Summary
Smoothie is designed to keep most of your reading data on your device. The app stores articles, preferences, discovery topics, and reading state locally. Some features send article text or excerpts to third-party services when they need network access to fetch an article, discover new articles, or generate AI-assisted output.
Information stored on device
- Saved articles and imported content.
- Reading progress, focus-assist settings, and reader preferences.
- Discovery topics, trusted sources, and related local ranking state.
- An optional AI API key if you choose to enter one in the app settings.
This information is stored locally using on-device app storage such as DataStore and a local database.
Information sent over the network
- URLs, page content, or feed data may be requested from websites or RSS/Atom feeds so Smoothie can import or discover articles.
- If you use AI-assisted features, Smoothie may send article text, article excerpts, or your search prompt to an external AI provider to generate smoothing, classification, summaries, or search-generated reading output.
- If you provide your own API key, requests may be sent to the provider associated with that key. Smoothie currently supports a MiniMax-based path and may use other network-backed fallback pathways for some AI features.
What Smoothie does not do
- It is not built as an advertising network.
- It does not sell your personal information.
- It does not require account creation for core reading and import flows.
Discovery and feed handling
Discovery topics and trusted sources are used to rank and prefetch candidate articles for the in-app “For you” shelf. This logic is driven by the app and local preferences. Public feeds and linked webpages may still receive ordinary network requests from your device when Smoothie refreshes discovery content.
Sharing and clipboard handling
If you use share sheet, file import, clipboard import, or search, Smoothie processes only the content you explicitly provide to that feature. Clipboard data is handled only when you trigger clipboard import inside the app.
Retention and deletion
Articles, preferences, and locally stored reading data remain on your device until you delete them, clear app storage, or uninstall the app. Third-party service providers may retain request data under their own policies when a network-backed feature is used.
Third-party services
Smoothie may rely on third-party services for article fetching, discovery feed retrieval, and AI-assisted generation. Those services process data under their own terms and privacy policies.
Contact
For privacy questions, use the developer contact details provided in the app listing or distribution channel where you installed Smoothie.
Policy updates
This policy may be updated as the app’s discovery, AI, or import features evolve. The effective date above will change when updates are published.