Aoede has no servers and no accounts of its own. It collects nothing about you, contains no analytics or advertising, and does not track you.
What stays on your device
The documents and books you import, your library, reading positions, bookmarks, notes, study cards, review history and settings are kept in the app's own storage on your device. Speech is made on your device too, by Apple's voices or by the Kokoro voice, and so is the highlight that follows it.
What goes where, and why
Aoede only reaches the network for the things below, and only when you use them.
- Voice and dictionary downloads. The first time you choose the Kokoro voice, Aoede downloads its model from Hugging Face. The first time you read Japanese, it downloads a reading dictionary (Open JTalk's, from GitHub) for furigana and pronunciation. Nothing about you is sent with these requests beyond what any download sends.
- Project Gutenberg. If you browse free books, your searches go to Gutendex (gutendex.com), a public catalogue of Project Gutenberg, and the books and covers you open are downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
- The assistant. The assistant runs on your device with Apple Intelligence by default, and then nothing leaves it. You can instead point it at a local server you run (such as Ollama or LM Studio), and requests go only to that server. If you add your own API key for OpenAI, OpenRouter or Anthropic, Aoede asks you each time before it sends a passage to that provider, and what the provider does with it is covered by its own privacy policy. Your keys are stored in the Keychain on this device and are not synced.
Beta builds
If you test a TestFlight build, Apple shares the crash reports and feedback you choose to send with the developer, as described in TestFlight's own terms.
Deleting your data
Deleting the app removes everything it stored on your device.
Contact
Questions: aoede@krisbaker.com.