Privacy Policy
EchoNative (the "App") is built by an independent developer for upper-intermediate to advanced English learners. This policy explains, in plain language, what happens to your data when you use the App and this website.
1. What we do not collect
- We do not require an account. There is no sign-up, no email collection inside the App.
- We do not run analytics, advertising, or behavioral tracking inside the App.
- We do not build user profiles, and we do not sell or share data with third-party data brokers.
2. What stays on your device
- Your shadowing recordings are written to the App sandbox on your iPhone and never uploaded.
- Your vocabulary, dictation history, sentence drills, and listening history live in on-device storage (SwiftData). Deleting the App deletes them.
- Your podcast subscriptions and downloaded episodes are stored locally.
3. What we send to OpenAI (and only OpenAI)
The App uses OpenAI's API to power three optional features. The only data ever leaving your device is what those features need:
- Transcription (Whisper): the episode audio file you choose to transcribe is sent to OpenAI in 10-minute slices. Returned text + word-level timestamps are stored locally.
- Sentence breakdown / idiom mining / Q&A grading (gpt-4o): the relevant subtitle text — and, for grading, the transcription of your spoken answer — is sent as text. Your raw recording is not sent.
- Ad detection (gpt-4o-mini): the subtitle text of the episode is sent.
OpenAI's API terms apply to those requests. Per OpenAI's published policy at the time of writing, API data is not used to train their models. We do not retain a server-side copy of your audio or text — there is no EchoNative backend that stores your content.
4. Website analytics
This marketing site (echonative.com) uses Plausible Analytics, a privacy-friendly tool that does not set cookies, does not track you across sites, and reports only aggregated traffic data. No personal information is collected.
5. Third-party podcast hosts
When you import an RSS feed or Apple Podcasts link, the App fetches the episode list and audio directly from the podcast's hosting provider. Those providers may log standard request metadata (IP, user agent). EchoNative does not proxy or log those requests.
6. Children
EchoNative is intended for users 13 years and older. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13.
7. Your rights
Because almost all your data lives on your device, you can exercise your rights at any time by deleting items in-App or uninstalling the App. For requests related to anything you may have shared by emailing us, contact us below.
8. Changes
If we make material changes to this policy we will update the date at the top and, where appropriate, mention it on the home page.
9. Contact
Questions, requests, or anything else: [email protected].