YouTube
youtube.readonly
Your subscriptions, liked videos and playlists say what you follow and what you keep — the strongest single description of taste most people have. Watch history is not available through the API and is not requested.
Let your love story
be written
Édouard Manet, Monet Painting on His Studio Boat, 1874
Distillation
A profile you do not have to write
Every dating app asks you to describe yourself in a box, on the worst possible day for it. Written reads what you already listen to, watch, plan and do — and puts the answer together itself.
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One
Extraction
One button per app, and never a password typed into ours. YouTube and Google Calendar arrive through Google's own consent screen; Apple Music, Podcasts, Calendar and Health through the system sheets your phone already knows how to draw. What comes back is what you subscribed to, the music you kept, the evenings you booked, the miles you actually ran.
Read-only, and only what the source you chose exposes. Nothing new is asked for on a hunch, and nothing is read in the background — a snapshot happens when you tap, and not otherwise.
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Two
Ontology
A thousand rows of titles are not yet a person. Each one is read against an ontology until it says something in a vocabulary everything else shares — so a Bach partita, a bouldering session and a ticket bought for November can finally be compared at all.
YouTube is the exception, and deliberately. Nothing there is categorised by us. Written uses only the classifications YouTube itself returns — the category on a video, the topics on a channel, the tags its creator wrote — and never guesses from a title, a description or a channel's name. That is narrower than what the other sources get, it means some of what you watch stays unplaced, and it is what YouTube asks of apps that read your account.
This is the stage that decides what matters, which is why the stage before it does not try to guess.
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Three
Embedding
Interests, preferences and temperament are placed on a space where distance means something. Two people who have never used the same word for it can turn out to be standing beside each other — which is the only claim about compatibility this app is willing to make.
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Four
Dynamic prompting
Every other app gives you one bio and hopes it lands. A profile in Written is read differently by each person who finds it: if you play the violin and the person you are looking at has a hundred interests including the violin, that is the one you are shown first.
Nothing is invented. The order simply follows what the two of you already have in common.
What it reads
Every source, and what each one is for
You choose each of these, one tap at a time. Every one is read-only — Written never asks for permission to write anything back to any of them.
Google Calendar
calendar.calendarlist.readonly
calendar.events.readonly
Two narrow scopes rather than one broad one. The first reads only the names of your calendars, so holiday and birthday calendars can be left out before anything inside them is opened; the second reads the events themselves.
Apple Music & Podcasts
MusicKit · Media Library
The library you built, the playlists you made, what you have had on repeat lately, and the shows you keep on the phone.
Apple Calendar
EventKit
The concerts, flights and exhibitions you booked, and the evenings you keep for yourself. Birthdays and public holidays are left out.
Health
HealthKit
Which sports you actually do and roughly when you are awake. These readings are worked out on your phone; the underlying workouts and activity samples never leave it.
Signing in
Apple · Google · phone
Whichever you choose is the only one used. Google here is sign-in
only — openid email profile, which reads no content of
any kind. A phone number is verified by SMS and shown to nobody.
Notifications
APNs
If you allow them, your phone gives us a delivery token so Apple can reach it when somebody likes you, matches with you or writes. It is an address for that device and nothing else.
A snapshot, not a subscription
Each read happens once, in the foreground, in the seconds after you tap — and then it is over. Nothing polls, nothing syncs in the background, nothing keeps watching. Between one snapshot and the next, Written is not reading anything at all.
What it took, you can strike out
Any artist, channel, sport, show or event can be struck off your profile in the app. It is never used, never shown and never counted again — and it stays struck off through every snapshot after it, so you are not undoing the same thing twice.
And you can take it all back
Delete your account from inside the app and everything goes with it — your profile, your snapshots, your photographs and your conversations — within seven days. For anything narrower, write to us and we will delete it in the same seven.
Privacy
What we hold, and for how long
Limited use
Written's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Data from your Google account is used only to build and present your own profile inside the app. It is never sold, never used for advertising, and never given to a human to read except where you have asked us to look at something.
YouTube data, and 30 days
Written uses YouTube API Services. Titles, channel names and playlist contents are held for no more than 30 calendar days. A job runs every day and removes them on that schedule whether or not you ask, whether or not you are still signed in; what remains is the derived reading, which names nothing.
By using YouTube through Written you also agree to the YouTube Terms of Service. Google's own handling of your data is described in the Google Privacy Policy. The Memories page in Written carries two controls: one deletes everything read from YouTube and keeps the connection, the other also withdraws Written's access at Google. Both act immediately, and no later than 7 days. You can equally withdraw access at myaccount.google.com/permissions — and because of the sweep above, anything read from YouTube is already gone within the 30 days that withdrawal allows.
What stays on your phone
Health is the clearest case: workouts and activity samples are read, reduced to a handful of general readings on the device, and thrown away. The samples themselves are never uploaded — enforced in two places rather than intended in one.
Deleting everything
Deleting your account in the app removes your profile, your snapshots, your photographs and your conversations from our live systems within seven days. Encrypted backups roll over on their own schedule and are never used to bring a deleted account back.
This is the short account. Read the full privacy policy — it is the document referenced by the app's sign-in screen and by Google's OAuth consent screen, and its Google user data section sets out every scope one at a time. Alongside it: terms of service, support and cookies.