Last updated: 2 August 2026
Slow Burn is a guided intimacy program built on Sensate Focus — six unhurried stages you move through on your own, or with a partner. It is a wellness and education tool, not medical advice.
Questions, bugs, or anything at all? Email jonathanbbiles@gmail.com. We read every one.
Slow Burn collects nothing about you. There is no account, no sign-in, no ads, no analytics, no tracking, and no third-party advertising or analytics SDK of any kind. Nothing you enter is ever sent to us, because there is no server of ours for it to be sent to.
All of this is saved only in the app's own storage on your phone, and is never transmitted — not to us, not to anyone:
Deleting the app deletes all of it.
The only feature that uses the network at all is live pairing, where two people run the program together on their own phones. It exists so the two phones can do two things: open the next stage only when both people have privately confirmed they are ready, and show each of you the reflections you both named.
That link is end-to-end encrypted. When you pair, the two phones perform an ephemeral ECDH P-256 key exchange, publishing only their public keys. Each phone derives the shared secret itself — the secret is never transmitted, in any form — and that secret, combined with your pair code, produces an AES-256-GCM key that only your two phones hold. The pair code itself never travels. Everything sent afterwards is ciphertext.
What crosses between the two phones, encrypted: a number from 0 to 6 for the stage you have confirmed you are ready for, and the positions of the reflection chips you tapped (sent as list positions, never as words).
What never crosses at all, encrypted or otherwise: your name, pronouns, gender, orientation, relationship structure, session counts, and every written private note.
The messages are carried by a public relay (broker.emqx.io) that only ever sees
scrambled bytes it cannot read, and keeps none of them once you disconnect. We do not operate that
relay, we receive nothing from it, and it stores nothing after a session ends.
When you pair, you can either read the ten-character code aloud or scan the square on the other phone. The square contains only that pair code — no link, no address — and it is Slow Burn's own scanner that reads it, not a browser.
If you use the scanner, the camera view is processed entirely on your phone: the app looks at the frame, finds the code, and stops the camera. No photo or video is ever recorded, saved, or sent anywhere. There is no code in the app that could send one. If you would rather not grant camera access, don't — typing the code does exactly the same thing, and the scan button doesn't appear at all on a device that can't scan.
Once your two phones have agreed on their key, each shows the same six-character safety word. If it reads the same on both phones, no one is in the middle of your connection. Checking it is optional and takes a second.
Encryption hides the contents of your messages, not the fact that messages exist. Someone watching the public relay could see that two anonymous parties are exchanging encrypted messages: when they connect and disconnect, roughly how often, and roughly how large the messages are. None of that is tied to a name, a device, or any other session, and none of it reveals a single thing you chose or wrote. We would rather say this plainly than claim more than we can deliver.
Two more things the app fetches, for the same reason of saying it plainly. Its typefaces come from Google Fonts, and two small pieces of its code — the client that talks to the pairing relay, and the one that draws the pairing QR code — are loaded from public code CDNs (jsDelivr and Cloudflare's cdnjs). Those three services receive the request and your device's IP address when it happens. They receive nothing else: no message, no journal entry, no pairing content, nothing you chose or wrote. It happens whether or not you ever pair.
Slow Burn is a paid app: you pay once on the App Store and everything in it is yours. There are no subscriptions and no locked or premium content — every stage, every reflection deck, every practice and every theme is there from the first launch.
There is one optional in-app purchase: a tip jar, on the Support card at the bottom of the last tab. It is entirely voluntary and it buys you nothing — the app is exactly the same before and after one, and the only thing that changes is a thank-you line on that card. Nothing in Slow Burn is ever waiting behind it.
Apple handles the payment, not us. The tip goes through the App Store. We never see your name, your email, your card or your Apple ID, and the app sends nothing anywhere when you tip. What we get is what any developer gets: a sales total in App Store Connect that is not attached to a person. The fact that you tipped is remembered only on your own phone, and deleting the app deletes it.
Slow Burn includes an optional journal that keeps your past reflections on your phone, with dates, so you can look back. It is included for everyone, needs no purchase, and it is off until you switch it on.
With it on, each reflection you save — including the note you write — is stored in the app's own storage on that phone. It is never transmitted, is never part of pairing, and never leaves the device. Switching the journal off deletes everything already saved, and so does deleting the app. It is off by default because a reflection is the most personal thing in Slow Burn, and writing it to disk should be something you choose rather than something you find out about later.
Slow Burn is a wellness and education program. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified clinician. If pain during intimacy, a medical condition, a recent surgery, or a trauma history is involved, please work with a licensed clinician — a sex therapist or a pelvic-floor physical therapist — before or alongside this program. The app links to independent directories to help you find one; we are not affiliated with them.
Slow Burn is intended for adults. Because it collects no personal information from anyone, it collects none from children.
If this policy ever changes, the updated version will be posted on this page with a new date.
jonathanbbiles@gmail.com
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