"I wouldn't be in this situation."

I never fell down the slippery slope of monetizing your data without your knowledge or permission. I couldn't do it, even though that's where the money was. Keep the product free, keep the user hooked, and keep the data flowing. Postpone privacy...that was the app economy.

The market is hungry for data...and structured health data is the juiciest of all. Without selling ours, it would be nearly impossible to raise the money we needed to tackle complex projects in a responsible, robust way:

• to store, secure and serve your data across devices

• to make it easy for parents to build health histories for their kids or engage with their aging parents

• to deal with images in a smart, private way.

These were things I really wanted to do, but not at the expense of your trust.

So I put development on pause. Symple continued to percolate in the app store, and even posted it's best-ever results this past quarter! And recently, the world seems to be waking up to the serious problem that is lax user data privacy rules and regulations. 

Consumers are beginning to realize that all those free apps weren't really free. 

I'm still not sure what our next steps should be for Symple. But wherever we go, please know I will always put your privacy first. These are your thoughts, your images, your data. And they always will be.

Tim Cook: "I wouldn't be in this situation."