Privacy
Hide sexual activity in your period tracker with Face ID
Hand your phone to a friend to show them a photo, and whatever app you left open is suddenly shared too. MiniCycle can record sexual activity as part of cycle tracking, and that is exactly the kind of mark some people would rather not have visible on a screen that gets passed around. So the app splits the decision in two. Hiding every trace takes one switch and no authentication. Bringing the records back takes your face.
A purple dot, and one tap to make it
Logging is deliberately small. Tap a date on the calendar and the day panel below shows a heart-shaped button for sexual activity. Tap it once and a small purple dot appears under that date, next to whatever else the day holds. Tap it again and the dot is gone. There is no separate diary, no detail form, no rating. One mark per day, on or off.
The dot sits on the calendar for a practical reason: context. Sexual activity viewed alongside period dates and the estimated fertile window is useful to have in one place, whether you are trying to conceive or trying not to. The legend lists it in purple, next to the pink of period days and the sky blue of the fertile window.
One switch removes every trace
Open Settings and turn on the hide option for sexual activity. The effect is immediate and complete. Every purple dot disappears from the calendar, the purple entry leaves the legend, and the heart button itself drops out of the day panel. Someone scrolling through your months would not see that the feature exists.
Hiding asks for no authentication, and that is deliberate. If a moment calls for the marks to be gone, the switch has to work right now, not after a face scan you may not want to perform in front of the person you are about to hand the phone to.
Why does showing them again need Face ID?
The asymmetry is the design. Turning the records back on is the sensitive direction, because the person most likely to flip that switch on your phone is not you. So before unhiding, MiniCycle asks the iPhone to confirm your face through Apple's LocalAuthentication framework. Apple puts the odds of a random person's face unlocking your Face ID at less than 1 in 1,000,000.
Worth knowing: the app never sees your face. Apple is specific about this. Face ID data is encrypted, stays inside the device's Secure Enclave, and is never sent anywhere, and an app is told only whether the authentication succeeded. MiniCycle receives a yes or a no, nothing else. If the scan fails, the records simply stay hidden.
Hiding is not deleting
A reasonable worry, answered directly: the switch erases nothing. Your records stay stored exactly as they were, and passing Face ID brings every dot back to its original date. Hide them for a month, unhide them, and nothing is missing.
The flip side is also true. While hidden, the logging button is gone as well, so you cannot add or remove entries until you unhide. If you want a record actually gone, that is a different action. Tap the date and tap the heart button off to clear a single day, or use the data reset in Settings, which permanently deletes everything the app stores, sexual activity included.
The limits, stated plainly
Unhiding requires Face ID specifically, not Touch ID and not your passcode. On an iPhone that has Touch ID instead, such as an SE with a home button, the app refuses to unhide and says so. The same applies when Face ID is not set up. If your device cannot do Face ID, do not turn hiding on expecting to reverse it on that device.
Be clear about what this protects against, too. It guards against eyes on your open calendar: a borrowed phone, a shared photo moment, a screen visible on a desk. It is not device security; that is your passcode's job. One more detail helps here. The home-screen widget never displays sexual activity at all, hidden or not, so the most public surface of the app was never part of the problem.
Where the records live
Sexual activity is stored the same way MiniCycle stores periods and notes: on your device by default, with no account and no sign-in, as the privacy policy describes. The optional iCloud backup, if you choose to turn it on, syncs records through your own iCloud account rather than a MiniCycle server.
Like everything on the calendar, these marks are reference information for your own planning. The fertile-window and ovulation marks they sit beside are estimates, not medical advice, contraception, or a way to judge pregnancy. The hide switch changes who can see your records on screen. It does not change whose they are. They are yours.
Before you hand your phone over
The realistic exposures are small ones. A coworker leaning in while you check a date. A friend swiping through photos who lands in the wrong app. A family member borrowing the phone for a call. The hide switch exists for exactly that scale of moment, and because hiding needs no authentication, it works in the two seconds before the handoff.
If you keep the records hidden most of the time, treat unhiding as the deliberate step. It is one Face ID scan, done on your own time, ideally not in front of an audience.
Frequently asked questions
Does hiding sexual activity delete my records? No. Hiding only removes the dots, the legend entry, and the logging button from view. The records stay on the device, and unhiding with Face ID returns every dot to its date.
Can I unhide without Face ID? No. The unhide step takes a successful Face ID scan, with no passcode fallback inside the app. On devices without Face ID, including Touch ID models, the app declines to unhide and explains why.
Does the home-screen widget show sexual activity? No, never. The widget shows period and cycle information only, whether hiding is on or off, so nothing intimate appears on your home screen.
The one-line version
One tap logs a purple dot. One switch hides every trace instantly, and only your face brings the records back. Hiding deletes nothing, and the records stay on your device either way.
If your iPhone has no Face ID, skip the hide switch. And the widget never showed these records to begin with, so the home screen needs no extra care.
MiniCycle is built for a clean iPhone period calendar, local records, simple statistics, and a home screen widget.
View on the App Store