Stormline Weather — Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 1, 2026

Stormline Weather is built by Northbaseworks, LLC ("Northbaseworks," "we," "us"). This policy explains what information Stormline Weather collects on iPhone, iPad and Android, how it is used, who processes it, and what choices you have. Where the iOS and Android apps behave differently, this policy says so.

The short version

Stormline Weather works without an account. To show a forecast, radar and alerts, the app sends the coordinates of the place you are looking at to our servers, which pass them to weather data providers. An account (Sign in with Apple, or Google on Android) is optional; it stores an opaque identifier from Apple or Google, never your email address or name, and is used to sync your settings and saved places and to unlock optional features. Lightning alerts, if you turn them on, register a random device identifier, a push notification token and your chosen place or places with our lightning service. We do not show ads, we do not use advertising identifiers or third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs, and we do not sell your data.

Location

Stormline Weather uses location to show the forecast, radar and lightning for where you are. You can also skip location entirely and search for and save places instead.

• Forecast and alerts. The app sends the coordinates of the place being shown (your current location or a saved place) to our Worker service at api.northbaseworks.net. On iPhone and iPad the coordinates are sent as the device reports them, and the app asks the system for approximate (about one kilometre) accuracy. On Android the app rounds them to two decimal places (about 1 km) before sending. Our service forwards them to Apple WeatherKit for the forecast, and to the US National Weather Service (United States) or Environment and Climate Change Canada (Canada) to look up weather alerts. We do not keep a history of the coordinates you request. To reduce repeat lookups, our service temporarily caches each forecast for 10 minutes under a location key rounded to about 1 km; the cache holds the forecast, not information about you. Alerts are fetched for each request and are not cached.
• Home Screen widget (iPhone and iPad). The widget and the app's background refresh request the forecast from the same service using the last known coordinates.
• Place names. On iPhone and iPad, your device asks Apple to turn your current coordinates into a place name, and when you search for a place to add, the text you type is sent directly from your device to Open-Meteo's geocoding service. On Android, place search and place names use the geocoding service built into your device. We do not receive or store what you type.
• Radar. The radar map requests map tiles from our service, which retrieves them from Environment and Climate Change Canada and caches them briefly. These requests identify map tiles, not your coordinates.

iOS

Stormline Weather asks for "While Using the App" location first. After you grant that, iOS may show its own prompt to change to "Always"; this is optional and the app is fully usable without it. If you choose Always, the Home Screen widget and lightning alerts can follow you while the app is closed. The app uses iOS significant-location-change monitoring for this, not continuous tracking. If you decline, you can change the setting in iOS Settings at any time.

Android

Stormline Weather asks for foreground location (approximate or precise, your choice in the system prompt) while the app is in use. Background location is a separate, optional permission, requested only if you turn on "Follow my location" for lightning alerts, and only after an in-app explanation. When it is on, an hourly background job takes one location fix and updates your lightning-alert location. You can turn Follow my location off, or revoke the permission in Android settings, at any time.

Lightning map and alerts

Lightning data comes from NOAA's GOES-19 satellite lightning mapper. We process it in a lightning service we run on Google Cloud (Cloud Run and Firestore).

• Viewing lightning. When the lightning map or lightning row is shown, the app sends the centre of the area being viewed, a radius and a time window to that service. The request does not carry a device identifier. The service notes which one-degree map cells were viewed so that it records strikes for them; those marks expire after 6 hours and are not linked to you.
• Lightning Alerts (optional, off until you turn them on). To send you a push notification when lightning is near, the app registers your device with the service. The registration contains a random device identifier the app generates (not your account), your device's push notification token, your alert radius, and one or more places (coordinates plus the place's name, if it has one). On iPhone and iPad the app registers your home place, or your first saved place if none is marked as home. On Android it registers each of your saved places. The service uses these records only to match nearby lightning and send an alert through Firebase Cloud Messaging (and Apple's push service on iOS).
• Follow my location (optional). If you turn this on, your current position is also registered, reduced on the device and again by the service to a grid of about 5 kilometres. It is re-registered only after you move about 10 kilometres, or about once a week.
• Expiry and removal. A lightning registration expires on its own about 30 days after the app last contacted the service (each time the app registers again). Turning Lightning Alerts off unregisters the device and removes the record. The record belongs to the device, not to an account.

Optional account and sync

You can sign in with Sign in with Apple (iPhone and iPad) or Google (Android). Stormline Weather does not request your email address or name. Our service receives a signed token from Apple or Google, verifies it, and stores only the platform and the opaque user identifier the provider assigns, in a database at Cloudflare (Cloudflare D1).

• Synced settings and saved places. While you are signed in, your units and other preferences, and your saved places (their names, coordinates and which is your home), are stored with your account so your devices can share them.
• Sessions. Each sign-in creates a random session token, stored on your device and, with the platform and its creation and last-use times, on our server. Signing out removes the token from your device and leaves your local settings in place; the server-side session record is removed when you delete your account.
• AI summary usage. For each account we keep a count of AI summaries used (see below), including a per-day count.
• Subscription status. If you subscribe, we store the plan, its status and expiry, and Apple's original transaction identifier against your account (see Subscriptions and purchases).

AI weather summaries

Signed-in users can request short written summaries of today's, tomorrow's or this week's weather. To generate one, our service looks up the forecast for the place you are viewing and sends only the forecast values (for example temperatures, precipitation, wind and times) to Anthropic's API, which runs Anthropic's Claude model. The coordinates, the place name and any account identifier are not included in what is sent to Anthropic. The generated text is cached briefly (about 3 hours) under a location key rounded to about 11 kilometres and may be shown to other people viewing the same area and period; it is not tied to your account. Summaries are optional; the rest of the app does not depend on them. The AI summary feature is currently available in the iOS app.

Subscriptions and purchases

Stormline Weather Pro is an optional auto-renewing subscription (monthly or annual) sold in the iOS app through the Apple App Store. Apple handles payment, and Northbaseworks never receives or stores your payment details. When you subscribe or restore a purchase while signed in, the app sends Apple's original transaction identifier to our service, which asks Apple's App Store Server API whether the subscription is active and stores the result (plan, status, expiry date, the transaction identifier and whether it was a sandbox or production purchase) on your account. The Android app does not currently offer purchases.

What we don't collect

• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers or third-party ad tracking.
• No third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs in the iOS or Android apps. The only Google Firebase component the apps include is Cloud Messaging, for lightning alert notifications.
• No email address or name, from account sign-in or otherwise.
• No access to your contacts, photos or microphone.
• No sale of your data.

Third-party service providers

Stormline Weather relies on these providers to function:

• Apple — WeatherKit (forecasts), Sign in with Apple, the App Store and StoreKit, the App Store Server API, push notifications (APNs), and place-name lookup on iPhone and iPad.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada — radar imagery and Canadian weather alerts.
• US National Weather Service — United States weather alerts.
• NOAA — GOES-19 Geostationary Lightning Mapper data, processed by our own lightning service. No user data is sent to NOAA.
• Anthropic — generates AI weather summaries from forecast values, as described above.
• Cloudflare — hosts our Worker service, database (D1), key-value cache and edge cache, and this website.
• Google — Google Cloud (Cloud Run and Firestore for lightning), Firebase Cloud Messaging for alert notifications on both platforms, and on Android Google Sign-In, Google Maps for the lightning map, and Android's geocoding service.
• Open-Meteo — place-name search on iPhone and iPad.

Our service and these providers may process data in the United States and other countries.

Logs and diagnostics

Our Worker service runs on Cloudflare with request logging enabled, and our lightning service runs on Google Cloud, which keeps its standard request logs. As is normal for web services, these logs can include request details such as the requested URL (which for forecast requests contains the coordinates), the time, and the IP address of the request. We use them to operate, debug and secure the service. Our own code additionally records a small number of operational events, such as radar upstream errors, rate-limit events (which include the requesting IP address), a timezone-lookup fallback (which includes coordinates) and the fact that an account was deleted (without any identifier). To limit abuse we keep short-lived request counters, in memory or in a cache entry that expires within about two hours, keyed by IP address.

The apps also keep a diagnostic log on your device. It is not sent to us. If you choose to share it from the app's debug screen, you decide where it goes. We do not use these logs or any other data to build advertising profiles.

How long data is kept

• Forecast cache. 10 minutes.
• AI summary cache. About 3 hours.
• Radar tiles. Cached for up to about 5 hours.
• Lightning strike data. About 25 hours.
• Lightning "viewed area" marks. 6 hours.
• Lightning device registrations. About 30 days after the last registration, or sooner if you turn Lightning Alerts off.
• Account data (account identifier, synced settings and saved places, sessions, AI summary counters, subscription status). Until you delete your account.
• Backups. After you delete your account, copies in our hosting provider's rolling database backups can persist for up to 30 days and are not used to restore deleted accounts.
• Logs. Retained by Cloudflare and Google under their own settings for those services.

Your choices and deleting your data

• Location. Change or withdraw location permission at any time in iOS Settings or Android settings. The app also works from places you search for and save.
• Notifications and lightning alerts. Turn Lightning Alerts off in the app's Settings, or in your device's notification settings. On Android you can also turn Follow my location off.
• Sign out. Signing out stops syncing and keeps your settings and saved places on your device.
• Delete your account. On iPhone and iPad, go to Settings, then Delete Account in the app. For accounts created with Google (Android), use the page at northbaseworks.com/stormline/delete-account, which does not require the app. Deleting removes your account record (including your synced settings and saved places and subscription fields), all your sign-in sessions and your AI summary usage counters. On iPhone and iPad it also unregisters that device's lightning alerts and turns Lightning Alerts off. The web page cannot reach a device's lightning registration; turn Lightning Alerts off in the app, or let it expire as described above. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription: manage it with Apple.
• Subscriptions. Cancel or manage a subscription in your Apple account settings. Cancelling stops future renewals.
• AI summaries. They are optional; you can use the app without them.
• Your rights. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct or delete personal information we hold about you. Contact us using the information below to make a request.

Children's privacy

Stormline Weather is a general-audience weather app and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13, and the apps do not ask for age or date of birth.

Security

The apps communicate with our services over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Session tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain or in Android's encrypted storage. We rely on the security practices of our infrastructure providers (Cloudflare, Google) in addition to our own controls. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date above will change and, for material changes, we'll make reasonable efforts to notify users through the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy or Stormline Weather's data practices: privacy@northbaseworks.com. For help with the app, see Stormline Weather Support. The Terms of Use describe the conditions for using the app.