Alfread: grow reading habit 4+

5 stars for indie makers! Support Small Biz/Independents

The app has a great foundation. The potential is huge! Some features are still needed to become premium and/or making this primary or secondary read it later app. I usually use two.

Reading only on iOS is fine. However, no API (unless there’s a private beta available?), and mostly, can’t save content outside iOS. I usually add content on desktop (Mac). If or when content can be added elsewhere, being able to customize tags, organizing, when adding would be great.

Always important: This is made by independent devs. Not a team with $10M in funding or part of a company doing tens of millions in revenue or more. You can verify this by a quick online search.

Developer Response ,

Thanks a lot for such a detailed review, appreciate it!
Can you elaborate on needing API? What would you use it for? (You can reply to hello at alfreadapp dot com)

We’re working on a Mac app which will allow saving links from browsers natively via Share sheet. Browser extensions for desktop will come after that.

Thanks again!

The core flow of saving from Safari does not work

I was excited to try this app on my Mac, and followed the instructions to set up basic sharing to Alfread from Safari (just enable it in the share menu). After doing that, I found I could never actually share articles to Alfread from Safari because it doesn't show up in the share menu after enabling it. I tried seeing if it was based on the website or something but it doesn't show up when trying to save any article-like content, whether from Substack or Fortune. Of course I go to Alread and click the "add more articles" button to make sure I'm not missing anything. Nope, it just says the way is to share from browser. I go to close the support article, but you can't – the button at the bottom just says I've read the article before, so I have to close the app. Then I reopen, and find there is no way to just paste the link and have Alfread fetch the article. Hopefully this is fixed and I can re-review!

Alfread makes reading a pleasure

Lovely app with a great clean UI. I love being able to send news articles from the web or an app to Alfread so that when I get more morning coffee I have some great articles to read. You can toggle between article view (reader) and the web view. You can copy/paste text, share article, favorite it, etc.

I would love to see is support for Apple News. I pay $10 a month to Apple but it doesn’t bring the article into Alfread (just a link to the source which won’t load if behind a paywall).

Hoping the developers are doing well. Would love to have paid upgrade features for highlighting the text while reading out loud, the ability to look up words, etc.