Twine
Privacy
Twine is operated by ELAQ Limited.
Last updated: 24 September 2026
THE SHORT VERSION
Twine keeps your answers on your phone. To play apart you sign in with Apple, and we receive only an Apple account identifier and the name you choose — never your email. Playing on one phone, or on two phones in the same room, needs no account at all.
Once your two phones are paired, everything between them — chat, nudges, game turns and video — is end-to-end encrypted, and we cannot read any of it. Before you pair, long-distance games that use a room code are encrypted on the way to our relay but not end-to-end, so pair your phones if you want that guarantee.
YOUR TWINE ACCOUNT
When you sign in with Apple, Twine asks Apple for your name only. We never request your email address, so neither your real address nor an Apple "Hide My Email" relay address reaches us. Apple gives us a stable identifier for your Apple account, which is how we recognise you when you sign in again.
For your account we store: that identifier; the name and emoji you choose; your Twine code; the friends you have added and requests you have sent or received; invites and partner requests waiting to be delivered (for at most seven days); and, if you allow notifications, your device's push token. Friends see your name, emoji and Twine code, and whether you are online.
We use this only to run the account features — adding friends, invites, pairing by Twine code and notifications. It is never sold, shared with advertisers, or used to track you.
Delete your account at any time in Us → Account → Delete account. That removes everything listed above from our server immediately and disconnects Sign in with Apple from Twine.
GAME CENTER
If you sign in to Game Center, Twine reports achievements and leaderboard scores (games played, longest streak) to Apple's Game Center. Game Center is run by Apple under Apple's privacy policy; we do not receive your Game Center friends or contacts.
WHAT STAYS ON YOUR DEVICE
Your names, avatars, anniversary and distance. Your streak, level, milestones and which prompts you have seen. Your time capsules. Your settings. All of it is stored locally and is deleted when you delete the app, or when you tap Erase All Data in Us → Settings.
SAME-ROOM PLAY
When you play on two phones in the same place, the phones talk to each other directly over your local network using Apple's MultipeerConnectivity, with encryption required. Nothing is sent to us, and it works with no internet connection at all.
PAIRING AND END-TO-END ENCRYPTION
Pairing happens once. Your two phones each make a key and exchange the public halves through our relay; from those, each phone works out the same secret key, which never leaves the phone and is never sent to us. Both phones then show four "safety emoji". If they match, nobody was able to sit between your phones during the exchange.
That key is kept in your phone's Keychain, marked so that it is never included in backups or moved to another device. A new phone pairs again.
From then on, chat, nudges, game invites, game turns and video frames are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they leave your phone and opened only on your partner's. Our relay passes the sealed bytes along and cannot open them.
CHAT
Your chat history is stored on your phone, encrypted by iOS whenever the phone is locked. If your partner is offline when you send something, our relay holds the sealed message — which it cannot read — until their phone connects, for at most 30 days, and then discards it. Unpairing deletes the key and the chat history from your phone.
WHAT OUR RELAY CAN SEE
End-to-end encryption hides what you say, not that you are talking. While it is forwarding messages, the relay necessarily handles a random room identifier, when each phone connects, and how large each sealed message is. It does not log this, and it has no way to connect a room to a name, an email or an Apple Account.
LONG-DISTANCE GAMES WITHOUT PAIRING
You can also play across a distance by sharing a six-character room code instead of pairing. Those games travel to our relay over an encrypted (TLS) connection, but the relay forwards the turns themselves unsealed, because there is no shared key to seal them with. They are held at most seven days if your partner is offline. For anything private, pair first.
Same-room mode never touches our servers.
SEEING EACH OTHER WHILE YOU PLAY
Long-distance play has an optional video window. It is off until you tap
"See them", and your camera is never switched on at any other time. A red
dot shows on the tile the whole time your camera is live.
Video is sent as small still frames through the same relay as your turns,
at roughly eight frames a second, and is end-to-end encrypted like
everything else between paired phones. Unlike messages, video frames are
never held by the relay — if your partner is not connected at that instant,
the frame is discarded immediately rather than stored. Nothing is recorded,
by us or by the app.
Twine does not carry audio. If you want to hear each other, stay on your
normal phone or video call; it keeps running while Twine is open.
You can revoke camera access at any time in iOS Settings, and Twine will
keep working without it.
SNAP SWAP
A Snap Swap photo is sealed on your phone and sent through your
end-to-end encrypted channel like a chat message; our relay cannot see it.
It is stored on the two phones only, and your partner's phone keeps it
hidden until they send one back. Unpairing deletes the photos from your
phone.
CALLS AND SHAREPLAY
Twine does not make calls itself. If you add a FaceTime phone number or
email in Us, Twine sends it only to your paired partner's phone, inside
your end-to-end encrypted channel, so they can call you from Twine. We
never receive it, and removing it removes it from their phone the next
time your phones connect.
Calls are made by Apple's FaceTime app. If you play a game inside a
FaceTime call using SharePlay, the game's moves travel between the phones
on the call through Apple's SharePlay service, not through our relay.
FaceTime and SharePlay are covered by Apple's privacy policy.
PURCHASES
Twine+ is sold through Apple. Apple processes the payment and tells the app whether a subscription is active. We never see your payment details, and purchases are not linked to your Twine account.
ADVERTISING
The free tier shows promotions for Twine+ only. These are served by the app itself. There is no third-party advertising SDK in Twine, no advertising identifier is read, and no tracking-permission prompt is shown, because nothing about you is tracked across apps or websites.
ANALYTICS
Twine contains no third-party analytics SDK. To see how many people get through setup, pair with a partner and play their first game, the app counts a handful of anonymous milestones — first open, onboarding finished, an invite sent, pairing completed, first game finished, the paywall shown, a trial started, a purchase made — as a plain tally with no identifier of any kind attached. Nothing identifies you or your phone, these counts are never linked to your account, and they are never shared with anyone outside Twine. We do not collect crash reports with personal content or device fingerprints.
CHILDREN
Twine is for adults aged 18 and over and is not directed at children. The After Dark games are additionally gated behind an explicit 18+ confirmation and are switched off by default.
YOUR RIGHTS
You can delete your account yourself in the app, as above. To ask for a copy of the account data we hold about you, or for help deleting it, email privacy@twineapp.club. Everything else Twine knows lives on your phone: erase it by deleting the app or with Erase All Data.
CHANGES
If this policy changes we will update it in the app and on our website, with the date above.
CONTACT
privacy@twineapp.club
ELAQ Limited