Effective August 31, 2026 · Version 2026-08-31.2 · Sykla is made by Hibiscus Consulting, LLC
Amended August 31, 2026: if Sykla thinks you have come off — on a ride or on a run — it can now ask “did you fall?” and let you answer out loud; see Answering “did you fall?” out loud below. Nothing new leaves your phone: the recognition runs on your device and the audio is never recorded. We are telling you anyway, because the permission prompt you originally agreed to said the microphone was only ever for group ride voice, and that had stopped being true.
Amended August 31, 2026: Sykla can now read a small number of fitness metrics from a Garmin watch you connect — see Connected watches below. The summary line that follows previously said recovery data never leaves your phone without qualification, which was no longer true for a rider who connects one. It is corrected rather than quietly reworded, for the same reason the rewrite below was.
This policy was rewritten on July 30, 2026, because the previous version was out of date. It said Sykla had no accounts and no cloud sync. Accounts, effort upload, leaderboards and shared routes have since shipped, and the old wording no longer described what the app does. It is corrected below rather than quietly amended, because a privacy policy that overstates your privacy is worse than none at all.
The short version: you have an account, your efforts are stored on our servers, and you choose what is public. An effort marked private is never published anywhere. Anything you never upload, and everything Sykla reads from Apple Health — sleep, heart-rate variability, resting heart rate — genuinely never leaves your phone. If you connect a Garmin watch, it sends two fitness numbers to your account; that is described below.
If you connect a Garmin watch to Sykla, the Sykla app on that watch sends two measured fitness numbers to your account: your VO₂ max (Garmin keeps a separate figure for running and for cycling, and both are sent) and your average resting heart rate. They are stored against your account so your training zones and fitness estimates can use them, and so they survive you changing phones.
What is not sent, and cannot be: sleep and heart-rate variability. Garmin does not make either available to a third-party watch app, so Sykla never sees them from your watch. If Sykla shows you HRV or sleep, it read them from Apple Health on your phone, and those readings still never leave it.
This happens only while a Garmin is connected. Disconnect it and the sending stops; delete your account and the stored values go with it, like everything else.
You can export your efforts as GPX at any time from the app, and you can ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it by writing to the address below. Deleting an account removes your efforts, your photos and your account record.
Beacons, hazard alerts and live sharing exist to get help to you, and they are never behind a paywall. They are also best-effort: they depend on your phone, its battery, and a signal. They are not a substitute for calling emergency services.
Apple provides us basic App Store and TestFlight information (install status, crash reports as configured by your own device settings). That data is governed by Apple's terms.
When this policy changes materially, the version above changes and the app asks you to read it again. Questions, or a deletion request: blake@thepayhive.com.