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About Cove

Cove is a family of four offline AI Android apps — Travel, Voice, Photo, and Health — built by one indie developer running on coffee, a Pixel 9, and a stubborn belief that the AI default of "send it to the cloud" is the wrong answer for personal moments.

Why I started building it

In 2025 I found myself sitting in a café in Tokyo, trying to translate a menu while watching three different cloud translation apps fail in succession — captive Wi-Fi, expired roaming plan, server timeout. The waiter was patient, but I was paying $14 a day for a roaming plan and uploading every menu I read to a US server I had never heard of.

That same week, Google released Gemma 4 E2B, a model small enough to run on a phone but capable enough to handle real-world translation. The combination — frustration plus a shipped technology — was the moment Cove stopped being a vague idea and became a thing I had to build.

What I'm trying to make

Four focused apps, one engine, zero network dependency for the work that actually matters:

  • Cove Travel — translation in menus, signs, and conversations, with the model on the device.
  • Cove Voice — meeting and lecture recording with on-device transcription and AI-organized notes.
  • Cove Photo — point your camera at anything, get answers and follow-ups locally.
  • Cove Health — a private, on-device companion for general health questions and a personal health journal (never a doctor).

What I refuse to do

A small list, in order of how often I get asked to break each one:

  • No silent uploads. Photos, voice, and health entries process on your device.
  • No subscription gates on the basic feature. A monthly fee for translating a menu is the wrong shape of business.
  • No third-party analytics SDKs in the apps. The website uses cookieless Cloudflare Analytics; the apps report only crash logs with no user content.
  • No venture capital. I would rather grow slowly and keep the dark patterns out than scale a privacy compromise.

How it gets built

Stack-wise, the apps are written in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose, run Gemma via LiteRT-LM on the device's NPU, and use Room for any local persistence. The website is Astro + TypeScript with content collections for blog posts. Every commit goes through a CI matrix that includes Lighthouse, axe accessibility, and a thin-content guard for the blog.

The deeper engineering reasoning is in the why-offline piece and the on-device AI explainer.

Roadmap, honestly

The current phase is shipping Cove Travel as the flagship, with Voice, Photo, and Health pages live and apps to follow on Google Play. The five-year version is Cove as a small, sustainable studio — the kind where I write the code, answer support email, and keep the privacy line clean.

If you want to try it, the download page has signed APKs. If you want to follow along, the home page has an email signup that goes out roughly once a month, written by me, no marketing team involved.

Get in touch

For anything — including privacy questions — email [email protected]. I read every email; replies may take a day.

More about the person behind Cove

Background

I've been writing software for about 18 years. Most of my career was at large companies on infrastructure and systems work — not the AI hype track, but the kind of engineering where you ship code that runs at scale and stays running. AI-assisted coding changed what an indie developer could realistically ship in 2025–2026. Cove is what I built with that leverage.

Why no venture capital

I've taken a public position to not raise venture capital for Cove. Here's why: VC math requires 10x exits, which forces every product decision toward maximizing per-user revenue (subscriptions, upsells, dark patterns). One-time purchase + on-device privacy is the opposite of that math — it's the right model for users but the wrong model for VC. I'd rather build a smaller business that lets me keep saying no to the things VCs would force me to say yes to.

How you can support without spending money

  • Honest Play Store review

    If Cove earns its place in your phone, leave a star rating and a sentence on Google Play. Star ratings dictate Play Store ranking — your two minutes is worth more than any marketing I could buy.

  • Tell one person

    If Cove solved a real problem for you, mention it to one friend who'd benefit. One specific recommendation from a real person beats any ad.

  • Send specific feedback

    Email [email protected] with what you wish Cove did differently. Real feedback shapes the roadmap more than abstract surveys ever could.

How to reach me

Email [email protected] — every email comes to me directly, and I read all of them. I don't have a personal Twitter account I update; I don't do podcast interviews; I don't speak at conferences. The product is the public output. The email is the support channel.