Privacy policy
Sessions for iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch ยท last updated 4 November 2026
Your songs
Songs, setlists, favourites and covers are saved as plain files in your own iCloud Drive, in a Sessions folder, so they appear on your other devices. If iCloud is off, they stay on the device. We can't see them. You can open, copy or delete them in the Files app at any time.
What Sessions looks up for you
To fill in a song's details, Sessions sends the song's title and artist, and nothing about you, to public services that answer and forget:
| Service | What it's sent | What for |
|---|---|---|
| Apple (iTunes Search) | Song title and artist | Album, year, length, genre and cover |
| Deezer | Song title and artist, an artist's name, or what you type to find a new song | Tempo, artist photos, and putting the most popular songs first in search |
| Wikipedia and MusicBrainz | Song title and artist | A song's story and an artist's page |
| Apple Music | Only with your permission | Playing along, and finding songs from your playlists and recently played. This happens between your device and Apple. |
Song research
The first time anyone opens Story and theory for a song, Sessions asks its own server to research it. The app sends only the song's title and artist: no account, no device identifier, nothing about you or your library.
- The server runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Sydney, Australia.
- It asks Anthropic's Claude to research the song from public web pages. Anthropic processes the song's title and artist to do this, under Anthropic's privacy policy and commercial terms.
- The result is kept and shared with everyone who opens the same song, so each song is researched once. It isn't linked to who asked.
- Like any server, it sees the internet address (IP address) a request comes from. It never stores the address: it keeps only a scrambled (hashed) form of it, mixed with a secret that changes every hour, to limit how many songs one connection can research per hour, and deletes those counters after about two hours. Server logs are kept for 14 days and don't record addresses.
Once a song's research has arrived, it's kept on your device and not asked for again.
Microphone, camera and photos
- Tuner: listens to your guitar on the device. Nothing is recorded or kept.
- What's playing?: when you tap it, it listens for up to 15 seconds and Apple's Shazam service names the song. Nothing is kept.
- Say it: while you speak a song's name, your words are turned into text on the device where it can, otherwise by Apple. Nothing is kept.
- Photos and the camera: a photo of a chart is read on the device to find its chords, and a cover photo is saved with your songs. Photos are never uploaded by us.
The web, YouTube and other apps
When you search the web, open a page or play a YouTube video inside Sessions, you're browsing those sites as you would in Safari, and their own privacy policies apply (for example DuckDuckGo and Google for YouTube). Sessions never fetches a page or a chart unless you ask it to. Links to Spotify, Apple Music, Wikipedia and MusicBrainz open in their own app or your browser.
Playing as a band
Band mode connects devices in the same room directly, without the internet or any server. The song, key and place are shared with the other players, along with your device's name so they can see who's leading. Nothing leaves the room.
Apple Watch
Your songs are copied from your iPhone to your paired watch, device to device.
Children
Sessions collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes
If Sessions ever starts to collect anything more, this page and the App Store privacy details will say so first, and the date above will change.
Questions
Write to hello@guitarsessions.app.