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Developer builds Android read-aloud app with word highlighting after struggling to focus while reading

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A developer who struggles with reading attention and focus built an Android app called ReadAloud, now available on Google Play, that reads text aloud while highlighting each word in sync. The app supports PDFs, EPUBs, DOCX files, plain text, and web articles, with features including offline listening, multilingual support, speed reading, and a vocabulary builder. Built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, one of its core technical challenges was synchronizing word-level highlighting across both on-device and cloud text-to-speech voices, which required two separate code paths. To protect cloud API keys from being extracted from the app binary, the developer implemented an HMAC-signed request system where keys are fetched from a server and decrypted on-device using a unique per-device derived key. Early testing with two volunteers helped identify usability issues and stabilize the app before wider release.

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