This update makes reading, listening and finding your next story more comfortable. • Original chapter names and clearer contents for classic books. • Tappable footnotes with the full note text. • Reader text that follows your device’s text size, with further adjustment in Aa. • Improved layouts for larger text, clearer author names and more room for character portraits. • Clearer daily-limit messages and quieter handling when you cancel Restore Purchases. • Reliability improvements for long Book-mode stories and subscription status. • Narration reliability improvements for starting, pausing and resuming playback.

Redeem a Code, smoother adventures, a better reader and fixes for long stories. • Redeem a Code now sits beside Restore Purchases on the upgrade screen. It opens Apple's code sheet, and Pro switches on once the App Store confirms the code. Restore Purchases now tells you when the App Store can't be reached. • Play As tiles now show the painted portrait of the character you'll play, where there is one. • Adventures scroll more smoothly. • Scene art: with StoryVault Pro, a scene that has no picture offers Paint this scene, even one played before you upgraded. Without Pro, the newest scene says that scene art comes with Pro. • Tonight's Tale now has a short teaser for every story, written to fit the card. • Long stories: in Book mode a story can now go past chapter 11, and ending a very long adventure now adds its closing scene. • Write Your Own: a story with a long, detailed brief now publishes to Tales and keeps going, instead of stopping with an error. • A long direction for the next chapter no longer stops a book, and books it stopped can continue. Typed adventure moves are kept to 500 characters, so they are no longer refused. • Sleep timer: opens in a new panel, keeps time while your phone is locked, and keeps going after Restart from here. • Device voice: each speed now sounds much closer to its label, and a new speed takes effect mid-paragraph. • The page follows the narrator through long paragraphs without sliding sideways, and Back 15 seconds takes the page back with the voice. • Read-along: in adventures the marker jumps from word to word and the word keeps its own color. With Increase Contrast on, the highlight is easier to see. • In the reader, a long book title now takes two lines in the top bar. • Long book titles and author names fit better on book tiles. • VoiceOver and large text work better in the reader's panels. • Small fixes throughout.

A fresh look for StoryVault, and four new classics. • Four new classics: The Last Man, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Scarlet Plague and Aesop's Fables. • A living Home: a painted world rises from an open book, chosen by what you last read, and characters climb out of its pages. • Newly painted covers for all 84 classics and all 22 Original Worlds. • Painted portraits for the characters you can play, and for your narrators. • Undo a turn, then bring it back with Restore. • Adventures reopen where you were reading. • Try again resends your move, and dropped connections get a plain message. • Our privacy policy has been updated.

Bug fixes and small improvements.

New AI data-sharing choices with named providers and clearer controls. Offline classics and saved stories remain available when you decline.

The first screen you ever see was three pieces of stock artwork in rounded rectangles. Each one carried its own background — one purple, one navy, one almost black — pasted onto the app's own purple, so every page showed a visible seam, and about forty percent of each screen was empty. Onboarding is now built out of the app itself. The first page is a shelf of the real painted covers you actually get — Treasure Island, Dracula, Moby-Dick, Alice, Frankenstein. The second sets a real book beside the quill you write your own with. The third draws the thing the app is actually for: one path of stars that forks, and forks again. The sky behind all three is one continuous sky, so the pages read as one place rather than three unrelated cards. The night sky is a night sky now. It used to be a single flat colour with a little noise on it — end to end, its entire brightness range was 1.6 to 1, and there was not one pixel in it brighter than a dim grey. The few "stars" were a piece of parchment-coloured artwork shrunk down so far that each one came out darker in the middle than at its edges. The sky now has real depth from top to bottom, a light source the shadows agree with, and stars that are actually points of light. This runs everywhere the dark theme does — Home, Library, Browse, Profile, Settings and the opening moment. The opening animation no longer stands its book on a glowing pedestal that isn't there. Onboarding also reads correctly at large text sizes now, and fits on the smallest supported screen without cutting off its own title. Settings has lost the "Book cover style" switch. It offered Classic or Painted and drew exactly the same cover either way — the classic editions it named were removed a version ago, and the painted files behind the other option turned out to be identical copies of the covers already on screen. A control that cannot change anything is worse than no control, so it is gone, and the 25 MB of duplicated artwork behind it went with it.

The AI Adventure page was drawn in one shade of purple. The page, the passage and the three choices all sat within a few percent of the same colour, so nothing on screen had rank and nothing said who was speaking. Each passage now sits on its own plate with a gilt spine down its leading edge, and your own move is the one purple object in the transcript — the storyteller's voice and yours finally read as two voices. Listen is a proper button beneath the passage instead of a line of small gold text tucked inside it. And the choice the original author actually wrote is labelled "From the book"; before, it carried a bookmark icon and nothing that said what the icon meant. Light mode was worse than it looked. The brand gold that reads beautifully on the night theme is nearly invisible on parchment, and it was being used as ink — chapter headings, the Listen control, section titles in Settings and Profile, library headers, the reading controls. On the light theme those were sitting under 2:1 against the page behind them. They are legible now, across Adventure, the Library, the Reader, Settings and Profile. While a chapter is read aloud, the spoken word is the most readable word on the page rather than the least, and the page no longer shifts sideways as the narration moves from paragraph to paragraph. Story passages can be selected and copied. VoiceOver reads them as prose instead of announcing "button". The reader's playback controls, the Listen button and the composer's send button all have full-size tap targets, and the page-curl page turn honours Reduce Motion. The King in Yellow is divided into its ten stories instead of twenty-four fragments.

Ten of the eighty bundled classics did not begin or end where they should. The Call of the Wild opened on the publisher's front matter — a licence, a release date, a credits line, a table of contents — before the story. It now opens where Jack London did: "Buck did not read the newspapers." Frankenstein, Treasure Island, The War of the Worlds, The Wind in the Willows, Around the World in Eighty Days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and The Iliad each opened on a title page and a table of contents. They now open on their first line. The Secret Garden ran past its own last line into a list of printer's corrections. It now closes on Master Colin crossing the lawn, and stops there. The King in Yellow had twenty-four chapters for its ten stories, several of them named after stray lines of prose. It now has one chapter per story. Also: the moon over the narrator picker no longer sits on the words it was decorating, and the App Store artwork is new throughout.