Maatje learns from the things around you: photos of signs and letters, text you share into it, and spoken conversations with a language coach. That means it handles a camera, a microphone, and the words you are trying to learn. This page is specific about what leaves your phone, who processes it, and how to get rid of it. Maatje has no advertising, no advertising identifier, and nothing about you is ever sold.
Maatje is made and operated by an independent developer in the Netherlands (KvK 98505963). For any privacy question, including a request to see or delete your data, write to sam@getmaatje.app.
Almost everything. Maatje is local-first by design.
None of this is uploaded for storage. Your lesson transcripts in particular never leave your phone to be kept anywhere: Maatje has no copy of them. Deleting the app deletes all of it.
To do its work Maatje sends some content to Google's AI services. Google is not given your name, your email, or your account identifier: it receives only the content of the request, and does not keep it to train its models.
The coach sometimes shows a picture: a drawing of a word it is teaching, or a photo to talk about. To get one, the app sends Maatje's own server a single word (for example "de fiets") and its meaning; nothing you said is sent. Each picture is made once, with Google's image models, and then shared by every learner, so a picture contains nothing about you. The server keeps a count of how many new pictures your anonymous account caused to be made today, to limit what one account can spend, and nothing else.
Maatje asks for your agreement in the app before any of this happens for the first time, and you can use the whole free part of the app - capturing, learning words, reviewing - without ever agreeing.
Maatje can also serve a speaking lesson through OpenAI's realtime voice service. It is not used today. If that changes, this page and the app will say so before it does.
Maatje's own server (Google Cloud and Firebase) holds only your anonymous account, whether you have a subscription, how much lesson time you have used, and the daily picture count above. It is stored in the European Union.
Example sentences, translations, lesson recaps, pictures and everything the coach says are generated by AI. They are usually right and sometimes wrong. Maatje marks them as AI-generated in the app. Do not rely on them for anything that matters legally or medically.
Maatje signs your device in anonymously so that purchases and your lesson time can be attached to something. There is no name, no email, and no password. If you subscribe, the app store tells us that an anonymous identifier has an active subscription. We never see your payment details.
Anonymous usage events - that a capture was saved, that a review was finished, that a lesson started or failed - and crash reports. These say which parts of the app are used and which are broken. They never contain your photos, your words, your voice, or your transcripts.
In the app: Settings → Delete my data. This erases your captures, your words, your progress and your lessons, transcripts included, from the phone, and deletes your anonymous account, lesson time and picture count from our server. It cannot be undone, and a deleted subscription balance cannot be restored.
Deleting the app alone removes everything stored on the phone but leaves the anonymous account, which you can remove by writing to the address above.
Maatje is not intended for children under 16.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what leaves your phone, the app will say so before the change takes effect.