Four things break most read-aloud apps: playback dies when the screen locks, the app forgets where you were, a book sits on "processing" for a quarter of an hour, and the good voice quietly disappears the moment your signal dips. PhonoLeaf has none of the four, and not by luck. Each one is a consequence of where the audio is made.
Most reading apps play audio as a simple sound file. When the screen locks, Android is free to suspend the app that was feeding it, and the sound stops. Getting around that needs a proper background service and a wake lock, which is more work than it sounds and is why so many apps skip it.
PhonoLeaf runs one. Playback survives the lock, the pocket and the walk, and the lock screen carries real controls rather than a dead notification.
A position stored only in memory is gone the moment the app is killed, and a position stored per account rather than per book gets overwritten the next time you open something else.
PhonoLeaf writes your position to the device on every page turn and every time you leave the app, separately for each book. Not near where you were. Where you were.
If an app makes the audio on a server, your book joins a queue with everyone else's. A long book means a long wait, and a busy evening means a longer one.
PhonoLeaf makes the voice on your phone, one sentence ahead of the one you are hearing. There is no queue to join, so there is nothing to wait for.
Cloud voices degrade deliberately. When bandwidth drops, the app falls back to a lower-quality voice so that something keeps playing. It is a sensible engineering decision that sounds terrible.
A voice generated on the device has nothing to degrade to. It is the same voice on five bars, one bar, and none.
Usually because it plays audio without a proper background service, so the system suspends it when the screen locks. PhonoLeaf runs a real foreground service with a wake lock, so playback continues.
Because the position is held in memory, or stored in one place shared across books. PhonoLeaf saves it to your device on every page turn, separately for each book, down to the paragraph.
Yes. Once your voice is downloaded and a book is saved for offline listening, it keeps reading with no connection at all, including generating new audio as it goes.
Because the audio is being generated on a server and your book is in a queue. PhonoLeaf generates the voice on your phone as it reads, so there is no queue.
No. The voice is generated on your device, so there is no streaming quality to fall back from.
Free to start, and the first walk will tell you whether it holds up.