Cadence Reader
Your books stay on your device. We never receive them, on either plan. If you subscribe to Cadence Plus, we sync facts about your reading so a second device knows them.
Cadence Reader is made by SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD, registered in South Africa (registration 2026/180066/07), at 301 Turin Street, Lombardy Estate, Paradiso, Pretoria 0081, South Africa. In this policy that company is "we".
You can reach us at [email protected]. There is no other channel and no automated one. A person reads it.
This policy covers the Cadence Reader app on iOS and iPadOS, on Android, and the Cadence web reader. It is published in accordance with the requirements of the Apple App Store and Google Play, and with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA) of South Africa.
The first time you open Cadence, the app creates an account for you. You are not asked to, and there is no screen for it. There is no registration form, no email address and no password anywhere in the app.
That account is a random identifier. It is not derived from anything about you, your device, or your hardware. It exists so that a subscription has something to attach to, and so that Cadence Plus can be restored if you reinstall. How your device proves it is that account differs by platform:
A second, unrelated random identifier travels with each request. It exists only so that we can apply rate limits per device, it is deliberately not derived from the first one, and it identifies nothing about you.
The account record itself is three fields: its identifier, the date it was created, and whether it is active. There is no name field, no email field and no password field, because those columns do not exist. Attached to it are the ways your devices prove they are you, the sessions currently signed in, and, if you have ever subscribed, the subscription.
On the free plan, that is the whole of it. No book titles, no reading positions, no bookmarks and no settings. None of that leaves your device, and the refusal is on our server rather than only in the app, so it holds even if the app is modified. On Cadence Plus, the difference is sync, and section 5 lists exactly what sync carries.
There are none. We do not store passwords, we do not hash passwords, and there is no password reset, because there is nothing to reset. Your session is held as a token on your phone or as a cookie in your browser. We never store the token itself, only a one-way hash of it, so a copy of our database does not let anybody sign in as you. Signing out marks the session dead on our side rather than merely forgetting it on yours.
Cadence Reader stores what you bring and what you create so the app is useful between sessions. On the free plan this is held locally on your device only, inside the app's private storage area. It includes:
You can remove all of it by deleting books within the app, or by uninstalling the app, which permanently erases all associated local data.
This holds on both plans. We do not receive the files you import, and we do not open, store, read or index them. Cadence Plus syncs facts about your books, described next, and never the books themselves. All text-to-speech synthesis uses the on-device system voices provided by your operating system, so the text of your book is not sent anywhere to be spoken.
Sync between your devices is the service that Cadence Plus buys. It is also the only reason we hold anything about your reading. What syncs is:
That is the whole list. A second device shows you the book and knows your place, then asks you to import the file yourself.
On the free plan none of this is sent. The app does not compose the request, and our servers refuse it in any case.
Cadence Plus is sold by Apple and by Google, not by us. We never see your card, your billing address, or your store account.
What the stores tell us, and what we store, is the state of the subscription itself: which product you bought, when it runs to, whether it is set to renew, whether it was refunded or revoked, whether it is shared with you through Apple Family Sharing, and the store's own identifiers for the transaction. The stores notify us directly when any of that changes.
Your device is told only three of those things, and only so that a screen can write an accurate sentence: whether it renews, whether it is monthly or yearly, and whether it belongs to somebody else who alone can cancel it.
Any service on the internet sees some of this. We would rather name it than imply it does not exist.
We do not build a profile from any of it, and we do not use it for anything other than running and protecting the service.
Only the parties that have to:
We use no other processor, and we have no analytics or advertising partner to list. Please review the Apple Privacy Policy and the Google Privacy Policy for what those platforms collect when you download or buy through them.
We keep the account deliberately. Deleting it would mean that a reader who resubscribes a year later arrives as a stranger, loses their place in everything, and cannot restore what they paid for. If you would rather we did not, the next section is how to say so.
You can delete your account and everything we hold against it from Settings in the app, on iOS, Android and the web. You do not have to email anybody, and you do not have to prove who you are: we hold no name and no email address to check a request against, so the app asking from a signed-in device is the proof. If you would rather write to a person, [email protected] reaches one, and we act on requests there within 30 days as POPIA and the GDPR require.
What is deleted: the installation identity, the library list, reading positions, per-book settings, favourites, finished marks, bookmarks, and everything cached against the account.
What is kept: a record of the subscription transactions themselves. That record holds no identity and nothing about what you read. We keep it because refunds and renewals continue to arrive from the stores after an account is gone, and they have to be resolvable.
Two things worth knowing before you ask:
To let you bring your own content into the app, Cadence Reader uses your operating system's file picker or share sheet so you can select files to import. This is initiated by you and used solely to copy the selected file into the app's private storage. Cadence Reader does not scan, index, or upload your wider file library.
The app requests background audio permission so it can continue reading aloud with the screen off or while you use other apps. On Android it also asks for notification permission so it can show playback controls while it reads; you can decline, and the app will still play.
To show playback controls and let you resume where you left off, Cadence Reader displays the current book's title, author, cover, and progress in your device's media notification, in Live Activities on iOS, and in the home-screen resume widget on iOS and Android. The widget and the Live Activity are Cadence Plus features. This information is passed only to the operating system on your own device, through a shared app group on iOS and app-local widget storage on Android, and is never transmitted to us or to any third party. Removing the widget or deleting the book clears it.
Cadence is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect anything from one. We do not participate in Apple's Kids Category or Google Play's Designed for Families programme. The app contains no chat, no user-generated content sharing, and no advertising. It does offer an optional subscription, which is bought through the store and subject to whatever purchase controls you have set there.
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to object to how we use it, or to receive a copy. Write to [email protected] and we will answer. Section 11 is the fastest route to deletion, and it does not require you to write to us at all.
Under POPIA in South Africa you have the right to be notified about whether your personal information is being processed, to request access to it, to request correction or deletion, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with South Africa's Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za). Where the GDPR applies to you, the equivalent rights are available on the same email address.
Data on your device resides within the sandboxed, private storage that iOS and Android provide to each app, protected by your device's own security model. Data in transit to our servers is encrypted. Session tokens are stored only as a one-way hash, as described in section 2. We recommend keeping your operating system up to date and securing your device with a passcode or biometric lock.
If we change what we do, we change this page before the change ships, not after. The "Last updated" date above is when it last changed. Where a change is significant, we will say so in the app.
For any questions about this Privacy Policy or your privacy, contact our Information Officer at:
SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD
301 Turin Street, Lombardy Estate, Paradiso
Pretoria 0081, South Africa
Email: [email protected]
Web: subvertingcomplexity.com