Privacy Policy¶
Effective 30 August 2026.
This policy covers the wuDict Android app (com.legbehindneck.wudict) and
the wudict program it is built from, on every platform.
The short version¶
wuDict collects no data about you, and sends none anywhere.
There is no account, no sign-in, no cloud, no analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting and no third-party SDK of any kind. The app has no server to talk to. Your dictionaries, your searches and your settings never leave your device.
This is a property of how the program is built rather than a promise about how
we behave: wuDict runs a small web server inside the app itself, bound to
127.0.0.1, and shows its pages in a WebView. The INTERNET permission you see
in the Play listing exists so the app can reach that server on your own device.
It is the only permission this build declares.
What the app stores, and where¶
Everything the app keeps is written to storage that belongs to the app and to no one else:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Dictionary files you import | The app's own external files directory |
| The prepared search index built from them | The same place |
| Your settings and search history | The same place |
Nothing is encrypted or uploaded, because nothing leaves the device.
The app declares allowBackup="false", so none of it is copied into Google's
Auto Backup either. Uninstalling the app deletes all of it. You can also
clear it at any time from Android's Settings ▸ Apps ▸ wuDict ▸ Storage ▸ Clear
storage, which removes the whole library, the imported dictionaries and the
settings in one step.
Permissions¶
This build declares four permissions, none of which grants access to anything about you:
INTERNET— used solely to connect to the wuDict server running inside the app on127.0.0.1.FOREGROUND_SERVICEandFOREGROUND_SERVICE_DATA_SYNC— granted at install time, with no prompt. They let preparing a dictionary keep running while you are in another app, instead of being killed halfway through.POST_NOTIFICATIONS— the only one you are ever asked about, and only the first time a dictionary is prepared. It shows the progress notification for that work. Decline it and everything still works; you simply will not see the progress.
It declares no storage permission at all. Dictionaries are imported through Android's system file picker (the Storage Access Framework), which gives the app access to the one file you chose and nothing else. The app cannot read, list or scan your storage.
It requests no location, no contacts, no camera, no microphone, no phone state and no identifiers. It does not read the clipboard, and it does not use the Advertising ID.
The one exception: dictionary content¶
Dictionary files are authored by third parties, and an article inside one can contain a link or a reference to something on the internet.
- Links. Tapping an external link hands it to your browser. wuDict does not open it and does not follow it.
- Embedded remote resources. If a dictionary's article references an image,
font or script by an
http://orhttps://address instead of bundling it, your device will request that address while the article is displayed, and the server at the other end will see your IP address the way any web request does.
This is the dictionary's doing, not the app's, and it is uncommon — a self-contained dictionary file bundles its own media. If it matters to you, the app works fully with the network turned off; only such embedded references will fail to load.
Data collected by Google Play¶
Distributing through Google Play means Google collects information about installs, and receives crash and ANR reports from Android itself, under Google's own privacy policy. We can see that only as aggregate statistics in the Play Console — install counts, device and country breakdowns, stack traces. It is not collected by the app, we cannot connect it to you, and it does not include anything you looked up.
If you install the FOSS build from GitHub instead, none of this applies.
Children¶
wuDict is a dictionary reader. It collects no data from anyone, of any age, and contains no advertising and no in-app purchases.
Your rights¶
Regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal data a service holds about you. We hold none. There is no account to close, no profile to export and no record to delete, because none was ever created. Every byte the app produced is on your device and under your control.
Open source¶
wuDict is free software under the GPL-3.0-or-later. The claims on this page are checkable: the source is public, and so is the build.
- Source: github.com/wuweidict/wudict
Changes to this policy¶
If this policy ever changes, the effective date at the top changes with it and the previous text stays in the repository's history. A change that affected what the app collects would arrive with an app update, not quietly.
Contact¶
Questions about this policy, or about anything on this page: