Cast
Cast privacy policy
Last updated 23 October 2026.
Cast performs books with a narrator and separate voices for the characters. It plays the Carrier Press books on its shelf, and EPUB files of your own that you add. Books play with no signal, and nothing about what you listen to leaves your phone.
There is no account and no server
You do not sign in, because there is nothing to sign in to. This app has no database of ours, no cloud sync and no backend.
The voices are made on your phone
Cast reads with natural voices generated on your iPhone by an open source speech model (Kokoro), or with the iPhone's own voices if you choose them. The text of a book is never sent anywhere to be read aloud. No speech service, no language model online and no server of ours is involved, so nobody learns which book you are listening to or how far you got.
Books you add
When you add an EPUB, Cast reads it on your phone, works out who speaks each line, and keeps that prepared script in the app's own storage so the book plays again later. The copy of the file it was handed is deleted once it has been read. A book you add is never uploaded, and we never see its title or its text. Tapping Remove deletes it and your place in it.
What is stored, on your device
- Where you are in each book, as a line number and the time you were last there, so a book opens where you left it.
- Your listening settings: the reading speed, natural or iPhone voices, the narrator you picked, and whether music plays at the start and end of a book.
- The natural voice model, once you download it, so the voices work offline.
- The books you added, as described above.
- What you have bought: which books, and whether your subscription is active and until when, so the app does not have to ask the App Store every time it opens.
- When the app last asked for a rating, described below.
That is the whole list. No name, no email address, no location and no listening history beyond that one line number and time per book is asked for or kept. None of it is ever uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.
What Cast connects to
- The App Store, to show prices, to buy a book or the subscription, to restore purchases, and at launch to pick up a purchase or renewal it has not seen yet. Apple handles the payment and tells the app only that the purchase exists. We never see your card or your Apple Account.
- GitHub, once, to download the natural voice model the first time you use it. It is an ordinary file download: nothing about you or your books is sent, and after that the voices work offline.
- Expo's update service, at launch, to ask whether a newer version of the app's code is ready, which is how fixes reach you between App Store releases. The request carries the app's version, the update it is running and a random number made for this install, which says nothing about who you are or what you listen to.
Like any download, these services see your phone's internet address when it connects. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no tracking software of any kind.
The subscription
Cast: Your own books lets the books you add play in full, monthly or yearly, and may begin with a free trial. It renews automatically through your Apple Account until you cancel it in your iPhone's Settings, under your Apple Account and Subscriptions. Books on the Cast shelf are bought one at a time, each a one-time purchase of a license to listen to the full book.
On the web version
At carrierpress.com/cast/app/ Cast plays the same shelf in your browser. There are no natural voices on the web. The web version reads with the voices your browser provides, and it uses only the voices your browser marks as working on your device, so the text of a book is not sent to an online speech service. If your browser has no voice of that kind, it falls back to the browser's own default voice, which in some browsers is an online one.
When you open a book, your browser downloads that book's file from this site, the way any page loads a file; the opening first, and the rest of the book only once it is unlocked. This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, and we receive no record of which books are opened.
Books you add on the web stay in that browser. When you add an EPUB, the page reads it and finds the characters inside your browser; the book is never uploaded. What it keeps is the cast script it made, in that browser's own storage for this site (IndexedDB), and not the file you chose.
On the web, books from the shelf are sold one at a time, and the membership that opens the books you add is sold separately, both by Gumroad, which handles those payments. When you paste a key from your Gumroad receipt, the page sends that key, and only that key, to Gumroad to check it. Nothing about what you listen to or the books you add goes with it. A book's key is not kept afterwards; the browser remembers only which books it unlocked. A membership key is kept in that browser, because a membership can end: the page sends it to Gumroad again about once a day while you use it, and forgets it if the membership has ended. Your place in each book, your settings and the books you added stay in that browser's own storage for this site, and clearing site data removes them.
Deleting it
There is no account to close. Deleting the app removes everything above: your place in every book, your settings and the books you added. We hold no copy. If your iPhone backs up to iCloud or a computer, that backup includes Cast's data, as it does any app's, and stays under your Apple Account. Your purchases are held by Apple rather than by us, so reinstalling and tapping Restore purchases brings them back without paying again. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription; cancel it in Settings.
The rating prompt and Contact support
After something in the app has gone well, it may now and then ask Apple to show the App Store's own rating sheet. So that it asks rarely, it keeps one small note on your device: how many times things have gone well, the last two days they did, and the app version it last asked on. Nothing you entered is in that note, and it never leaves the device. Whatever you choose in the rating sheet is handled by Apple.
Contact support opens your own mail app with a message addressed to support@carrierpress.com. The subject line carries the app's name, its version and your phone's system version, so we know which build you mean. Nothing is sent unless you send it, and the app is not told whether you did.
Contact
Cast is published by Jeffrey L Carrier.