Good but Dysfunctional
I have 3+ bars of wifi connection and it keeps throwing in a “connection error”.
Funnily enough the app is able to load advertisements while text can’t generated.
But where credit must be given is its formatting. Not too complex and very straightforward.
Love it
Not Anymore
I used to really love this app for its speed, privacy, freedom, and laid back nature of just being able to start and explore any story. Now it’s just as corporate, privacy disrespecting, invasive, and tracker heavy as any of the others. I can’t recommend it to anyone. If these policies have changed so much in only a few months, then I have no reason to believe they won’t change even further to scrape even more private data from users, give it to even more companies and third parties, and restrict both normal and premium users even more.
Edit after dev response:
The response was a platitude of half truths that address the local storage and marketing but not the central issues: conversations and memories still LEAVE the device even if stored long term on device, third parties still access the data without mention of how they retain, log, view, or use them, and still the persistent UUID. Saying memories are “stored on your device” doesn’t mean they’re only processed there which is the whole point. The response just feels so silicon-valley like a half apology trying to argue the differences in “stored” and “processed” without actually denying the valid privacy concerns because they’re still being sent off, processed by third parties, and potentially retained by them. Just like other privacy-invasive parties, they also keep all of the processing under the guise of “Abuse” and “Security” or legal. This is a UK company, the same UK that has arrested over 50,000 people in the last five years for social media posts. Regardless of intent- I no longer consider this app meaningfully private especially when they used to so heavily offer that everything is, and have since changed the advertising as a regular of those changes. If I could give a zero I would.
Response from developer
This review was genuinely disheartening for our small team to read. We’ve put a lot of care into PersonaChat, including its privacy, and we want to address the claims directly. We do not store your conversations on our servers or keep logs of their content. Your conversation history and memories are stored on your device. Relevant text is sent through our service to open-source models accessed through OpenRouter to generate responses. Prompts sent are not used for training. An installation identifier helps us protect the service against abuse. Its persistence across app launches does not mean we are constantly monitoring you. We do not use your conversations for marketing or sales. We accept that parts of our privacy policy were overly technical and confusing. We’ve revised the wording to explain our practices more clearly. But describing PersonaChat as having “little to no privacy” misrepresents the distinction between processing a request and storing your conversation history. We’re happy to answer specific questions. We care about getting this right, and we take your privacy seriously.
Good but
Response from developer
Thanks for the four stars! We hear you, and we’ve reduced the ads slightly in the latest release. Running the AI behind each conversation is expensive, and as a very small team, we can’t cover unlimited free usage ourselves. Ads help pay part of those costs and keep the lights on so we can continue improving PersonaChat. We don’t love the interruptions either, and we’re working to find a better balance. Thanks for supporting us!
Broke/adds
Response from developer
Hi Teresa, we’re sorry the ads have been disrupting your chats. We’ve reduced them slightly in the latest release. AI responses are expensive to run, and ads help our small team cover those costs, but they shouldn’t cause messages to disappear or chats to restart. Were you returning from an ad, or had you closed and reopened the app? Also, were the missing messages unsent drafts or messages already in the conversation? Those details would help us investigate. For characters sounding alike, the setup may be missing some context, especially in the Scenario section. A detailed description explains who a character is; the scenario establishes their situation and how they relate to you. That could explain why adding Lore helped. Try opening an existing built-in character in the editor to see how each section is written. Please join our Discord community. We’d be happy to help you build your characters and look into the chat issues with you!
