Privacy Policy — Pinly

Effective date: 2026-09-10

Summary

Your content never leaves your phone. Camera frames, saved photos, your vocabulary list, and any text you translate are processed entirely on your device — the OCR model, the Chinese-English dictionary and pinyin conversion are all bundled inside the app.

Pinly collects nothing about you unless you switch it on. There are no accounts, no advertising identifiers, and no third-party trackers. Three things can put anything on the network, all optional and all off until you choose them:

• Anonymous usage counts (off by default). If you turn on Share anonymous usage counts in Settings, Pinly records which features get opened, when a free limit is reached, and whether a purchase completed. Nothing else — see "Anonymous usage counts" below.

• Offline translation (Pro, off by default). If you turn it on and confirm, Pinly downloads a Chinese→English model from Google once. That brings the model in — your text is never sent out; afterward translation runs entirely on your device, even with no connection.
• Handwriting (the first time you write a character). Opening a writing pad — to fix a misread, to put a character into the Reader, to search your saved words, or to answer a review card — fetches a Chinese ink model from Google once. The pad says so while it waits. That brings the model in; your strokes are never sent out, and after that reading your writing happens on your device with no connection. We fetch it rather than ship it so that people who never write anything never pay for it in download size.
• When you tap Translate, or Share/Export. If you tap Translate on a phrase without offline translation set up, Pinly opens it in Google Translate and your browser does the sending. The .tsv / PDF / crash-log sharing likewise hands a file to an app you pick. Nothing goes anywhere until you tap.

One note about the software Pinly is built on. The text recognition comes from Google's ML Kit, which ships with a component that reports usage statistics about the recognizer back to Google, on a schedule, in the background. Pinly is built with that component removed, so nothing about your use of recognition is reported to anyone. Test builds made before 10 September 2026 still contained it; this policy's effective date marks the change. Anything such a build had queued but not yet sent stays in the app's private storage, where nothing can send it any more, and is removed if you clear the app's data or uninstall. The fonts are bundled inside the app, so nothing is fetched for those either.

If you read nothing else: nothing you read, write, save or photograph leaves your phone. Three requests can go out, and not one of them carries anything about you — two one-time model downloads (translation, which is off until you turn it on, and handwriting, the first time you open a writing pad), and anonymous usage counts, which are also off until you turn them on and carry no content of any kind. Everything else leaves only when you explicitly translate, export or share it, to a destination you pick.

What runs entirely on your device

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Pinly uses Google's ML Kit Chinese text recognition. The model is bundled in the APK and runs locally — your camera frames never leave your phone.
• Chinese-to-pinyin conversion via the pinyin4j library, bundled.
• Dictionary lookups via the CC-CEDICT Chinese-English dictionary, bundled (~125 000 entries, ~4 MB compressed in the APK).
• Text-to-speech (TTS) uses your device's Android TTS engine, which is also on-device.

What's saved on your phone

What's shared, and only on your tap

• Vocabulary export. Saves a tab-separated file via the Android system file picker (Storage Access Framework). You pick the destination — Pinly does not upload anywhere.
• PDF study sheets. Generated locally and written straight to the file you choose in the Android system file picker — the same way the vocabulary export works. Pinly does not upload anywhere.
• Translate a phrase. When you tap Translate on a highlighted phrase, what happens depends on your setting: - By default, Pinly opens the phrase in Google Translate (a translate.google.com link). Pinly makes no network request itself — your browser or the Translate app does the fetching. - If you've turned on Offline translation (Pro, off by default), the phrase is translated by the on-device model and never leaves your phone — the result shows inside Pinly. Either way, the word-by-word meanings Pinly shows come from the bundled offline dictionary.
• Crash logs. Disabled by default. If you enable them in Settings → Diagnostics, captured stack traces sit in app cache. You must explicitly tap "Share crash logs" to send them anywhere; Pinly has no servers and does not transmit them on its own.

Anonymous usage counts

Off by default. Until you turn on Share anonymous usage counts in Settings → Anonymous usage data, Pinly records and transmits nothing, and this whole section does not apply to you. You can turn it back off at any time; collection stops immediately.

If you turn it on, we record a small, fixed set of counts:

• that the app was opened
• that you saved your first word
• that you reached one of the free limits (saved words, photo library, or daily photo reads), and which one
• that an upgrade screen was shown, and what prompted it
• that a free trial was started, or a purchase completed

Alongside each count, the app sends the technical fields the analytics service needs to group them: your Android version, your language setting, Pinly's own version number, and a random session ID that is generated fresh in memory, rotates after an hour of inactivity, and is never stored — so it groups a single sitting and cannot recognise you on a later one.

What is never included: camera frames, photos, saved words or readings, translated text, file names, your location, your device or advertising ID, your IP address as a stored identifier, or anything else that identifies you or your phone. The counts cannot be linked back to a person or a device, which also means we cannot single out your data to hand back or delete on request — turning the setting off stops any further collection.

Why it exists. Pinly's free tier has limits — a number of saved words, a number of photos kept in the app, and a number of photos read per day. (Reading itself is not limited: the live camera, the clean reading page and the text reader are unlimited for everyone.) These counts are how we find out whether those limits are set fairly, instead of guessing. That is the only purpose.

Retention. Usage counts are kept for 12 months and then deleted.

Where they go. To a server we run ourselves, on infrastructure we control. There is no third-party analytics company involved and no analytics SDK in the app. The counts are never sold, never shared for advertising, and never used for any purpose other than the one above.

Our server does not record the IP address your phone connects from. Our hosting provider sees it in order to route the request, as any network does, and we neither store it nor link it to anything.

What we still do not collect

• No advertising IDs, no IDFA equivalent
• No installed-app lists
• No location data (ACCESS_*_LOCATION permissions are not requested)
• No contacts, calendar, microphone, or any other sensitive permission
• No account creation. The app has no user accounts at all.
• No content of any kind — nothing you photograph, read, save or translate is ever transmitted.

Permissions we request

INTERNET is declared to fetch two models, and for nothing else.

Offline translation (opt-in, Pro) downloads a Chinese→English model once, after you turn on the (default-off) setting and confirm a "Download (~30 MB)?" prompt. After that, translation runs on your device and your text is never transmitted.

Handwriting downloads a Chinese ink model once, the first time you open a writing pad — you tapped "Write", and the pad tells you it is fetching. After that, reading your writing happens on your device; the strokes never leave it. We fetch it rather than ship it so that people who never write anything never pay for it in download size.

Both are one-way: a model comes in, nothing about you goes out. The only other network use is the anonymous usage counts described above, which are off unless you enable them. ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE just lets the model download check for a connection first. (Before 2026-06 the manifest removed INTERNET entirely; we softened that to enable offline translation, gated behind the consent prompt above.)

Google Play Billing

If you purchase Pinly Pro, the transaction is handled entirely by the Google Play Store app on your device, which communicates with Google's billing servers out-of-process via an Android Inter-Process Communication (AIDL) call. Pinly itself never touches the network for this — we only receive the result of the purchase (succeeded / canceled / failed) from the Play Store app.

Google's privacy policy covers what Google does with that data: <https://policies.google.com/privacy>.

Children's privacy

Pinly is intended for general audiences interested in learning Mandarin Chinese, and is intended for a general audience rather than directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone: the app collects nothing by default, and the optional usage counts contain no personal or identifying information from anyone, of any age. Pinly is rated "Everyone" in Google Play.

Third-party libraries bundled in the APK

All run on-device. None send data anywhere.

• Google ML Kit — Chinese text recognition (bundled model)
• pinyin4j — hanzi → pinyin conversion
• OpenCC4J — simplified ↔ traditional Chinese conversion
• CC-CEDICT — Chinese-English dictionary data (CC BY-SA 4.0; © MDBG and contributors)
• OpenCV — optical flow tracking for stable label anchoring
• Google Play Billing Library — in-app purchase plumbing (AIDL to the Play Store app; no direct network from Pinly)

About this website

Everything above describes the app. This page, and the site it sits on, are separate — and they are the one part of Pinly you are using right now, so they get their own paragraph.

The site is static: a few HTML files and images, no accounts, no logins, no forms, and no cookies. Nothing you do here is tied to anything you do in the app; the two cannot see each other.

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see whether anyone is finding the site. It records aggregate page views, the referring site, and a country — it sets no cookies, stores no device or advertising identifier, and does not follow you to other sites. That is also why you are not being asked to dismiss a cookie banner: there is nothing to consent to.

Like any web server, our host sees the IP address your browser connects from in order to send you this page. It is not stored to build a profile of you and is not linked to anything in the app.

The site loads fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google's font servers receive the request for those files. If that matters to you, a content blocker will stop it and the page still reads fine in your system's own typefaces.

Changes to this policy

If we ever change what Pinly collects or transmits, we will update this document and bump the effective date above. The architecture is no-collection and on-device-by-default — the only network uses are the three described above: the translation-model download, the handwriting- model download, and the anonymous usage counts, none of which send anything about you — so any change in that direction would be a significant departure that we'd flag in the app's release notes too.

Contact

Questions about this policy or the app? Email hello.pinly@gmail.com. This is the support address for Pinly; we aim to respond within a few business days.

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This privacy policy is required by Google Play for any app that collects user data — even when the answer is "no, we don't." Hosting it at a publicly-reachable URL is a Play Console launch requirement.