Musgo

Musgo — Deleting your data

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Musgo doesn’t have accounts in the ordinary sense. It never asks for an email address, a name, or a password, and there’s nothing to sign up for. What it does create, the first time you open it, is an anonymous identity for your phone — a random identifier tied to nothing about you — and your plants hang off that identity.

This page is Musgo’s account and data deletion route. It explains how to delete that identity and everything attached to it, what gets removed, and what your options are if you no longer have the app.

Musgo is made by João Samouco. If anything here doesn’t match what you see the app doing: [email protected].

Deleting everything, from inside the app

Open Musgo and go to Settings. Under Leaving Musgo, choose Delete everything, then confirm with Yes, delete everything.

It happens immediately and can’t be undone. Your recovery key stops working, because there’s nothing left for it to bring back.

What gets removed

  • Your plants — their species, their watering and fertilizing schedules, and everything you’ve logged about them — from the phone and from the server.
  • Your photographs — the copies on the phone, and the copies in the private folder on the server.
  • The backup Musgo writes so a recovery key can reach a new phone.
  • Your recovery key, or rather the scrambled copy of it the server holds.
  • The count of identifications kept against your identity.
  • The anonymous identity itself, deleted last, since everything else hangs off it.

After that, nothing on the server belongs to you, because there’s no longer a you for it to belong to.

What isn’t removed, and why

Correction signals. When what you actually do disagrees with the schedule Musgo suggested, the app sends the species name and the numbers involved so a person can improve the guidance for that species for everyone. These carry no identifier of any kind — no owner ID, no plant ID, no device ID, nothing you’ve named. There’s nothing in them to look you up by, which is both why they can’t be deleted on request and why they can’t be traced back to you in the first place.

The day’s total. The server counts how many identifications everyone together requested on a given date, so Musgo’s spending has a ceiling. It’s a number and a date, with no identity attached.

If you’ve uninstalled Musgo

Reinstall it, and on the empty screen choose I have used Musgo before. Enter your recovery key to get your plants back, then delete everything from Settings as described above.

This only works if you saved the key. Musgo keeps a scrambled copy of it and nothing else, so it’s the one thing that proves a collection is yours.

If you no longer have your recovery key

Then this is a genuine dead end, and it’s worth saying plainly rather than pointing you at a form that can’t actually do anything.

Nobody at Musgo can find your collection. There’s no email address on it, no name, no phone number — only an anonymous identifier that lived on a phone you no longer have, matched against a scrambled key you no longer have either. Asked to delete one particular person’s data, Musgo has no way to tell which rows are theirs, and neither does anyone else.

What’s left is a backup and some photographs sitting in a private folder that no account can open — not a new identity of yours, not ours by accident, just the one that created them, which is gone along with your phone. The database refuses everyone else, and that’s enforced by the database itself, not merely promised by the app.

You’re still welcome to write in: [email protected]. We’ll do whatever can actually be done, and tell you honestly if the answer is that there’s nothing left to identify.

Deleting one plant

Open the plant and choose Delete. It removes the plant, everything logged about it, and its photograph.

One limitation: deleting a single plant while the phone has no signal can leave that plant’s photograph in your private folder on the server until you delete everything. Deleting everything always clears it.

Questions

[email protected]. The privacy policy has the fuller account of what Musgo collects and what leaves your phone.