No ads. No tracking. No third-party SDKs.

The promise list

• No banner ads. No interstitials. No video ads to "unlock" anything.
• No analytics SDKs. No Google Analytics, no Mixpanel, no Amplitude, no Heap, no Plausible, no Fathom.
• No crash reporters. No Sentry, no Crashlytics, no Bugsnag, no Rollbar. Apple's built-in opt-in crash reporting is the only path, and I see aggregated patterns, not individual users.
• No ad networks or attribution. No AppsFlyer, no Adjust, no Branch, no Singular, no Kochava, no Tenjin.
• No advertising IDs. Tideward never asks for IDFA permission because Tideward never has any use for it.
• No third-party fonts, no third-party JS frameworks in the app. Pure SwiftUI for UI, SwiftData for storage, CloudKit for sync.
• No telemetry of any kind. No "anonymous usage data" claim because there is no usage data of any shape.
• No cross-site tracking. Google Analytics 4 was removed on May 1, 2026; the site now uses cookieless Cloudflare Web Analytics, so it still sets zero cookies and needs no consent banner.
• No accounts. CloudKit identifies your save by Apple ID. No login, no password, no email signup, no "sign in with Apple" prompt to bypass.
• No servers, and so no live presence. No online status, no player counter, no friends list of mine, nothing that has to be up for you to play. There is no service here to go down or to be breached.
• Not built to keep taking your money. Every purchase is direct and one-time, a plain price on a thing you can see whole, and nothing consumable, renewing, or random is sold at all. This is the one promise everything else here is downstream of.
• No ads, no subscription, no loot boxes, no premium currency. Everything you bought keeps working.
• What you can buy, in full. The $9.99 unlock, and then cosmetics: a few profile icons and a card background. That is the whole shop. Every one of them is a one-time, permanent purchase, so nothing in this game can be bought twice.

Why there are cosmetics, and why there is nothing else

A lot of games on this store make their money by finding the few players who will spend hundreds, then building everything around keeping those players spending. The mechanics that do it are well understood: a currency you buy in the wrong denominations, a random box, a thing that expires, a small advantage sold to someone who is losing. I am not interested in running that, and I do not think it is good for anyone.

So the line is drawn where it is easy to check: you can buy things that change how your character looks, and you can never buy anything that changes how your character performs. If a cosmetic ever carried a bonus, however small, it would have stopped being a cosmetic.

What makes that more than a sentence is what is structurally absent. There is no currency in Tideward, so there is nothing to buy in bundles that leave you holding a remainder. Nothing is random, so there is nothing to roll for and nothing to chase. Nothing is consumable, so nothing can be sold to you a second time. In App Store terms every product in the game is a non-consumable, and there are no subscriptions at all. That is not a policy I am asking you to trust, it is the shape of the thing.

Said plainly: three things Tideward will not do

The privacy list above is a list of things I chose. These three are limits, and they are worth stating in the same breath, because a promise page that only lists wins is an advertisement.

• No mods. App Store apps cannot load third-party code. This is not a feature being held back for later, it is a rule of the platform, and I will never imply otherwise. Everything in the game is in the game. What I do instead is build in the things people usually mod a game to get: the Harbormaster's Forecast rather than a third-party combat simulator, visible drop rates and item sources rather than a wiki in another tab, App Intents and Shortcuts for automation, and a full export of your own data.
• Apple only. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch, one purchase, no account. There is no Windows, Android, Steam, or web build and none is planned. If you play on Windows, Melvor Idle 2 is the one to watch. Pure SwiftUI is why the six Apple platforms are good rather than ported, and it is also exactly why there is no seventh.
• No live presence. Nothing in Tideward reports that you are online, because nothing of mine is online. The social layer is Game Center, which is Apple's and opt-in. If you want a game with a friends list, a chat, and a population count, this is not that game, and it never becomes that game by accident.

The architectural proof

The simplest test: open the App Privacy Nutrition Label on Tideward's App Store listing. It will read "Data Not Collected." That label is filed under Apple's App Privacy framework and is contractually enforceable, false claims trigger app removal. Most premium iOS games don't earn that label because they bundle at least one analytics SDK. Tideward earns it because the binary literally has no SDK to disclose.

The deeper test: the project's Swift Package dependencies. There aren't any beyond Apple's. No Package.swift dependencies, no third-party CocoaPods, no Swift Package Manager external imports. The full source tree could be inspected by Apple's reviewers in minutes, there's nothing to find.

Why this stance is structural, not just preference

Most privacy-positive games still ship analytics SDKs. The reasoning is reasonable: "we need to know what features players use." The cost is also reasonable: the SDK adds 50-200 KB to the binary, opens at least one network connection on app launch, sends anonymized event data to a third-party server, and creates a paper trail that someone (you, the developer; the SDK vendor; their downstream partners) is responsible for.

Tideward's decision was different: I don't need to know what features players use. The Discord community gives me direct, qualitative, voluntary feedback that's 10× more useful than a Mixpanel funnel chart. The TestFlight invitation cohort tells me retention. The App Store Connect crash dashboard tells me stability. None of those involve a third-party SDK in the binary.

The trade-off is real: I have less data than a F2P competitor would. The trade-off is also worth it: the binary is smaller, the architecture is simpler, the privacy claim is honest, and no third-party vendor has any tendril into your data. For an indie game played by people who care about this, that's the whole point.

The website honors the same stance

On May 1, 2026, Google Analytics 4 came off the marketing site. This page (and every other page on tideward.app and manugames.com) has:

• Third-party JavaScript is limited to three things: Cloudflare Web Analytics (cookieless and aggregate), the YouTube trailer embed on the homepage and the press page, and Beehiiv's signup script on /install only. The newsletter forms on the homepage and /blog load no script at all, they're plain HTML forms that POST to Beehiiv when you submit. The trailer uses the privacy-friendly youtube-nocookie.com host, and the analytics sets no cookies and builds no per-visitor profile.
• Zero cookies set by Tideward. The browser may set its own cookies for session management; nothing comes from us.
• No consent banner. There's nothing to consent to.
• No fingerprinting. No identifying headers. The CDN that fronts the site sees IP addresses for routing, and Cloudflare Web Analytics counts aggregate page views and referrers, but neither hands Tideward anything that identifies an individual visitor.

What I do use: Google Search Console (free, cookieless), Bing Webmaster Tools (same), and the build/deploy logs. That's the full analytics stack. It's thinner than what most marketing sites use; it's also enough.

What about iOS's own data?

Apple's framework-level data is governed by Apple's policies, not mine. CloudKit syncs your save through Apple's servers, those bytes are end-to-end encrypted by Apple and Apple cannot read them. iCloud backup, if you have it on, includes Tideward data, encrypted by Apple. App Store Connect aggregated stats (install count, crash rate, device breakdown) are visible to me but never identifiable per-user.

For the full surface, see the privacy policy. The short version: I get nothing about you that Apple doesn't mediate, and Apple's mediation is anonymous-by-default.

Frequently asked about Tideward's privacy stance

Is "no ads, no tracking" really architectural, or is it just marketing?

Architectural. Tideward ships with zero third-party SDKs in the binary, no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising network, no attribution library, no Firebase. You can verify this yourself: Apple's App Privacy Nutrition Label on the App Store listing literally says "Data Not Collected." That label is contractually binding under Apple's App Store Review Guidelines.

How does Tideward handle crash reporting if there's no third-party SDK?

Apple's built-in crash reporting. If you opt in via iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements → Share with App Developers, anonymized crash logs go to me through App Store Connect. I see aggregated patterns, not individual user data. If you don't opt in, I see nothing. The choice is yours, mediated entirely by Apple.

Where does my save file actually live?

Locally on your device, plus your private CloudKit container. CloudKit uses the same end-to-end encryption Apple provides for the rest of iCloud. I cannot read your save. Nobody at Manu Games can. There is no Tideward server holding your character data, no service to breach, no database to leak, no backup of mine to lose.

Are there ads, ever?

No, and there never will be. Not banner ads, not interstitials, not "watch a video to double your reward," not affiliate links inside the game, not anything. This is structural to the business model: Tideward will be a one-time premium purchase, not an ad-supported F2P game. The math only works without ads.

What about microtransactions?

There are cosmetic ones, and I would rather say so than let you find them. After the single one-time $9.99 unlock you can buy a handful of profile icons and a card background, each a one-time purchase, none of which touches anything you play. What does not exist: premium currency, gacha, loot boxes, a battle pass, energy timers, anything consumable, and anything designed to make you pay again. The promise is not "no microtransactions," which would be false. It is that every purchase is direct and one-time: a cosmetic you can see whole, priced plainly, yours for good. This game is not built to keep taking your money.

Why did you remove Google Analytics from the website too?

On May 1, 2026, GA4 (Google Analytics) came off both sites. GA4 sets cookies, needs a consent banner, and feeds your behavior into Google's ad graph, none of which fit a privacy-first game. In its place the sites use Cloudflare Web Analytics: cookieless, no consent banner, no cross-site tracking, no ad network. It counts page views and referrers in aggregate at the edge, and never sets anything on your device or builds a profile of you. With Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools alongside it, that is all the traffic insight I need, and none of it follows you around the web.

Are crawlers and search bots tracked?

They're served the same anonymous bytes everyone else gets. The site's robots.txt allows major search engines (Googlebot, Bingbot) and AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity) to crawl freely. None of them get any user-tied data because there is no user-tied data to give them.

Do you have an analytics dashboard internally?

For the app: only what App Store Connect shows me, aggregated install counts, crash rates, device breakdowns. No per-user data, no in-game telemetry. For the website: Cloudflare Web Analytics (cookieless and aggregate), Google Search Console, and Bing Webmaster Tools. All aggregate, none of it tied to you.