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Privacy Architecture

Orchard is designed so that nothing your AI client asks for, and nothing your Apple apps return, has to leave your Mac. This page explains the architecture that makes that true.

No server, no open network port

Earlier versions of Orchard’s MCP integration ran a small local server just to relay requests, so a network port stayed open even though everything happened on the same machine. Current Orchard removes that entirely: no server in the stack, no network port opened.

Instead, every channel (the installed Skill, the orchard CLI, and orchard mcp) talks directly to the running Orchard app through a private local connection that nothing outside your Mac, and no other user on it, can reach.

flowchart LR
    A[Your AI assistant] -->|Skill, CLI, or MCP| B[Orchard]
    B --> C[Apple apps]
    B -.->|Weather & Maps only| D[Apple's own services]

The Skill, the CLI, and orchard mcp are all lightweight front doors: they pass your request straight to the Orchard app and hand back its response. None of them touch Reminders, Calendar, Mail, or any other app directly, and none holds a macOS permission on its own. See Permissions Guide for why that matters.

Some tools take longer than a typical request to finish: shortcuts_run, for example, can trigger a Shortcut that waits on you to interact with it. Orchard stays connected for that instead of cutting it off early.

Where permissions live

All macOS permissions (Reminders, Calendar, Contacts, Location, Automation, Full Disk Access) are held by the Orchard app itself, never by the CLI, the Skill, or an MCP client. When Claude Code, Cursor, or any other client calls a tool, the request reaches Orchard.app, the only process that ever touches your Reminders, Calendar, or Mail data, or that automates any other app on your behalf.

That has a practical consequence: you configure and audit access in exactly one place, the Orchard app’s Authorization panel, regardless of how many AI clients you connect.

Does data leave your Mac?

No, with one narrow exception. Everything that flows between your AI client and your Apple apps (reminders, calendar events, mail content, messages, contacts, notes) stays on local calls between the Orchard app and those apps. Nothing is proxied through an Orchard server, because there isn’t one.

The exception is Apple’s own services: Weather and Maps tools pull from Apple’s weather and map data, the same way the built-in Weather and Maps apps do. That’s Apple’s infrastructure, not Orchard’s, and it only applies to those two integrations.

Note

What your AI client does with the data Orchard returns, whether it’s sent to a model API, logged, or kept local, is governed by that client’s own privacy policy, not Orchard’s.

Why Orchard isn’t sandboxed

Reading Mail and Messages data directly, and driving other apps on your behalf, both require capabilities incompatible with the App Sandbox the Mac App Store requires. Rather than lose them, Orchard ships as a notarized download outside the Store, with automatic update checks. See the FAQ for more on this trade-off.

If you set up Orchard before this architecture shipped, Migrate from Legacy MCP walks through moving off the old network-based configuration.