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.

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.
Paying for Pro shares only the purchase
Timber Pro is optional — the reader is free. When you buy or restore Pro, the App Store and RevenueCat (the service that manages purchases) see only purchase details: which product, when, and an anonymous purchase token — never what you read or what’s on your clipboard. If you use a one-time code to unlock Pro on another device, a small Timber service only checks that the code is valid and hasn’t been used before. No reading content is ever part of any of it.
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.

Timber Tabs · on your Mac

The Mac companion goes one further.

Timber Tabs is the Mac app that turns your open browser tabs into a listening queue for Timber. It is held to the same rule as the app on your phone — and on one count it is stricter still: it makes no network calls at all.

It reads only titles and addresses
To build your queue, Timber Tabs looks at the title and web address of each open tab — never the contents of the pages. It works across Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc and Opera.
Only when you click
It reads your tabs at the moment you ask it to collect them — not in the background, not on a timer, not while you browse.
It never contacts a server
Timber Tabs makes no network requests of its own. There is no account, no cloud, no analytics, and nothing to sign in to.
The list stays on your Mac
Your reviewed list is handed to the Timber app over your own computer (localhost), or saved as a portable .timberlist file you control. It never leaves the machine on the way.

So the same line holds on the desktop, only tighter: nothing about your tabs — not a title, not an address — is ever sent anywhere.

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.

Next: the accessibility work