No telemetry is a feature, not a sacrifice

There’s a widespread assumption in software that you need analytics to build good products — that without a firehose of usage data you’re flying blind. We think that’s backwards for the kind of tools we make.

When your software runs entirely on someone’s machine and does one thing well, you don’t need to watch them use it to know whether it works. You need to build it carefully, test it honestly, and listen when people write in. The telemetry you’d collect wouldn’t make the tool better; it would just make the user a little less the owner of their own machine.

So our default is nothing: no phone-home, no usage pings, no “anonymous” identifiers that aren’t. If we ever need a number, we’ll ask for it plainly. That’s not a limitation we’re working around. It’s the point.