The privacy-first ASO tool that keeps your research on your machine

What "privacy-first" actually means here

Most ASO tools route your keyword queries, competitor lists, and tracked apps through their cloud. That's a sensible engineering choice for a SaaS, but it means your roadmap signals — the keywords you care about, the competitors you're studying — sit on someone else's servers. We took the opposite path. RespectASO runs on your machine. The free edition has no analytics, no telemetry, and no account. The data lives in a local database, and the network calls go to a small, named list of endpoints we can show you.

This isn't a marketing posture. It's how the app is built, and you can verify every claim on this page in either the public source code or the full privacy policy.

The privacy commitments at a glance

Privacy property	RespectASO free edition	RespectASO Pro
Telemetry / usage analytics	None	None
Crash reports auto-sent	None	None
Account / signup required	No account	No account, just a license key entered locally
Where research data lives	Local SQLite database on your machine	Local SQLite database on your machine
LLM provider for AI workflows	N/A — no AI workflows in the free edition	You bring your own LLM API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or OpenRouter)
API keys stored	None required	Locally with restrictive (600) file permissions

The complete list of network calls

RespectASO doesn't make hidden calls. The full outbound traffic is short and explicit:

Endpoint	Why	Sent	When
Apple iTunes Search API	App Store keyword and ranking data	The keyword and country you searched. No credentials.	When you run a search
GitHub public API	Check for new RespectASO releases	A release-info request. No personal data, no device identifier.	App startup
Your chosen LLM provider	Pro AI workflows only	Your prompt and the LLM API key you configured. Goes from your machine straight to the provider.	Only when you trigger a Pro AI workflow
RespectASO license service	Pro license activation and refund detection	The license identifier only. No usage data. Falls back to local verification if unreachable.	Activation and occasional re-checks

That's the whole list. There is no analytics SDK, no event beacon, no “anonymous usage data” pipe back to RespectASO.

Where your data lives

• Mac app: the SQLite database lives at ~/Library/Application Support/RespectASO/ on your machine. Backups, migrations, and deletions are entirely under your control.
• Docker self-host: the database lives in the aso_data Docker volume on the host running the container. See the self-hosted ASO tool page for the full operational picture.
• Pro license key: stored locally as a JWT containing your email and expiry date. Used only to enable Pro features.
• Pro LLM API key: stored locally with restrictive file permissions (600). Used only when you trigger a Pro AI workflow against the provider you configured.

Why this matters for ASO

Your keyword research isn't a search query — it's a leading indicator of your product roadmap. The terms you target reveal what you're building. The competitors you track reveal who you consider real threats. The countries you scan reveal where you plan to grow. SaaS ASO tools have to centralise that data to operate. RespectASO doesn't, because the architecture is local-first and the network calls are scoped tightly. That removes a category of risk: your strategy can't leak from a vendor breach, can't be analysed in aggregate, and can't be sold as a dataset.

Evidence: what proves what

Claim	Where you can verify it
No telemetry, no analytics, no crash auto-reporting	Free-edition source in the public repo — no analytics SDK, no event-tracking calls. Confirmed in the privacy policy.
Local data path on macOS	Privacy policy section 3.1 documents ~/Library/Application Support/RespectASO/ as the storage location.
API keys stored locally with restrictive permissions	Privacy policy and the Pro settings storage logic in the upstream codebase.
Free edition uses the public iTunes Search API only	Free-edition keyword services in the public repo.
Pro AI uses your own LLM API key	Pro AI features documented on the Pro page; BYOK model documented in the privacy policy.
License verification sends only a license identifier	Privacy policy section 3.2.
Free edition is open source under AGPL-3.0	Public repository with full source and license file. See the open-source ASO tool page for context.

Who this fits

• Indie iOS developers who don't want their roadmap signals living on a SaaS vendor's servers.
• EU teams under GDPR that prefer processing on machines they control, with no third-party processor in the keyword research path.
• Privacy-sensitive organisations (healthcare, finance, defence-adjacent) where vendor data flows have to be defensible.
• Agencies that don't want every client's ASO strategy passing through a shared vendor account.
• Engineers who want to read the source and confirm the network calls themselves.

Honest limitations

• Privacy-first does not mean “zero outbound traffic”. The app must talk to Apple's iTunes Search API to do its job, and to GitHub's public API to check for updates. The network-calls table above is the full list and we don't hide it.
• If you choose to use a Pro AI workflow, your prompt does leave your machine — to the LLM provider whose API key you configured, not to RespectASO. That tradeoff is yours to make per request.
• Privacy is not the same as compliance. RespectASO is privacy-first by architecture, but a specific audit (HIPAA, SOC 2 customer mapping, internal data flow review) is your job, not ours.
• Local-first means the data on your machine is your responsibility — backups and access control are on you.

FAQ

Is RespectASO truly anonymous?

The free edition requires no account, no email, and no signup. The only personal data we hold is what you give us during a Pro purchase — we need an email to deliver the license and handle support. The desktop app itself sends nothing to us beyond the license-identifier check at activation.

Does the license verification reveal what I'm researching?

No. The license check transmits a license identifier and that's it — no keywords, no competitor lists, no tracked apps. It's how we detect refunds and revoked licenses. If the license server is unreachable, the app falls back to local verification so your work isn't blocked.

What about the GitHub release check on startup?

The app calls the public GitHub API to see if there's a newer release available. The request is a standard release-info call and does not include any personal data or device identifier.

If I use Pro AI, who sees my prompts?

The LLM provider you configured (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or OpenRouter) sees the prompt because it has to process it. RespectASO does not. The request is constructed locally, signed with your own API key, and sent directly from your machine to the provider's API endpoint. If you use OpenRouter, the request is routed onward to the host of the model you selected, so both OpenRouter and that model's host process the prompt.

Can I run RespectASO completely offline?

The keyword research workflow needs the iTunes Search API to fetch live App Store data, so you need network access for that part. Browsing your own search history, viewing past results, and using the app rank tracker UI continue to work without an internet connection.

How is this different from the other positioning pages?

The open-source ASO tool page covers the AGPL-3.0 licensing and what's in the public repo. The self-hosted ASO tool page covers how to actually run RespectASO on your own hardware. This page focuses on the data and network behaviour: what we collect, what we don't, and what leaves your machine.