Installing VoxTerm on Android

VoxTerm ships an on-device Android app: it records the mic and transcribes fully offline with Whisper — no account, no network, no Python. The APK even ships without the INTERNET permission (microphone only).

• Works on: arm64-v8a phones, Android 7.0+ (API 24). (Virtually every phone from ~2017 on is arm64.)
• Size: ~150–230 MB — it bundles the Whisper speech model so it works offline.
• Scope: record → stop → transcript, plus export. Diarization, AI-summarize, and system-audio capture are desktop-only and hidden on the phone.

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Option A — one-off install (sideload the APK)

1. On your phone, open the latest Android build (or any tagged release) and download VoxTerm-android-arm64.apk.
2. Tap the downloaded file. Android will warn that this source isn't allowed to install apps — tap Settings, enable “Allow from this source” (this is per-app, e.g. for your browser or Files app), then go back.
3. Tap Install, then Open.
4. On first record, grant the microphone permission.

That's it — record, talk, stop, read your transcript. You can turn Wi-Fi/data off entirely; transcription runs on the phone.

Quiet/blocked install? Make sure you grabbed the .apk (not the source zip), and that your phone is arm64 + Android 7+.

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Option B — auto-updating (recommended): Obtainium

Obtainium installs apps straight from their release page and notifies/updates you when a new build ships.

1. Install Obtainium (from its GitHub releases or F-Droid).
2. Add App → paste: https://github.com/dmarzzz/VoxTerm
3. If prompted, point it at the android-latest release (or enable pre-releases) and let it pick VoxTerm-android-arm64.apk.
4. Tap Add, then Install.

Every new CI build bumps the app's internal version, so Obtainium will offer the update automatically. (Obtainium installs the developer's own signed build, and all future updates must match that signature — see below.)

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When does a new APK get published?

CI (.github/workflows/android-release.yml) rebuilds and republishes the APK when:

• a mobile path changes on main (the native plugin tauri-plugin-voxasr/, the Tauri shell src-tauri/, the shared GUI in gui/static/, or the mobile-pair/ bundle) → updates the rolling android-latest release;
• you trigger it manually from the Actions tab (with an optional model size).

Heads-up: the phone bundles a separate native Whisper engine, not the desktop Python engine. UI/shell changes flow to the app on the next build; changes to the desktop Python ASR pipeline do not (the phone uses sherpa-onnx Whisper). See the project notes on engine divergence.

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Maintainers: signing

For stable, update-compatible releases, sign every build with the same key. Generate a keystore once and store it in repo secrets.

# 1. Create a release keystore (keep release.jks SAFE and BACKED UP — losing it
#    means users must uninstall before they can install a future build).
keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore release.jks -alias voxterm \
  -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000 \
  -storepass "<STORE_PASSWORD>" -keypass "<KEY_PASSWORD>" \
  -dname "CN=VoxTerm, O=VoxTerm, C=US"

# 2. Base64-encode it for the secret (macOS shown; on Linux use: base64 -w0 release.jks)
base64 -i release.jks | pbcopy

Then add four repository secrets (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions):

Secret	Value
ANDROID_KEYSTORE_BASE64	the base64 string from step 2
ANDROID_KEYSTORE_PASSWORD	<STORE_PASSWORD>
ANDROID_KEY_ALIAS	voxterm
ANDROID_KEY_PASSWORD	<KEY_PASSWORD>

With these set, CI signs every APK with your release key (the workflow reports Release-signed: true). Without them, the job still builds an installable APK using an ephemeral debug key (Release-signed: false) — handy for trying it out, but updates across builds may require an uninstall because the signing key changes each run.