What a jet lag app needs to know about you, and where Jetlag Away keeps it
A jet lag plan needs surprisingly little: your flight, your usual sleep hours, and how hard you want to push. Jetlag Away asks for nothing else. No name, no location, no contacts. Your plan is stored under your own account so it can sync, your reminders are scheduled on your phone and never pass through a server, the plan works without a connection, and usage analytics stay off until you say yes.
“Private” and “offline” are easy words to put on an app and hard ones to check. This page sets out exactly what Jetlag Away keeps, where it keeps it, and what that means in practice, including the parts that are not as minimal as a marketing page might like. The privacy policy is the full statement; this is the plain-language version.
What the plan actually needs
To build a schedule, the app needs two small sets of facts:
- The flight. The two airports, the departure and arrival times, and optionally when you fly home.
- You. Your usual bedtime and wake time, the earliest you are willing to wake and the latest you are willing to stay up, and the intensity you choose.
That is all. The app never asks for your location: the airports come from a list built into the app. It does not ask for your name, and it has no access to your contacts, photos, microphone or camera. The check-in asks for a mood, an energy rating and a yes or no; there is no free-text field anywhere, so there is nowhere for a note to end up.
Where your plan lives
Your preferences, trips, plans and check-ins are stored in Cloud Firestore, Google’s Firebase database, under your account. The rules on that database let only your signed-in account read or write them.
That is a deliberate trade. Keeping the plan under an account is what lets it come back on a new phone, and what lets the app rebuild it from your check-ins without losing what came before. An app that kept everything on the phone alone would lose your trip with the phone.
You do not need an email address to start. The free trial runs on a guest account with no email attached. A guest’s plan is stored the same way, but nobody, including you, can sign back into a guest account from another phone, and signing out of one loses it. Add an email and password when you want to keep it, and the same account carries on, with everything you made.
Reminders never leave your phone
Jetlag Away’s reminders are local notifications. The app works out the times from your plan and schedules them with iOS or Android on your own device. There is no push notification service, no device token registered with anyone, and no server of ours that knows when your reminders fire, or that they exist.
That also makes them dependable in the air. A reminder that is already on the phone does not need a signal to arrive. The Reminders screen shows how many are actually scheduled, read from the phone’s own queue rather than worked out from which switches are on.
One caveat, stated in the app as well: on Android, if you have not allowed exact alarms, the system may batch reminders to save battery and deliver one late. The app says so and offers the setting.
What works offline
The plan is generated on your phone, and Firestore keeps a copy on the device, so the plan, the timeline and the reminders all work with no connection at all. A banner says “No connection — your plan is still here, and changes will sync later.” Check-ins and edits made offline are saved on the phone first and sent when the connection comes back.
What needs a connection: starting the free trial, creating an account, signing in, buying, and restoring a purchase.
Analytics: off until you say yes
The first thing the app asks is whether you are willing to share anonymous usage data. Until you answer, analytics and crash reporting are both off. If you say yes, the app records things like which screens are reached and whether a plan got generated: never your trips, your times or your email. One switch in Account, “Share usage data”, turns both off again at any time, and turning it off also deletes crash reports not yet sent. The choice belongs to the phone, so it holds before you have an account and after you sign out.
Two small records worth knowing about
Honesty means mentioning the two things that are kept for reasons other than your plan:
- The free-trial record. The 30 minutes are one per phone, so the app keeps an identifier for the phone, which is not an advertising ID, with the time the trial started. It is not linked to your account, and it is not deleted when you delete your account, because otherwise deleting an account would be the way to get another trial.
- A purchase note for a Single Trip. Payment goes through Apple or Google; the app never sees a card number or billing address. For the 30-day Single Trip, the app keeps a small note under your account: when you bought it, how many days it granted, and which product it was. That note is what keeps your access through the 30 days.
What it does not do
- No advertising, and no advertising SDKs.
- No selling or sharing of personal data with anyone for their own purposes.
- No cross-app or cross-site tracking.
- No location tracking.
- No server-side code of ours processing your data: the project has no Cloud Functions and no file storage.
Deleting everything
Account → Delete Account removes your account, your plans, your check-ins and your purchase notes, and cancels every scheduled reminder, from inside the app and without emailing anyone. Two things it cannot touch: the free-trial record above, and a subscription bought through Apple or Google, which you cancel in the store. The deletion screen says so and links there. Deleting your account has the details.
For the full list of what is collected, who processes it and how long it is kept, read the privacy policy.
Jetlag Away is a scheduling tool and not medical advice. If you have a sleep or circadian disorder, or any diagnosed condition affected by sleep, talk to a healthcare professional first — see the health disclaimer in our terms.
Last reviewed 10 October 2026. Published 10 October 2026.