What You Read Is Nobody's Business

Reading used to be the most private thing you did with a screen off. Then reading moved onto screens, and the defaults quietly inverted: mainstream reading apps log what you open, how far you get, what you highlight, when you give up — and that behavioral record is either the product or an input to one. If you've searched for a reading app that doesn't track you, you've noticed. The fix isn't a settings toggle; it's architecture.

What on-device actually covers

The claim above is only meaningful if it covers the whole pipeline, so here's the whole pipeline:

• Import and parsing. When you add a DRM-free EPUB or PDF, the parsing — including the restructuring that detects chapters and strips page furniture — runs on your device. There is no "upload to process" step.
• The AI features too. Summaries, classification, key entities, and ask-the-book Q&A run via Apple Intelligence on your hardware. This is the part that's rare: most apps' AI features are the moment your book quietly takes a trip to a server. In Velo, analysing a confidential report means your device doing the analysing.
• Reading itself. Position, stats, and history are local records for you — your measured pace on your screen — not telemetry feeding a recommendation engine. There is no feed, no ads, and no sale of data. What you read isn't a signal being harvested; it's just what you read.
• Sync is opt-in, and encrypted. With Velo Pro, your library and position can sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac — encrypted in transit and at rest. Don't opt in, and the app runs entirely locally, no account needed.

The offline behavior falls out of the same design: a library that never needs a server to be read also works fully offline — the two guarantees are one architecture.

Why this matters more for books than browsers

Browser privacy gets the attention, but a reading log is arguably more intimate than a browsing log. Books are where people take their questions — health, money, faith, doubt, a divorce, a diagnosis. A record of what you read and where you slowed down is a record of what you're going through. The correct amount of that to share with an analytics pipeline is zero, and the only durable way to guarantee zero is for the data never to leave the device in the first place.

The aligned business model is the boring one: Velo's revenue is a subscription for features with real costs (sync, read-aloud, the optional heavy-OCR pass) — not your attention, and not your data.

Verifiable, not just promised

You don't have to take the architecture on faith: import a book, enable Airplane Mode, and everything — both reading modes, the RSVP focus stream, the intelligence dashboard on an already-analysed book — keeps working, because none of it ever depended on a connection. The free tier (both modes, 3 imported books, no account required) is enough to run that test end to end before trusting the app with anything sensitive.

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