What if your AI app didn't need the internet?

A story about building Narra — an offline AI e-reader — and what it taught me about what software can actually do without a cloud.

Summary: I built an e-reader that translates any book into a bilingual reading experience entirely on your device — no internet, no subscription, no data leaving your phone. This is what I learned about on-device AI, architectural discipline, and why "offline-first" is a feature, not a constraint. Android on Google Play · GitHub

The moment the idea became real

A few months ago I was reading a novel in German. I'm not fluent. Every two or three sentences I'd hit a word I didn't know, open Google Translate on my phone, switch back to the book, and try to remember where I was.

I stopped counting how many times I broke flow. It was somewhere north of forty in a single chapter.