Privacy Policy — Pinly

Effective date: 2026-08-24

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.
• 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. Anki / PDF / crash-log sharing likewise hands a file to an app you pick. Nothing goes anywhere until you tap.

One system-level footnote: Android's font provider (a separate Google process, not Pinly) may fetch the Inter display font on first run — the same mechanism most modern apps use, and it carries none of your data.

If you read nothing else: Pinly has no servers and no analytics. Nothing leaves your phone automatically — only what you explicitly translate, export, or share, to a destination you choose.

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

• Anki vocabulary export. Saves a tab-separated text 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 offered via a system Share intent — you pick the destination (email, Drive, etc).
• 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 camera time), 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 daily camera allowance. 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.

Processor. The counts are handled by a third-party analytics provider acting on our behalf. They are not sold, shared for advertising, or used for any purpose other than the one above.

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 for one purpose: the opt-in, Pro Offline translation feature 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. The only other network use is the anonymous usage counts described above, which are also 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 use is the opt-in translation-model download described above — 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 marcusliewjy@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.