The standard approach (and why I rejected it)
Most mobile games ship with a stack of third-party SDKs — analytics, crash reporting, ad networks, attribution tracking. It’s considered standard practice. Some games include dozens of these libraries before writing a single line of gameplay code.
I decided to ship with zero.
How CloudKit changes the equation
Apple’s CloudKit gives me something powerful: fully encrypted cloud sync that I never touch. When your game data syncs across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, it goes through your personal iCloud account. I have no servers. I have no database of player information. I can’t see your character builds, your progression, or even that you’re playing the game.
This isn’t a privacy policy promise — it’s an architectural decision. The data doesn’t pass through my systems.
What I gave up
Being honest: going fully private has tradeoffs. I can’t measure retention curves. I can’t see which features get the most use. I can’t do A/B testing on onboarding flows. I don’t know my daily active user count.
Every decision I make about the game comes from direct community feedback in Discord, not from dashboards. That forces me to listen harder and build closer relationships with players.
What you gain
When you play Manu Idle, you can be confident that no company is building a behavioral profile from your play patterns, no ad network is tracking you across apps, your game data is encrypted end-to-end and visible only to you, and deleting the app and your iCloud data removes everything — there’s nothing left on my side.
For a game you might play every day for months or years, that peace of mind matters.
The technical details
For the technically curious: I use Apple’s CloudKit framework with private database containers. All sync happens through CKRecord operations against the user’s personal iCloud storage. Authentication goes through the device’s Apple ID — no passwords, no email collection, no account creation flow.
The privacy policy isn’t a legal formality. It’s a technical architecture document.