Earleaf: an offline audiobook app built out of frustration

A developer switched from iPhone to Android after 15 years and missed his audiobook app so much that he built one. Earleaf is $4.99, with no ads, no subscriptions, and no tracking. It plays locally stored audiobooks. The killer feature is Page Sync — photograph a page from your physical book and the app finds that exact spot in the audio within about two seconds.

Earleaf downloads a 40MB speech-recognition model, transcribes the entire audiobook offline with millisecond timestamps, runs OCR on the photographed page, then does fuzzy matching. All of it happens on the phone, no internet required.

Beyond Page Sync, Earleaf has nested collections (collections inside collections), separate listen-through tracking so each pass through a book keeps its own position, and per-book playback speed with time displays that adjust accordingly. Cover art search requires a one-time internet connection; otherwise the app works entirely offline. "Not really a philosophical choice," the developer wrote. "An audiobook player just doesn't need to be online."

Previously:

• F-Droid: A free, open, privacy-oriented Android app store