Wcast is an open-source Android app that reads Wikipedia articles aloud using the text-to-speech service already installed on your device. It was written by one person, Joe Morris, with assistance from LLMs.
The app does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information. There is no account, no registration, and no user profile. It will save an in-app history of articles you have played, as “bookmarks” but this can be turned off in settings.
To fetch article content, Wcast sends requests to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. A request includes the search terms you type and the titles of the articles you open, so Wikipedia can return the matching content and its thumbnail images. These are the only network requests the app makes, and they are made directly from your device to Wikipedia’s servers.
Reading aloud is handled by the Android text-to-speech engine you have selected in your device’s system settings. That engine may run on your device or, if it is a cloud-based engine, send the text it reads to that cloud service engine. How your speech engine handles text is governed by that engine’s own privacy policy, not by Wcast. Wcast does not send your text anywhere itself.
Everything else stays on your device, in the app’s own private storage: bookmarked articles and your saved reading position, cached article text and thumbnails, and your settings. None of this is uploaded.
Wcast contains no advertising, no analytics, and no crash reporting. No information about how you use the app is sent to the developers or anyone else.
Wcast requests only what it needs to read articles aloud:
No microphone, camera, location, contact, or storage permissions are requested, and no audio is recorded.
Wcast is maintained at https://github.com/xenotropic/wcast. You can raise issues about privacy issues as an issue on GitHub, or you can email me at joe at morris dot cloud