Delete your account

Deleting your Hotline account removes your profile, your pictures, your strings and the voice notes on them. In the app it happens as soon as you tap “Delete for good”, and there’s no undo.

Signing out, or deleting the app from your iPhone, leaves your account as it is: your profile, pictures and strings stay until the account itself is deleted.

Delete it in the app

You can delete your account yourself, from the Me tab or, while you wait for approval, the waiting screen.

Open the app. Go to the Me tab, or, while your profile waits for approval, stay on the waiting screen.
Tap “Delete my account”, the small link under “Sign out” (on the Me tab, scroll to the bottom).
A sheet asks “Delete your account?” Tap “Delete for good”, or “Keep my account” to back out.
Everything listed below is deleted, the app signs you out and you see “Your account is deleted”.

If the app says “Couldn’t delete your account”, check your connection and try again.

Partway through signing up, before your profile is complete, the app offers “Sign out” but no way to delete yet, so finish the steps or ask us instead. If the app is showing “Hotline needs your location”, the tabs come back once you allow it.

Ask us to delete it

If you stopped partway through signing up, or no longer have the app, you can ask us to delete your account for you.

Send udayan@gethotline.app the phone number your account uses and say you want the account deleted. Only the person who holds that number can ask.

So that nobody can delete someone else’s account, we first check the number is yours: we text a code to it and ask you to send it back.

Then we delete your account and everything listed below, just as the app would. We do it by hand within 7 days and reply to your email when it’s done.

What happens at once

There’s no waiting period and no way to undo it: all of this happens as soon as you tap “Delete for good”.

Straight away:

Any string you’re on ends, and a call or ring in progress stops.
Anyone you have a string with sees only “A string loosened”, never why.
Every string you were on, loose ones included, leaves the other person’s Strings list, along with your pictures and the voice notes on it.
You disappear from every map, and every pull to or from you is gone.
The app signs you out.

What’s deleted

Your account, your profile, your pictures and everything on your strings are deleted from Hotline.

We delete:

Your account, with your phone number and password.
Your five pictures.
Your profile: first and last name, city, whether you’re a woman or a man, who you want to find, your “How far” distance and your “Visible nearby” setting.
Your last stored location, and when you were last seen.
Pulls you made and pulls on you, and blocks either way.
Every string you were on, with its call times, the private votes and any record of who unmatched.
The voice notes on those strings, the other person’s as well as yours.
The push tokens that let your iPhone ring for calls and get notifications.

We never record calls, so there’s no call audio to delete. Private notes and nicknames you gave people were never saved anywhere, and they’re gone once the app signs you out.

What stays, and why

A few things outlast your account, each for a reason: reports, a record if you were reported, nightly backups for up to 30 days, other companies’ own logs and any old waitlist entry.

These stay after you delete:

Reports. If you reported someone, or someone reported you, the report stays on record for safety, with the reason picked and its time, but your account is taken off it. A report you made still points to the account you reported, for as long as that account exists. Reports are kept for 3 years.
A record if you were reported. If anyone had reported you, we keep your account’s id, your phone number (and an email address, only if an older account had one), how many reports there were and when you deleted, so we can recognize you if you come back. Nobody using the app can see it. This record is kept for 3 years.
Backups. A copy of the database is made every night and kept privately on GitHub for 30 days, so it can be restored if something breaks. Copies made before you deleted still hold your database records (not your pictures or voice notes) until they expire, within 30 days.
Other companies’ records. Twilio keeps its own record of the code texts it sent you, and LiveKit keeps its own logs of the calls it carried, under their own retention rules.
The old waitlist. If you joined the website’s waitlist before it closed on October 26, 2026, that entry isn’t linked to your account, so it isn’t deleted with it. Email udayan@gethotline.app to have it removed.

On your own iPhone, voice notes you recorded can stay in the app’s temporary files until iOS clears them or you remove the app.