Privacy Policy — Hello Nanchang

Effective 30 August 2026

The short version

The app collects nothing. There is no account, no login, no analytics, no advertising SDK and no tracking of any kind. What you do in the app stays on your device and none of it reaches us. Two things can leave your device, and neither of them comes to us: text you ask iOS to translate, which goes to Apple's own system translation feature (see Camera and translation below), and anything you deliberately send with a share button.

What the app stores on your device

• Downloaded guides. When the app has a connection it downloads our published guides and saves them on your device so they keep working offline. This is a one-way read: we send content to you, the app sends no content about you back.
• Cached images. Guide photos are cached in the app's own storage folder so they display without a connection. You can delete them at any time with About → Storage → Clear image cache.
• Your bookmarks and small preferences. Saved guides, the last guide you were reading, whether you have seen the welcome screens, the timestamp and version number of the last content refresh, whether the optional Adjust map pins switch is turned on, and the map coordinates the app has looked up for the places it lists — including any you corrected yourself — are stored in the app's local settings. They never leave your device on their own.

The only way any of that leaves your device is if you send it yourself. A guide's share button hands the guide's web address to the iOS share sheet, and — if you turn on Adjust map pins in About — the Map screen gains a share button that exports the list of place coordinates the same way. Both hand the content to whichever app you pick. Neither contains anything about you or your location, and neither sends anything to us.

Camera and translation

The app can use your camera to read Chinese menus, signs and prices and show you an English translation. Three separate things happen, and they are not handled the same way:

• The camera view. Camera frames are never recorded, never saved and never uploaded — not to us and not to anyone else. They are used only to draw the live viewfinder on your screen.
• Recognising the text. Turning the characters in the viewfinder into text runs on your device, using Apple's built-in Live Text recognition. Nothing leaves your device for this step.
• Translating the text. When you tap a recognised phrase — or type or paste Chinese text yourself — the app hands that text to Apple's system translation feature built into iOS, which shows you the translation. Depending on your device and which languages you have downloaded, Apple may process that text on Apple's servers; iOS says so in its own translation panel. That step is between you and Apple, under Apple's privacy policy: the app does not collect, store or send that text to us, and we never see what you translate.

Opening the Translate tool does not by itself ask for anything. The tool first explains what the camera would be used for, and iOS only asks for camera permission if you tap Allow camera access. The tool works without that permission — you can type or paste Chinese text instead. You can change the permission at any time in iOS Settings → Hello Nanchang → Camera.

Location

The map screen can sort nearby attractions by distance. If you allow it, the app reads your approximate location while you are using the app (When In Use). Your location is used on the device to order a list and is never stored, never logged and never transmitted to us or to any third party. Declining location permission only means the map list is not distance-sorted; everything else works normally. You can change the permission at any time in iOS Settings → Hello Nanchang → Location.

What the app sends over the network

• Requests to our content service (Supabase, and occasionally our own hellonanchang.com website for a small number of images) to download published guides and images. These requests contain no account, no device identifier and no personal data. Like any internet service, our provider processes the connection's IP address to deliver the response.
• A small number of article images are not hosted by us and load directly from whichever site does host them. At the time of writing that is two Chinese news sites, x0.ifengimg.com and imagepphcloud.thepaper.cn; we are moving those images to our own storage, and a guide could always link to an image somewhere else. Loading one of these images sends a plain, anonymous request for that image's address to the site that hosts it — no account, no device identifier, nothing added by us — the same way any web browser loading a public image would.
• Requests to Apple's map service asking where the places we write about actually are, so the Map screen can put its pins in the right spots. These requests contain a place name, such as "滕王阁 南昌"; they say nothing about you and do not include your location. The answers are stored on your device so each place only has to be looked up once.
• Beyond the requests described above, there is no analytics service, no crash-reporting SDK, no advertising network and no social-media SDK in the app, and none of these requests carry any tracking.
• Separately from the app's own requests, iOS may send text you asked it to translate to Apple, as described under Camera and translation. That connection is made by iOS itself, not by the app, and its content never passes through us.

Links that leave the app

Some screens open pages outside the app in Safari: our own website, hotel, train and activity booking partners (Booking.com, Trip.com, Klook), eSIM provider Airalo, Apple Maps, and the Wikimedia Commons file pages that carry our photo credits. Guides can also link out to other sites not listed here — that list is open-ended, because the links are written into the guides themselves. Separately, tapping a number on the emergency-numbers screen hands that number to the iOS phone app; no call is placed until you confirm it.

Some, but not all, of those links are affiliate links, and the two kinds behave differently:

• Klook activity links and the Airalo eSIM link go through our affiliate network, Travelpayouts, at the address tp.media, which redirects you straight on to the partner. The link carries a non-personal label saying which part of the app the link sat in, and which guide you were reading if it sat in a guide — for example ios_travelinfo_esim_airalo for the eSIM link, or ios_destinations_jingdezhen_activity for an activity link inside our Jingdezhen guide. That label lets the partner credit us for the referral. It says nothing about you.
• Booking.com and Trip.com links are plain links, with no tracking of ours. Most are ordinary search or listing pages; the Trip.com train link goes to that partner's train landing page. We applied to their affiliate programmes and were not accepted, so these links carry no label and no referral tracking of ours at all.

Once you follow any of these links you are on that company's site — Travelpayouts included — and its own privacy policy applies.

Children

The app is a general-audience travel guide. It is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, including children.

Your choices

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing to request, correct or delete on our side. Deleting the app removes every guide, image and preference it stored on your device.

Changes and contact

If the app ever starts collecting data, this policy will be updated before that version ships.

Questions: info@hellonanchang.com