Last updated: 5 September 2026
Bookaroo keeps your reading on your phone. There is no account to create, no server of ours for your library to sit on, and no analytics, advertising or tracking SDKs in the app.
We — the people who make Bookaroo — cannot see your books, your reading, your notes or your quotes. Not because we promise not to look, but because none of it is ever sent to us.
Four things do leave your phone, and only in the circumstances described below: the words you type into book search, the backups you choose to send to your own cloud storage, a check for app updates when the app starts, and anything you write to us yourself.
Everything you record — books, shelves, reading sessions, dates, ratings, notes, quotes, tags and settings — is stored in a database file on your device. It is not uploaded anywhere as part of using the app.
If your phone makes its own backups (iCloud device backup, or Android’s Auto Backup), that copy is made by your phone’s operating system under your own account, governed by Apple’s or Google’s terms rather than ours.
When you search for a book by title, author or ISBN, or scan a barcode, Bookaroo sends what you searched for to one or both of:
Those services receive the words or the ISBN, plus the technical details any web request carries, including your IP address. They do not receive your library, your reading history, or anything identifying you as a Bookaroo user, because Bookaroo has no identity for you to be.
Cover images are downloaded from those same services when a book has one, which also involves a request from your device to them.
Their handling of those requests is covered by their own policies: Google’s, and the Internet Archive’s, which operates Open Library.
Scanning a barcode, or photographing a cover to read its title, happens entirely on your device. Bookaroo uses your operating system’s own text recognition; the photograph is not uploaded, is not stored, and is discarded as soon as the text has been read from it.
The camera is only ever active on the scanning screens, and only after you have granted camera permission.