Timber ✶

The privacy promise

What you read
won’t be shared.

What you read in Timber, and what’s on your clipboard, stay on your device — never sent off for ads, never for analytics, never at all. That holds because the reading itself happens on your iPhone: the text is pulled, summarized, translated, and spoken right here, with no cloud in the loop. This is the whole promise, in plain words.

What Timber promises

In plain words.

What you read won’t be shared

The one that matters most, stated first: the content you read in Timber is yours and stays yours.

No account required

No sign-up, no login, no email. Open Timber and read — the core reader is free, with no catch.

iCloud sync

Library and settings ride your private iCloud across devices — never anywhere else.

Natural voice packs

Extra voices download to this iPhone. They sound more natural and keep working offline.

†  If any of these change, this is the first place you’ll see it. Call us out if we drift.

What Timber will never do

Three flat refusals — not goals, not someday. Things Timber will never do, full stop:

Never

send your reading content or clipboard off this device — not to us, not to anyone.

Never

hand your voice recordings to anyone else as training data.

Never

sell or share what you read with advertisers or third parties.

How the claim holds up

Not a slogan — how the app is built.

Every voice runs on the device
All of Timber’s speech engines — Apple, Piper, Kokoro, Supertonic, Pocket, KittenTTS and the rest — synthesize on your iPhone. There is no cloud text-to-speech, so the words you read are never sent out to be spoken.
Reading, summaries and translation are local
Pulling clean text from a page, the on-device summary, and translation all happen on the phone using Apple’s own frameworks. None of it ships your content anywhere.
No analytics or advertising SDK
Timber bundles no third-party analytics or advertising SDK. The app isn’t wired to send what you do to anyone.
iCloud is your private container
When sync is on, your library and settings travel through your own private iCloud account — not our servers. On a free Apple ID without iCloud, Timber simply stays local-only.
The only network calls are ones you start
Timber reaches the network when you ask it to: fetching a link you pasted, browsing free books, refreshing a feed. The article text it reads back to you is processed on the phone and is never uploaded.

The honest version

Why we don’t say “nothing ever leaves your phone.”

Because it wouldn’t be true, and you deserve the true version. Timber does talk to the network — but only when you ask it to. When you paste a link, browse a free book, or refresh a feed, it fetches that one thing for you. That’s the whole of it.

And here’s the part that matters: the article text it reads back to you is processed on your phone. Fetching a page is not the same as uploading what you read — the words you listen to never go anywhere. Neither does what’s on your clipboard.

So we don’t say “nothing ever leaves your phone,” because some things do, at your request. We say the line we can actually keep: what you read, and what’s on your clipboard, stay on your device. We’d rather make one promise we can prove than a bigger one we can’t.