Dictation runs on your phone.

Version 1, last updated 26 October 2026. This policy covers the Inmost app for Android. The Mac app has its own policy. Every sentence here describes what the app's code does, not what we would like it to do.

The short version

Dictation runs on your phone. Nothing is uploaded unless you turn cloud dictation on, and that switch is off when you install the app. Nothing you swipe or type is uploaded, ever.

What leaves your phone

There is one switch that sends a recording off the phone, and one that sends text. Both are off in a fresh install.

Cloud dictation sends each recording to cloud.inmost.app, where it is transcribed and the text comes back. Nothing else about the recording is sent: not the field it goes into, not the app, not what was said about it. A recording is at most 300 seconds and 20 MB, and the app refuses a longer one before it uploads anything.

Rewrite can only be on while cloud dictation is on. While it is on, the text of each finished transcript is sent to cloud.inmost.app to be tidied, and the tidied text comes back. The audio is not sent again, and there is no dictionary to send because the app has none.

The only host those two switches talk to is cloud.inmost.app, over HTTPS. The app does not follow a redirect, so a request cannot be handed to another host.

Downloading a larger model is the one other time the app uses the network, and only if you tap Download on that model. The files come from Hugging Face (huggingface.co), like any download on a phone, and each one is checked against its size and its SHA-256 before the model is allowed to run. No text, no audio and no id goes with that download.

There is nothing else. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no advertising code, no account, and no update check.

Audio: the answers Play asks for

• What is collected: the audio of a recording, as a 16 kHz mono WAV file. Google Play's data types call this, "Voice or sound recordings".
• Is it optional: yes. Cloud dictation is off in a fresh install and stays off until you turn it on, and you can turn it off again whenever you like.
• Is it required for the app to work: no. The bundled engine transcribes on the phone and needs no network at all. With cloud dictation off, the app opens no connection.
• Is it encrypted in transit: yes. The audio goes to cloud.inmost.app over HTTPS, and the app will not follow a redirect to another host.
• Who transcribes it: our own proxy passes the audio to Microsoft's transcription service for that one request, and Microsoft acts as our service provider while it does.
• How long it is kept: the proxy stores no audio. It answers with the transcript and keeps nothing of the recording: no file, no copy, no excerpt. The one thing left behind is the length of the recording in seconds, so a free allowance cannot be reset by reinstalling.

The install identifier

With no license pasted, each cloud request carries an install identifier: a random number made on your phone the first time it is needed, used to count the free allowance for that phone and to stop one address from minting unlimited free trials. It is not derived from your hardware, your account or your email. We call it an install id rather than an anonymous id because it is one number that stays the same for the life of the install.

Next to it, the proxy keeps one row per install id: the seconds transcribed, how many requests, and when the row last changed. The first request from an install id on a given day also records the network address the request came from with that day, so one address cannot claim more than three new installs in a day. That address row belongs to its day and is not used for anything else.

If you paste a license, requests carry the license instead and the install id is not sent. The proxy then records the seconds used against the license id for the current month.

What stays on the phone

• Recordings. While you dictate, the audio is written to the app's own storage on the phone. A recording you cancel is deleted the moment you cancel it. A recording that was transcribed is not deleted by the app, so it stays there until the app's storage is cleared or the app is uninstalled.
• Kept takes. If a recording fails to reach the cloud, a copy is kept in the app's own files so it can be tried again. The ten most recent are held and older ones are deleted. Settings → Recordings turns this off.
• Your words. When you type or dictate a word the shipped dictionary does not know, the app remembers it after the second use, on the phone only, up to 500 words, and offers it ahead of the shipped list. Settings → Your words shows them, can forget one on a long press, and has a button that forgets every one. No cloud request carries them.
• Practice. The practice screen, where you swipe a short story on your own keyboard, writes one line per swipe to a file in the app's own storage: the word you were asked for, the word the keyboard produced, the shape of your gesture and the key positions it was made on. It is on by default, it stops at 256 KB, it is never sent anywhere, and Settings → Practice has a switch to stop it and a button that deletes what it kept. A swipe you make while dictating or typing normally is not recorded at all.
• Your key. A pasted license is encrypted with a key held in the Android keystore, and the credential is replaced with [key] in every line the app logs.

What is not collected

• No account, no sign-in, no email address, no name.
• No contacts, no calendar, no photos, no files, no location.
• No keyboard history: the app keeps no log of what you type, and its suggestions come from the shipped word list and the words you have taught it.
• Nothing from a password field. The keyboard shows no microphone there, and the app refuses to read or write a field Android marks as a password.
• No advertising id, no analytics, no crash reports, no diagnostics uploaded anywhere.
• Nothing at all while cloud dictation is off: with that switch off, the app opens no network connection, not even to check for an update.

Deleting your data

• On the phone. Settings → Your words → Forget every learned word deletes the words the keyboard learned. Settings → Practice → Forget what practice kept deletes the practice file. For everything else, the recordings, the license and this app's settings, use Android's Settings → Apps → Inmost → Storage → Clear storage, or uninstall the app. Those are the phone's own controls and they remove all of it.
• Audio already sent. There is nothing to delete. The proxy keeps no audio, and the transcript is not stored on our side.
• The usage row. An install id's seconds, and the network address kept for its day, are the only things about you that remain on our side without a license, and the app has no way for you to ask for them to be removed. Until there is one, write to privacy@inmost.app and say what you want deleted.

Changes

A change to how the app handles your data is a change to this page in the same commit, and the version above goes up. If this page and the app disagree, the app is right and the page is a bug: write to privacy@inmost.app.

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