Musgo — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Musgo is an Android app that helps you look after your houseplants. This page explains what it collects, what leaves your phone, and how to get rid of all of it — written to actually be read.

Musgo is made by João Samouco. Questions, or anything here that looks wrong: [email protected].

There’s no account

Musgo never asks for an email address, a name, a password, or a phone number, and there’s nothing to sign up for. The first time you open it, the app generates an anonymous identity for itself — a random identifier, made on the device, tied to nothing about you. That identifier is how the server tells your plants apart from everyone else’s.

Because there’s no account behind it, there’s also no way for anyone — including us — to look at a collection and know whose it is.

What stays on your phone

Your plants, their species, their watering and fertilizing schedules, and everything you log about them live on the phone itself. So do the photographs you take. Musgo works with no signal at all, and the copy on your phone is the one every screen reads from.

Reminders are scheduled by your phone, locally. Nothing is pushed from a server, and there’s no notification token to collect in the first place.

What leaves your phone

Photographs, when you ask Musgo to identify a plant. The photo is sent to Anthropic, whose vision model suggests what species it might be. A copy is also kept on Musgo’s own server, in a private folder only your identity can read, so it survives a lost phone.

A backup of your collection. Each time the app starts, it writes a snapshot of your plants, schedules, and history to that same private folder, so a recovery key can bring them back onto a new phone. It contains no photographs of you, no contacts, and nothing beyond what you’ve put into Musgo.

Correction signals. When what you actually do disagrees with the schedule Musgo suggested — you keep watering a plant earlier than it says, for instance — the app sends the species name and the numbers involved. It deliberately sends no identifier alongside them: no owner ID, no plant ID, no device ID, nothing you’ve named anything. A person reads these to improve the guidance for that species for everyone. There’s nothing in them to trace back to you, or to count per person, by design.

A count of identifications. The server keeps a daily tally per identity, to cap what the app can spend on identification overall. It’s a number and a date — nothing more.

That’s the entire list.

What Musgo doesn’t do

• No advertising, and no advertising identifier is ever read.
• No analytics, no tracking, no usage measurement, no third-party SDKs of that kind at all.
• No location tracking. Musgo estimates roughly which hemisphere you’re in from your phone’s time zone setting, so “winter” means the right half of the year for you. That happens on the phone, and the time zone itself is never sent anywhere.
• No crash reporting.
• Nothing is sold, rented, or shared with anyone for their own purposes.

Who else touches it

Two companies process data in order to run Musgo, and only for that:

• Anthropic — receives a photograph when you request an identification, in order to answer it. See https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy.
• Supabase — hosts the database and the private file storage where your backup and photographs are kept. See https://supabase.com/privacy.

Deleting everything

Open Musgo, go to Settings, and choose to delete everything. It removes your plants, history, photographs, and backup from the server, and wipes the copy on the phone. It happens immediately and can’t be undone — there’s no account to recover through, and no recovery key will restore a collection once it’s deleted.

One honest limitation: deleting a single plant while the phone is offline can leave that plant’s photograph in your private folder on the server until you delete everything. Deleting everything always clears it.

If you no longer have the app on a phone, or no longer have your recovery key, deleting your data explains what can be done about it, and what honestly can’t.

Children

Musgo isn’t directed at children, and it collects nothing that would identify anyone, of any age.

Where your data is kept

On your phone, and on servers run by the providers named above. Identification requests are answered in the United States.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the version at this address is always the current one.

This app is in closed testing

Musgo is currently distributed to a small group of invited testers rather than to the public. If you’re one of them and something here doesn’t match what you see the app doing, that’s a bug worth telling us about: [email protected].