Why We Ship Without Telemetry

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:00:00 -0500

Somewhere in the last fifteen years the industry decided that shipping software without a phone-home channel was the eccentric choice, and the decision happened so gradually that most teams now add an analytics SDK before they add a settings screen, not because anyone asked for one but because the checklist says so. We looked at that checklist when we started shipping and asked the only question that matters: what would we actually do with the data, and the honest answer was “look at a dashboard occasionally and feel informed,” which is not a reason to run a surveillance pipe inside somebody else’s machine, so every VisorCraft project, the GPL desktop apps and the closed-source MongrelDB alike, ships with no telemetry, no event hooks, no “anonymous usage stats,” and no opt-out switch, because there is nothing to opt out of.

Telemetry on VisorCraft News

Why We Ship Without Telemetry