Most health apps ask for an account, upload your history to a server, and paint the screen when there is a signal. That works until one of three things happens: the clinic has no reception, the company changes hands, or you want everything deleted and cannot tell who still has a copy.

The difference that matters is not the slogan. It is who holds the file when you are not looking.

Three questions before you pick one

1. Does the history open in airplane mode? Run the test today, not at the front desk. If it vanishes without a signal, it is not with you. It is with the service.

2. How many copies exist, and whose are they? The company’s account, photo backup, email, the family chat. Each copy is a door. Fewer doors means fewer people to remember to close them.

3. What happens if you want out? “Download my data” and “delete my account” are rights. In practice, what you can use in the clinic next week is what was already on the phone.

None of these questions ask you to understand servers. They ask for a Tuesday-morning test.

What a vendor cloud solves, and what it costs

A company cloud is convenient: new phone, second device, forgotten password. The cost is the obvious one and the quieter one. Obvious: one more organization holding a copy of your clinical data. Quieter: the file depends on a login, on the company’s paid plan, and on a network. A basement clinic negotiates none of the three.

Backup from your phone’s own system (the copy the device makes into your platform account) is different: the copy is yours, under the store’s rules, not a health app’s. It is still a copy. It is not the same as the app company hosting your chart.

How FichaMed helps

For day-to-day use, appointments, clinicians, and notes stay on the device only. There is no FichaMed account for the clinical history, and the normal flow does not send that content to company servers. That is why the app works without internet, and why the team has nothing to send back if you lose the phone without a backup.

The copies that exist, you control:

  • Export on the device and keep the file wherever you want.
  • Automatic copy on iPhone, into your iCloud account, not a FichaMed server.
  • Android system backup, when the phone itself includes the app’s database in a restore.

None of those paths creates a clinical account at the company. If the worry is who opens an unlocked phone, the companion piece is who can see the health data on your phone.

This compares data-keeping habits and is not legal advice. Device settings and platform-account settings also decide where copies exist.