in the feed. Nothing on your screen is trying to sell you a mattress or the next awful game. We won’t gate content behind ads, either.
Follow you around the internet
No ad SDKs, no tracking pixels, no advertising ID, no cross-app profile of you being assembled in the background. We’re not interested in your browsing habits.
Feed your art into AI
Not your finished doodls, not your sketches, not the strokes you drew to make them. Doodl will never train an AI on your art or hand it to anyone who will. There's no generative anything in the app, either. Everything in the feed was made by a human hand.
Rank you
There's no engagement algorithm deciding whose doodl deserves to be seen. Everybody who draws today shows up. There are no leaderboards - just community.
Hand your behavior to an analytics company
Doodl doesn't use Google Analytics or any other tracking service. Your taps, sessions, and screen-by-screen behavior aren't being watched. Doodl's servers do run on Google's Firebase, but that's storage, not surveillance.
Things Doodl does collect — and why
Your email & username
The email so you can log back in, and so I can reach you if something breaks. The username is whatever you want it to be — it doesn't have to be your real name, and plenty of people here are a cryptid or a houseplant.
Your doodles
They have to live somewhere for you to see them again. Public ones go in the feed. Private ones stay yours. I might spotlight your amazing artwork on socials, but you can reach out at any time if you’d rather I take something of yours down.
Your timezone
Used for exactly one thing: knowing when your day rolls over, so your streak doesn't break at some random hour that isn't midnight where you are. You can set it anywhere, if that’s what you want.
Your purchases
Purchases and donations go through Stripe and RevenueCat. Your card number never touches Doodl. I never see it.
However, your general purchase info is of course linked to your account – that’s how you unlock things!
How Doodl data gets used
Which prompts people actually want to draw, what day of the week is busiest, how many people stick around, how achievements are going. I built all of that myself out of Doodl's own database, and it stays there. There's no analytics company in the middle. It's me, looking at my own app, so I know what to fix and what to build next.
Your in-app stats
Streak count, how many doodls you've made, likes and comments you've given, how many friends you have. These are attached to your account, because there's no way to show you a streak without knowing it's yours.
Crash reports
When the app falls over, I get a report telling me what broke: which screen, which line, which device, etc. It tells me the app crashed. It doesn't tell me who you are or what you were drawing. This is how I find out the share button is broken without waiting for someone to email me about it. (But please, email me about it.)
We don’t touch:
Your Contacts
Your Microphone
Your Location
Your Phone Number
I won't feed your art to an AI
Here's the part I control:
Your doodles are not a dataset. I don't train on them. I don't license them. I don't sell them to anybody building a model. That is not going to change while I'm the one running this.
Here's the part I want to be straight with you about:
Doodl's public feed is, well, public. Apple's rules say an app can't force you to create an account just to look at content that isn't yours — which is honestly a good rule most of the time, since it's the reason apps can't hold their own contents hostage behind your email address. But for an app full of art, it has a side effect: the feed has to be viewable without signing up.
And I'm not going to pretend that's the whole story either. A scraper determined enough to want your art can just make an account. Nobody has ever been stopped by a signup form. Public art on the internet has always been copyable, and Doodl doesn't get a magic exemption from that just because I'd like one.
Here’s what I’d like changed:
Apps built around original, human-made art should be allowed to require an account to view the feed. Not to harvest your email, but to raise the floor a little on the people hoovering up artwork at scale. Right now the rules treat a drawing app the same as a pizza menu.
If that seems reasonable to you, Apple and Google both take developer and user feedback, and they move when enough people say the same thing. I'm one solo dev in Montana. I don't move them by myself.
In the meantime: if you want to draw something nobody can reach, draw it private. Private doodls never enter the feed, never get a public link, and never leave your account.
Your art belongs to you
You drew it. You own it. Full stop.
Posting a doodl gives me permission to show it in the app and in the feed, because that's how a feed works. It does not make it mine.
One thing I want to be upfront about: I also share doodls in Doodl's own posts on social media. Often as a big collage of what people made that day, because the best argument for Doodl is just showing what comes out of it.
Some ground rules on that:
Public only. I only ever share doodls that were posted publicly. Private doodls stay private — they don't go in the feed, they don't go on my Instagram, they don't go anywhere. That's the whole point of the private option.
You can tell me no. If you don't want your art in Doodl's marketing, email me and it comes down. I'm not going to ask you to justify it, and I'm not going to make it a process. It's your drawing.
It's promotion, not resale. Your doodl showing up in a Doodl post is me pointing at the app and saying "look what people made." It isn't licensed to anyone, sold to anyone, or used for anything beyond that.
Delete means delete
There's a Delete Account button right in the app. You don't have to email me. You don't have to explain yourself. You don't have to survive four screens of "are you sure?"
When you press it, an automated process goes through and removes your account, your profile, and your doodls — from the database and from storage. There's no shadow copy sitting in a folder somewhere marked "just in case."
One honest exception: if someone was banned for harassing people, I keep a minimal record so they can't delete, re-register, and do it again tomorrow. That's it. That's the whole exception, and it exists to protect everyone else who's just here to draw.
About that email list~
I'll send you something occasionally, but only when I have something to say. Announcements, Doodl highlights, founder thoughts, etc.
There's an unsubscribe link on every one, it works immediately, and I'm never renting that list to anybody.
Why any of this matters to me
I'm an artist. I've watched the internet get very good at turning people into inventory: everywhere you turn now, your attention is being sold and your work is being scraped.
Doodl is a small thing, but it's a small thing built the other way. It's just prompts, pens, and people. I'd like to keep it that way.
Let's stay human together.