Kura ← ngzhongwei.com / apps / kura
Privacy

Nothing you read leaves your phone.

Last updated 3 September 2026 · Applies to Kura 1.0 for iOS

Kura has no account to create, no analytics riding along, and no server of ours to send anything to. This page isn't a promise we're making — it's a description of how the app is built.

What stays on your phone

Everything that is yours:

  • Your library — every article you import, your reading positions, highlights, and notes. It's stored as files in the app's own container on your iPhone, and you can export all of it, restore it, or delete all of it from Settings.
  • The voice — Kura's AI-generated voice (the open-source Kokoro-82M model) ships inside the app and makes speech on your iPhone. Your articles are never uploaded to be read aloud, and no audio is made in the cloud.
  • The intelligence — the "So far" catch-up, plainer lines, the finishing gist, titles for pastes and scans, and scan repair are written on your iPhone by Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro or later on iOS 26 with Apple Intelligence on). On other iPhones these features are simply absent; nothing is sent anywhere instead.
  • Scans — photographing a printed page uses text recognition on your iPhone. The photo is processed on your iPhone and isn't kept after the text is lifted from it.
  • Settings and usage counts — your preferences and the app's small local tallies (like how many pieces you've finished) live in the app's local storage and go nowhere.

What leaves your phone, and why

Kura runs no server, but a few things necessarily involve the network or Apple. Here is the complete list:

  • Fetching a link. When you import a URL, your iPhone loads that page in a hidden web view, directly from the website — the same as visiting it in Safari, scripts and cookies included, and those stay in Kura's own web storage until you Delete All Data. Kura also fetches that page's lead image, for the cover, whenever a cover is drawn. The site sees a normal page request from your device; Kura is not in the middle and there is no proxy of ours. Links inside a piece are never followed; the only way to the open web is the "open the original" control, which hands off to Safari.
  • Translation language packs. Auto-translate uses Apple's translation framework. Translation runs on-device; the first use of a language pair downloads Apple's language pack from Apple.
  • Purchases. Kura Pro is bought through the App Store. Apple processes the payment and tells the app only that the purchase exists — we never see your payment details, and there's no account of ours attached to it.
  • Crash reports. If your iPhone is set to share analytics with app developers (an Apple setting, off unless you enabled it), Apple may share anonymized crash reports with us through Apple's own system. They contain no reading data.

That's the whole list. Nothing else — no telemetry, no usage analytics, no identifiers, no advertising SDKs, no third-party services of any kind embedded in the app.

What we never do

  • No accounts, sign-ins, or email collection.
  • No analytics or tracking of any kind, first- or third-party.
  • No ads, and no data sold or shared with anyone — there is nothing to sell.
  • No reading history anywhere but your phone. We could not produce a record of what you read if asked, because none exists outside your device.

Deleting your data

Delete an article and it's gone. Delete All Data, in Settings → Library, wipes the library, settings and caches and returns the app to first launch (your Pro purchase stays with your Apple Account). Delete the app and the entire library goes with it; offloading it keeps the library. There is no iCloud sync — Export Everything in Settings → Archives is the only way your library leaves the phone, and Restore from an Archive the only way it reaches another one. Because nothing is stored on a server, deletion is genuinely deletion — and also means we cannot recover a library for you. If your iPhone backs itself up to iCloud, your library is included in your own device backup, under your Apple Account, like any app's data.

Children

Kura collects no data from anyone, and so collects no data from children.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of Kura ever changes any of the above — for example, an optional feature that talks to a server — this page will say so plainly before that version ships, and the feature will be off unless you turn it on. The current version needs no such caveats.

Contact

Questions about any of this: support@ngzhongwei.com.