Questions, answered.

PrettyPrint is an AI-powered text-transformation keyboard for iPhone. You type normally, then tap a colorful action chip above the keys — Fix Grammar, Shorter, Translate to Spanish, Poem, and so on — to rewrite your text in place. The transform happens on the fly inside whatever app you're using, so you never copy, paste, or switch apps.

You can use the 22 built-in actions as-is, customize them, or create your own. Most users end up with a personal mix of "Professional," "Friendly," and a few quirky ones like "Pirate" or "Regional slang."

Currently iPhone only, iOS 17 and later. The keyboard works in almost every iOS app that supports text input — WhatsApp, iMessage, Mail, Safari, Notes, Slack, X, Gmail, LinkedIn, and so on.

A few apps (some password managers, banking apps) restrict custom keyboards system-wide; those will fall back to Apple's default keyboard, which is the intended iOS behavior.

An iPad version and a macOS menu-bar companion are on the roadmap; we don't have dates yet.

Typing itself works offline — the keyboard's layout, auto-correction, and suggestions are all on-device. You only need a network connection when you tap an action chip, because the transformation runs through our AI API. If you're offline, the chip simply shows a "no connection" toast and nothing is sent.

No. Everything you type on the PrettyPrint keyboard stays on your device. There is no background upload of keystrokes, no "learning from your messages," no keylogger, no analytics event that contains your text. Our servers only ever see the text associated with a single action tap, and only after you've tapped a chip.

Under the hood: keystrokes are handled by the iOS keyboard extension process, which reads the currently-focused text field through Apple's UITextDocumentProxy API. That proxy only gives us the text near your cursor when we explicitly ask for it, and we only ask after you tap an action.

Three things:

• The keyboard reads the relevant text in your current text field (the last paragraph, or the full message for actions like "Translate" that need the whole input).
• It sends that text, the action's instruction (e.g. "Translate to Spanish"), and your Firebase auth token to our backend.
• Our backend forwards the request to a third-party AI provider (Google Gemini). The rewritten text is returned, and the keyboard replaces your original text with it.

We do not retain the text of your request or the rewritten output in PrettyPrint-owned databases. We log basic metadata (which action you tapped, latency, rough character count, your hashed user ID) so we can improve the product and bill correctly, but never the text itself. See the Privacy Policy for the exact list of fields.

When you tap an action, your text is sent to Google Gemini (via the Vertex AI / Google AI platform) for transformation. Google processes it under Google Cloud's data-processing terms , which means:

• Google does not use Vertex AI inputs to train their own models by default.
• Google may retain the request briefly for abuse prevention and legal compliance.
• Google's infrastructure is the one running the transformation — not PrettyPrint.

We link to Google's full policy in our Privacy Policy.

No. PrettyPrint does not train its own AI models, and we don't use your text to fine-tune any third-party model on our behalf. The transformation is stateless: your request goes in, a rewrite comes out, and nothing user-specific is learned from it.

Yes. Tap Profile → Delete Account in the app and confirm. This:

• Removes your Firebase Auth account.
• Deletes your custom actions, settings, and user document from our database.
• Cancels in-app subscriptions via the App Store (you may need to confirm cancellation in iOS Settings → Apple ID → Subscriptions).
• Retains only anonymized usage metrics for billing reconciliation (required by Apple's rules), and those cannot be linked back to you.

The whole operation is irreversible — any custom actions you created will need to be recreated if you sign up again with the same email.

If you're offline when you tap an action, the keyboard shows a small error toast and your original text is untouched — nothing left your device.

If you tap another key or dismiss the keyboard while a transform is running, the request continues in the background but its result is discarded. Your daily usage counter is only incremented if the AI call succeeds.

After you download PrettyPrint, the app walks you through a three-step setup:

1. Add keyboard: Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → PrettyPrint.
2. Allow Full Access: tap the PrettyPrint entry in the list and toggle "Allow Full Access" on. This is required by iOS for any keyboard that makes network requests. Apple warns this is a privacy-sensitive permission; we only use it for action transforms, never for keystroke logging.
3. Switch to PrettyPrint: in any app, tap-and-hold the globe key (🌐) on the bottom left of the keyboard and pick PrettyPrint from the list.

That's Apple's standard warning for any third-party keyboard that wants network access — it applies to Gboard, SwiftKey, Grammarly, and every other Internet-capable keyboard on iOS.

Apple has no way to verify what individual apps do with that permission, so they display a single strong warning for all of them. As we explain above, PrettyPrint only reads the text around your cursor when you tap an action chip, and only sends that specific snippet to our API. We never read in the background.

Open the PrettyPrint host app → Actions tab. From there you can:

• Tap + to create a new custom action. Give it a name and a short instruction (e.g. "Rewrite as a pirate would say it"). The app can help you generate or improve the instruction with AI.
• Tap the dice 🎲 to have the AI invent a new action for you.
• Tap the store icon to browse a curated library of prompts.
• Drag chips to reorder them, long-press to rename, tap the color dot to change the chip color.

Changes sync to your iCloud-connected devices within a few seconds.

Some actions — especially translations, emoji rewrites, and poem generation — rewrite your input more aggressively. For those, we show a preview panel so you can Apply, Retry, or Dismiss before your original text is replaced. Actions that just tidy your text (Fix Grammar, Shorter, Professional) skip the preview and apply immediately; you can undo with the ↶ chip that appears right after.

Tap-and-hold the globe 🌐 key in the bottom-left of the keyboard and pick your desired keyboard from the list. iOS remembers the last-used keyboard per app.

PrettyPrint has a generous free tier — a fixed number of transforms per day and per month, enough for typical messaging use. Pro removes the daily limit and raises the monthly limit substantially. Exact numbers are shown on the pricing section of the homepage (we fetch them live so they always match what the app enforces).

The free tier itself is generous enough to let you evaluate every action. We're an indie product and prefer that model over a short free-trial window. If you hit the daily limit early, the keyboard shows an upgrade prompt that you can dismiss.

Subscriptions are handled by Apple, not PrettyPrint. Open iOS Settings → your Apple ID → Subscriptions → PrettyPrint to cancel or change. You can also reach Apple's unified subscription page from the PrettyPrint app's Profile tab.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you keep Pro features until then.

Free users hit a "soft nudge" at the base daily limit: a polite toast and an upgrade banner appear, but you get a small bonus of extra transforms to finish whatever you were writing. After the bonus or if you hit the monthly ceiling, action chips return an "upgrade to continue" message until the next day (for daily limits) or next month (for monthly limits).

Check the three setup steps:

1. Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards — is PrettyPrint listed?
2. If yes, tap it and make sure "Allow Full Access" is on.
3. In the text field, tap-and-hold 🌐 and select PrettyPrint.

If it's still missing, restart the app you're typing in, or as a last resort restart your phone — iOS caches keyboard registrations aggressively and occasionally needs a nudge.

Your Firebase authentication token has expired (they live for one hour by default) and the keyboard extension couldn't refresh it silently. Open the PrettyPrint app once; it refreshes the shared token automatically. Tap an action again and it should work.

Most transforms finish in 1–3 seconds. If yours is stuck, the most common causes are:

• Upstream AI provider is momentarily slow — usually resolves in under a minute.
• You're on a weak Wi-Fi or cellular connection — the keyboard times out requests after 35 seconds.
• The app you're in has unusual text-field behavior (some webviews truncate text); try the action again with a shorter selection.

If it consistently fails in a specific app, email hi@prettyprint.ai with the app name — we maintain a compatibility list.

Tap the ↶ undo chip that appears below the keyboard after a transform to revert. For review-required actions like translation, you can tap Retry in the preview panel to get a different suggestion.

The AI's output depends on the input — very short fragments, all-caps text, or text with lots of emoji sometimes produce surprising rewrites. Try editing the instruction in Actions tab → the action → Prompt to nudge the model's behavior.

Custom actions are stored locally and synced to your account. If an update seems to have lost them, force-quit the app and reopen it — the cloud sync typically re-populates them within a few seconds. If they're still missing and you had signed in before the update, email hi@prettyprint.ai; a backup is retained for 30 days and we can help restore.

Email hi@prettyprint.ai with as much detail as you can — which action, which app, what you expected versus what you got. We read every message.

If the issue is keyboard-specific (a crash, a chip not responding), mention your iPhone model and iOS version — some bugs are model-specific.