Cloudbreak Weather — Privacy policy

Last updated August 28, 2026

Stone Mesa Studio, LLC does not collect, sell, or track your data, and Cloudbreak Weather has no ads, no analytics, and no account. Because it is a weather app, it does send the location you are viewing to public weather and fire-data providers to fetch a forecast1 — never your name or any identifier. Two of those requests pass through a small relay we run2 so an access key doesn't ship inside the app. Your saved places and your weather-station list sync between your own Apple devices through your private iCloud, and any personal-station keys through iCloud Keychain3 — Apple's infrastructure, which we cannot read, never a server of ours.4 Each is detailed below, with how to limit or switch it off.

The promise, in plain terms No data collection, no advertising, no analytics, no third-party tracking, no account, and no selling or sharing of your information — ever. Two things leave your device: the location you ask about, sent to the public providers below to answer your request, and — only if you are signed in to iCloud — your own saved places and weather stations, which go into your private iCloud. Nothing goes to us. We store none of it and can read none of it.

Location

Cloudbreak uses your location to show weather for where you are. On Apple Watch that is the watch's own GPS, requested under its own permission, falling back to whichever place your iPhone is showing. To return a forecast, your coordinates are sent to the weather and fire-data providers listed below. This happens in real time to fulfill your request — your location is not stored by us, is not tied to your name or any account, and is never used to build a profile of you. Turn it off: deny location permission and enter locations manually instead; the app works either way.

Weather, map & fire-data providers

To produce forecasts, maps, conditions, and fire-weather information, Cloudbreak requests data from third-party sources, sending only the location or map area you are viewing:

Open-Meteo — forecast, cloud-cover, air-quality, and historical climate data
National Weather Service / NOAA — forecasts, current conditions, and alerts
Iowa State University (Iowa Environmental Mesonet) — U.S. NEXRAD radar imagery
Environment & Climate Change Canada (MSC GeoMet) — radar mosaic for Canada and the rest of North America
NASA GIBS / Earthdata — satellite imagery
NASA FIRMS — active-fire detections
NOAA Hazard Mapping System — smoke-plume data
NIFC (National Interagency Fire Center) — wildfire-incident information for the United States
CWFIS (Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Wildland Fire Information System) — wildfire-incident and fire-danger information for Canada
MTBS (USGS / USFS Monitoring Trends in Burn Severity) — historical wildfire burn scars
NOAA nowCOAST — lightning strike-density imagery
AirNow / EPA — air-quality data
Apple Maps — place search and place names, when you search for or open a location

The smoke and wildfire-incident layers are delivered through Esri ArcGIS hosting on behalf of NOAA and NIFC. Each provider handles requests under its own privacy policy. We share nothing with any of them beyond the location coordinates or map area needed to answer your request — never your name, an account, or a device identifier. Turn it off: the fire, smoke, satellite, lightning, and radar layers are optional map layers you can leave off.

How requests are routed

Most of the sources above are contacted directly from your device. Two of them — AirNow (air quality) and NASA FIRMS (active fire) — require an access key, so those requests pass through a small relay we run on Cloudflare (api.stonemesastudio.com).2 The relay adds the key, so it never ships inside the app, and forwards only your coordinates or the map area. It does not log your location, does not tie requests to you, and stores none of your data.

What syncs through your iCloud

From version 1.3. The version on the App Store today is 1.2, which keeps your places, stations and settings on the device you set them on — nothing in this section happens there. What follows describes 1.3 onward.

While your device is signed in to iCloud, Cloudbreak keeps your saved places and your weather-station list matched across your own iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This runs on Apple's iCloud, not on anything of ours — there is still no Cloudbreak account and no Cloudbreak server, and none of it reaches Stone Mesa Studio.4

Saved places — the name and coordinates of each place you saved — go into the app's private database inside your own iCloud account, which only you can read.
Weather-station details — the provider, the label you gave it, the device id, its coordinates, and whether it is switched on — travel through Apple's iCloud key-value storage. No key or password is ever included in this.
Station keys and passwords travel separately through iCloud Keychain, end-to-end encrypted — see the next section.

Two consequences worth knowing. Deleting a place or a station deletes it on every device signed in to the same account, straight away. And the Apple Watch is deliberately left out of all of it — it never receives your station or its keys. It is not a passive mirror either: the watch uses its own GPS for where you are, and falls back to the place your iPhone is showing. Turn it off: switch Cloudbreak off under iCloud in your device settings, or sign out of iCloud; the app keeps working and simply holds its own separate list on that device. Settings ▸ Sync inside the app says which of the two you are looking at.

Personal weather stations

If you connect your own weather station, the API key or credentials you enter are stored in your device's Keychain — the system's encrypted, protected credential store — and are used only to contact the provider you chose: Ambient Weather, Tempest, Davis, Netatmo, or PWSWeather. They are never sent to us. On the device itself they are readable only by Cloudbreak and its own widgets.

Those entries are marked as syncable, so they travel to your other Apple devices through iCloud Keychain — end-to-end encrypted, which means Apple cannot read them either, and they are not included in an unencrypted backup. Add a station on your iPhone and its keys reach your iPad and Mac on their own. Removing a station deletes its keys from the Keychain on every one of those devices at the same moment. Turn it off: this is optional — don't add a station, or remove one at any time; and if Passwords and Keychain is switched off in your iCloud settings, the keys stay on the one device you entered them on.

Notifications

If you opt in to weather or fire-weather alerts, Cloudbreak schedules them as local notifications on your device, computed on-device from forecast data. There is no push server, and we receive nothing. Turn it off: disable alerts in the app, or Cloudbreak's notifications in your device settings.

Preferences

Your units and app settings stay on the device you set them on; your saved places and weather stations sync through your own iCloud, as described above. Your iPhone also hands the Cloudbreak watch app your primary location and your unit choices over Apple's direct device-to-device link — that never passes through us. Cloudbreak has no accounts, no advertising, no analytics, and no third-party tracking.

No third parties

Beyond the public data providers above (which receive only a location), Cloudbreak contains no advertising, no analytics, no crash-reporting, and no third-party tracking software, and no third-party code libraries that send your data anywhere.

Notes

Location sent to providers. A weather app has to send somewhere to get a forecast. Cloudbreak sends only the coordinates or map area you are viewing to the public providers listed above, in real time, to answer your request — it is not stored and not tied to you. You can avoid GPS entirely by entering locations by name, and leave optional map layers off. ↩
The relay we run. AirNow and NASA FIRMS require an access key, so those two requests go through a small Cloudflare relay at api.stonemesastudio.com. It adds the key (so it isn't embedded in the public app), forwards only your coordinates or map area, logs nothing, ties nothing to you, and stores no data. ↩
Apple frameworks & your own keys. Location is Apple's CoreLocation and place search is Apple Maps — both run under system permissions you control. Any personal weather-station key you add is stored in your device's Keychain (the system's encrypted credential store), readable on that device only by Cloudbreak and its own widgets, carried to your other devices by end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Keychain, and sent only to that provider — never to us. ↩
iCloud sync. Saved places go into the app's private database inside your own iCloud account; the weather-station list (details only, never a key) goes through Apple's iCloud key-value storage; station keys go through iCloud Keychain. All three are Apple services operating on your account, under Apple's privacy policy. Stone Mesa Studio runs no server for any of it, receives none of it, and cannot read any of it. Signed out of iCloud, none of it leaves the device at all. ↩

Children's privacy

Cloudbreak is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect any personal information from anyone.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top of this page and post the revised version here.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email us.