Timber ✶

The privacy promise

What you read
won’t be shared.

What you read in Timber, and what’s on your clipboard, are yours — never sent to us, never for ads, never for analytics. 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 to us — not for ads, not for analytics, not ever.

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 off to a server to do the work.
No analytics or advertising SDK
Timber bundles no third-party analytics or advertising SDK. The app isn’t wired to send what you read 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 network calls are yours — and your own iCloud
Timber reaches out when you ask it to: fetching a link you pasted, browsing free books, refreshing a feed. If you turn sync on, your library rides your own private iCloud in the background too. The article text it reads back to you is processed on the phone, and is never uploaded to us.

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: what you are reading is nobody’s business but yours. Your tab list never reaches a server of ours — we don’t have one to send it to.

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 our servers
When you tap Quick Send, Timber Tabs writes your tab list to your own private iCloud account, so Timber can pick it up on another device — that trip goes to Apple, never to us. There is still no Timber account, no analytics, and nothing new to sign in to.
It asks each site for its icon
So you can tell your tabs apart at a glance, Timber Tabs asks a site for its small icon — the same request your browser already made when you opened the tab. That is the only place it reaches besides your own iCloud, it carries no account and no history, and the icon is all it keeps.
The list is yours to move
Your reviewed list is handed to the Timber app over your own computer (localhost), or saved as a portable .timberlist file you control — AirDrop it, keep it, delete it. The only copy Timber Tabs itself ever sends anywhere is the one that goes through your own iCloud, and only when you ask.

So the same line holds on the desktop: nothing about your tabs — not a title, not an address — is ever sent to us. Save the file and it is yours to put anywhere. Send it through your own private iCloud, and only when you ask.

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.

There’s one more thing that leaves, and we’d rather say it out loud: if you turn on iCloud sync, your saved library — titles, addresses, and the article text itself — travels to your own private iCloud, so it can meet you on your other devices. That trip goes to Apple, at your request, into an account that is yours. It never comes to us. Leave sync off and it never happens at all.

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 are never handed to a server to be turned into speech. Your clipboard is the same story: Timber only ever looks at it when you hand it over, and never reads it behind your back.

So we don’t say “nothing ever leaves your phone,” because some things do, at your request — to you, never to us. We say the line we can actually keep: what you read won’t be shared. We’d rather make one promise we can prove than a bigger one we can’t.

Next: the accessibility work