Last updated 10 October 2026.
Your library, your reading positions and your interests are kept on your device. To show you papers, the app sends three things with each catalog request: what you typed into search, the interests you picked, and the papers you asked not to see. They are used to answer that one request and are not stored. They travel inside the request rather than in its web address, which is the part servers write to their logs. If a paper in your library is not already on your phone, the app asks for it by its catalog identifier in the same way. If you add a paper by pasting a link, the identifier you pasted is sent the same way; the paper is added to the shared catalog with nothing that ties it to you. The only other things that leave your phone are usage data, which you can turn off, and the random identifier that tells the app whether you have Nerdi Plus. Both are described below.
Signing in is optional. It lets Nerdi Plus follow you to your other devices. Syncing your library is part of Nerdi Plus: if you have Plus and are signed in, these are stored so they follow you between devices, tied to the account identifier Apple gives us: which papers you saved, your reading position in each, the notes you wrote and the collections you made, which papers you asked not to see again, your selected interests, and whether you finished onboarding. If you sign in without Plus, none of this is sent and it stays on your device. If Plus ends, nothing new is sent, and what was already stored stays in your account until you delete it. If you chose to hide your email address, we only ever see Apple's private relay address.
When the app crashes or hits an unexpected error, a report goes to Sentry: the error, where in the code it happened, your device model and iOS version. Reports are filtered before they are sent to remove anything shaped like an email address or a login token. They never contain your searches or the contents of anything you read.
If usage sharing is on — it is on by default and there is a switch in Settings — the app records these things: opening a paper, a PDF loading, a PDF failing to load, saving a paper, tapping one of the day's picks, returning to something you were reading, and the Nerdi Plus purchase screen being shown and whether it ended in a purchase, a restore or a cancel, with where in the app it was opened. Each record holds the event name, the identifier of the paper it refers to, the time, and a random identifier for your installation of the app and, for the purchase screen, where it was opened. If you are signed in, it also holds your account identifier.
It does not hold your search terms, the contents of any paper, or anything you typed. The database column that would be needed to store them does not exist.
Turning the switch off stops collection immediately and discards anything not yet sent. It does not delete records already sent.
The paper catalog, saved data and usage data are stored on Supabase, hosted in the European Union (Frankfurt). Crash reports are stored by Sentry. Sign-in is handled by Apple. Subscriptions are handled by Apple and RevenueCat (United States) — see below. When you open a paper's PDF or source page, it is fetched from the publisher or from OpenAlex, and their own privacy policies apply to that visit.
Nothing is sold, and there is no advertising or cross-app tracking in Nerdi.
Nerdi Plus is an optional subscription. If you subscribe, you pay Apple, and Nerdi never sees your payment details. Nerdi uses RevenueCat (RevenueCat, Inc., United States) to sell, confirm and restore subscriptions. To know whether you have Plus, the app contacts RevenueCat each time it opens, whether or not you have ever subscribed. RevenueCat receives a random app user id — or, if you have signed in, your Nerdi account id — together with the App Store's record of any purchases, and the technical details any request carries, such as IP address, app version and store country. It does not receive your library, your searches or your email address. Before it adds a paper you pasted, Nerdi's server sends the same identifier to RevenueCat to check that you have Plus. This is needed to sell and restore purchases, so the usage-sharing switch in Settings does not turn it off. Deleting your Nerdi account does not delete RevenueCat's record of your purchases; email korayozcan33@gmail.com to have it removed. RevenueCat's privacy policy: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy
Settings has a Delete account button. It removes your account and everything stored against it, including saved papers, notes, collections, dismissals, interests and usage records tied to that account. It does not cancel Nerdi Plus or remove RevenueCat's record of your purchases — see above. This cannot be undone. Full instructions.
Usage records created while you were signed out carry no account identifier, so there is nothing linking them to you and no way to single them out for deletion. They are tied only to a random per-installation identifier, which is erased when you delete the app.
The website sets no cookies and runs no analytics. To show today's papers, your browser asks the paper catalog on Supabase (Frankfurt) for a page of papers. The request contains nothing about you beyond what every web request carries, such as your IP address, and nothing is stored about it.
Questions about any of this: korayozcan33@gmail.com.