Analytics Settings & Privacy
Homecrate’s listening analytics exist to make your own library smarter — better shuffle, better playlists, a dashboard worth looking at. They are not a data product. Everything is written to a local database inside Homecrate’s own storage on your device, all analysis runs on-device, and none of it is sent to advertisers, data brokers, or any third party. There is no account, so there is nothing to sync.
This page covers the three analytics tiers, what each one actually does, and — honestly — the handful of places where Homecrate does talk to the network.
Finding the Controls
Settings → Analytics & Privacy.
[SCREENSHOT: Settings "Analytics & Privacy" section — two buttons and three tier rows]
Two buttons sit at the top:
- View On-device Analytics — opens the Listening Analytics Dashboard
- Edit Your Music Algo — opens the Algorithm Tuner
Below them are the three tiers.
Tier 1 — Essential Analytics
Marked Always On.
Play counts, skip events, listening history — always on, never leaves your device.
This is the base layer: which track played, when it started and ended, how much of it you heard, whether you skipped it and where, and what you were playing from (album, playlist, artist, library, or a single track). It is what the dashboard, the achievements, and the recommendation scoring are built on.
There is no toggle because the app’s shuffle, up-next and stats would have nothing to work with. If you want the history gone, you can clear it per artist or per album (see Clearing History below).
Tier 2 — Enhanced Analytics
Off by default. Adds weather and coarse location context to your listening history.
[SCREENSHOT: Enhanced Analytics pre-permission explanation sheet]
Turning it on shows an explanation sheet first, listing what your device will track:
- City-level location (not GPS coordinates)
- Current weather conditions
- Time-of-day context
Tap Continue and iOS asks for location permission next. Homecrate requests location at roughly 3-kilometre accuracy — enough to know the weather where you are, not enough to identify a street.
What this unlocks:
| Feature | Page |
|---|---|
| Weather condition stored with each listening event | this page |
| Weather-based moods in your algorithm | Algorithm Tuner |
| The Weather Mood game (tap the weather pill in the header) | Algorithm Tuner |
Turning it off stops weather and location being recorded with new listening events. Existing events keep the weather already attached to them — nothing is retroactively rewritten or deleted.
Tier 3 — Intelligence & Recommendations
Off by default, and independent of Enhanced Analytics — you can enable either one without the other. (Earlier versions gated this behind Enhanced, which meant opting into metadata identification silently armed a location prompt. That’s fixed; identification has no location need.)
Enables Shazam import ID, skip learning, and AI playlist generation.
| Enabled behaviour | Where it shows up |
|---|---|
| Automatic Shazam identification during import | Importing Music, Identify a Track |
| Skip learning and contextual recommendation weighting | Algorithm Tuner |
| AI playlist generation | Library AI |
Configure the actual weightings in Edit Your Music Algo.
Disable AI
A separate panel with three switches — Player, Recorder, Tuner — that hide AI-powered features in those parts of the app.
[SCREENSHOT: "Disable AI" panel with Player / Recorder / Tuner switches]
The Recorder switch overrides the Tuner switch: disabling AI in the Recorder also hides AI inside the tuner within it. If your device doesn’t support Apple Intelligence at all, the panel says so and the AI features simply aren’t there to disable.
Clearing History
Per artist or album
Long-press an artist or album card in your Library and choose Reset. Every listening event for that artist’s or album’s tracks is deleted from the database. Play counts, skip history and time-of-day affinity for those tracks go back to zero.
[SCREENSHOT: Artist card long-press actions including Reset]
Excluding tracks up front
At import time, tick Omit from Songs & recommendations and those tracks are kept out of the All Tracks view, out of dashboard leaderboards and totals, and out of recommendation candidates. The same flag can be toggled per artist from the long-press menu. Useful for field recordings, audiobooks, stems, or a friend’s album you’re storing but don’t want colouring your taste profile.
Delete Preferences
The red Delete Preferences button at the bottom of the section clears saved app preferences — specifically your Shazam import opt-in decision and the dismissed-prompt flag — so first-time prompts appear again.
It does not delete your listening history. For that, use the per-artist and per-album Reset actions above.
The Privacy Story, Precisely
What stays on your device — all of it
Your entire listening history lives in a local database inside Homecrate’s own storage on your device. So do your algorithm preferences, weather tastes, trivia stats and achievement state.
Nothing on that path — recording your listening history, scoring recommendations, the dashboard, or the Algorithm Tuner — makes any network call of any kind. There is no analytics SDK linked into the app, no advertising identifier is read, no crash-reporter payload carries your history, and there is no server-side copy because there is no server and no account.
On-device analysis
The Generate AI Summary card on the dashboard, the AI playlist generation in Library AI, and the mood context used for recommendations all run on Apple Intelligence, on your device. Your statistics are handed to a model running in your own device’s memory. They are not uploaded to Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple, or anyone else.
Music-theory analysis (key, mood, BPM, chords) is likewise computed locally from your audio files. See Analyze Your Library.
What does leave your device
Being straight about it — three features in Homecrate make network requests, and one of them is on the analytics path:
| Feature | What goes out | What comes back | Requires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weather (WeatherKit) | Your approximate location, ~3 km accuracy | Current conditions, temperature, humidity, wind, daylight | Enhanced Analytics on, plus iOS location permission |
| Shazam identification | An audio fingerprint of the track being identified | Title, artist, album, genres, ISRC, Apple Music IDs | You tapping Identify, or Intelligence on during import |
| Lyrics & artist facts | The artist name and track title as a URL query to metadata.homecrate.app | Synced lyrics, or verified artist facts | Using Karaoke, artist pages, or Library AI |
Important distinctions:
- The weather request sends location only. Your listening history, track names and play counts are never part of it. The response is cached for 10 minutes in the foreground; in the background Homecrate reuses the last cached reading (up to 2 hours old) and never requests location while backgrounded.
- The lyrics and artist-metadata lookups send a name and a title — not your library, not your history, not an identifier. They exist to fetch text about music that is already public.
- Shazam identification sends an audio signature, not the audio file. See Identify a Track.
- If you use Plex, Homecrate also talks to your own Plex server using credentials you provide. That traffic goes to your machine, not ours.
Turn Enhanced Analytics off and the weather path stops entirely. Never open a lyrics or artist view and that path never fires. None of these requests carry your analytics data, and none of them go to an advertiser or an analytics vendor.
Location opt-in is tracked separately
Homecrate records your location consent as its own setting rather than inferring it from the Enhanced toggle. That’s deliberate: Enhanced can legitimately be on without the app having ever asked about location, and the weather pill uses this flag to avoid re-prompting you with its own explanation before the iOS dialog appears.
Footer Links
The bottom of the section links to homecrate.app, the full Privacy policy, and Support.
Related
- Listening Analytics Dashboard — what the collected data looks like
- Algorithm Tuner — what the collected data is used for
- Settings Overview — the rest of the Settings screen
- Identify a Track — the Shazam path in detail