Privacy and security

Jiggle Mode runs entirely on your Mac. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no crash reporting and no update check.

#What it connects to

  • Your phone, over the cable (through macOS's own connection to your iPhone or iPad), or over your Wi-Fi network after Wi-Fi setup. To find the phone on Wi-Fi it uses Bonjour, the same local discovery your Mac uses for printers, which only reaches your own network.
  • Your browser, through a private address on your Mac (127.0.0.1) that other computers can't reach. The address includes a key for that session, and the editor refuses requests from other websites.
  • Nothing on the internet. Jiggle Mode contains no code for contacting web servers; the only web server inside it is the editor's own, on your Mac.

When you use Jiggle Mode through an AI agent, the agent sees what Jiggle Mode tells it about your Home Screen (app names, folder names and their places, and a preview picture if it asks for one) and may send that to the AI service it runs on, like anything else you share with it. Jiggle Mode itself sends nothing.

#What it stores, and where

Everything is in one folder on your Mac:

~/Library/Application Support/Jiggle Mode/
  devices/<phone id>/backups/       your Home Screen layout from before each change
  devices/<phone id>/diagnostics/   rarely: what a change that didn't land left on the phone
  devices/<phone id>/cache/         app icons and a wallpaper picture read from your phone
  devices/<phone id>/memory.json    details a read can't return (widget settings, web clips)
  devices/<phone id>/pending-write.json  only while a change is unfinished
  wifi/                             the Wi-Fi record for each phone you set up (not its key)
  • Backups hold app ids (such as com.example.notes), app, folder and widget names, and positions. Not your app data, photos or messages: Jiggle Mode never looks inside apps.
  • The Wi-Fi key lets this Mac connect to that phone over Wi-Fi. It is kept in your login Keychain (as "com.jigglemode.wifi-pairing"), not in a file, never synced to iCloud, and readable without asking only by Jiggle Mode itself. jigglemode wifi forget deletes it from your Mac; the phone keeps accepting it until you reset its trusted computers on the phone (see Forget a phone). Builds from before the first release kept this key in a plain file instead: see If you used Wi-Fi with an earlier version.
  • Trust. When your phone trusts your Mac, macOS keeps that pairing record itself, as it does for Finder. Jiggle Mode doesn't keep a copy.
  • The skill for AI agents, if you installed it, is in ~/.claude/skills/jigglemode and ~/.agents/skills/jigglemode.
  • Agent settings are kept by each agent app, wherever it keeps its MCP servers.

#Remove everything

See Uninstall. In short, run jigglemode wifi forget for each phone set up for Wi-Fi (it deletes the Keychain key), then delete the folder above, which removes all backups and caches:

rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Jiggle\ Mode

#How changes are kept safe

  • The editor and the jigglemode command always ask before writing.
  • AI agents start read-only. When you allow changes, Jiggle Mode asks you to confirm each one itself, in your agent app or in a window on your Mac, and the agent can't answer for you. See Using it with your AI agent.
  • Every change is backed up, checked against the Home Screen's rules, read back from the phone and put back automatically if it didn't land. See Reviewing and applying.
  • App and folder names come from your phone and are treated as data: the skill tells agents to ignore any instructions that appear inside them.
  • Jiggle Mode never installs or deletes apps, and needs no jailbreak.
  • The Mac app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

#Report a security problem

Write to hello@jigglemode.com with "Security" in the subject. Please give us a chance to fix the problem before you share it publicly. Our security.txt has the same contact.

The website's own privacy policy is at /privacy.