Alfread: grow reading habit

Rather than being presented with a long daunting list of your articles to read (from pocket/instapaper integration or native to the app) the app’s main view shows you one of your articles (oldest, newest or shuffled) and you can choose to read it, swipe it away to archive or swipe it to have it shown again at a later date. With other reading apps I had a feeling when I added articles to my reading list I’d never see them again, buried lower down a list by newer stuff. With Alfread I have the app set to shuffle my list, so I’m surfacing articles that I stored a long time ago, some aren’t relevant any more so I can quickly archive them and move onto the next, others I still want to read but not right now. After a few swipes I find something I want to read, in a way that feels rather fun and natural.

I’m a vociferous Pocket user, going on 10 years. I’ve repeatedly asked them to add a shuffle or random article button. This app, by virtue of its Tinder-like interface, makes everything feel fun again, just seeing one article at a time makes you think more about which to read and is a nice reminder of articles you were once excited to read. Improvements I’d like to see - turn off all the reading goals, I don’t care how many I’ve read. Also gesture choices - e.g. I don’t archive articles, but i would like to delete them with a left swipe. Deleting is many taps currently. I don’t necessarily want to see the article again 24hr later by swiping right either, how about right swipe = don’t show again? Options like this would be great. Overall though, and for a first version, great!

Despite an initial tweet from the lead developer promising a fix for the syncing problem, it has been almost a year and no resolution has been delivered. I subscribed to the pro plan of Alfred in May 2022 for the syncing feature, but it has never worked properly. It was a featured heavily advertised within the app, but never implemented. I regret investing my time and money into this service as it has been a frustrating experience from the beginning. I advise against using Alfred until these issues are addressed and resolved -- and, honestly, I would love a full refund.

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.

I want to give this a higher rating, but it simply isn’t working for me. Originally, it worked great and fast, but over time, as I added more articles, had several in progress, and ticked off more and more, the app stalled and got slower. Eventually it took 20+ seconds to launch. Then it started to force quit between articles. Then it stopped launching in general. Now I can’t even get back the articles I’ve lost because the app won’t launch (which is half of why I wanted to use Alfread in the first place - so I would never lose articles from other random app shutdowns). I only have an iPhone 7, so maybe my phone is partly to blame. I also read a TON of articles, so maybe the app wasn’t built for so much content. Anyway, fantastic idea in theory, but in practice it gets bogged down. Fix this force quit/slowdown problem and the app deserves 5 stars

The developer kindly explained to me an alternate way to disconnect my pocket account after my recent bad review. i appreciate them taking the time and am changing my review to 4 stars based on that interaction alone.

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!

Great app and ui!, but it miss a simple yet essential feature. You can’t sync 2 devices with Alfread only! You can use apps like pocket to save articles and watch them on alfred but doesn’t it mean that app failed at its core target? I mean whole idea is to make an app to save articles into and have it sync across all devices but somehow you made your self in debt of apps like pocket, its like you made an extension for pocket or isntantpaper or whatever name it has. Hope to see Alfread grow and see an update to fix this issue.

I love Alfread. If I see something I want to read but don’t have time for, I send it to the app. If I read an article in a different app, I add it to the ‘must reads’ so I can mark it as read when it pops up first. The only thing I don’t like is when the reading time is off. For example, if Alfread says it’s a one minute read because there’s only a preview of an article displayed. It doesn’t happen too often and isn’t really their fault, but something to consider. I strongly recommend Alfread.

but it stopped saving articles after a while