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Introducing Squirrel Reader

· Jason @ Swiftfox Software

Pocket shut down a year ago this month, and a lot of reading lists went with it. The apps left standing mostly fall into two camps: the ones that keep bolting on features until saving an article feels like operating a content-management system, and the ones that are thin clients for someone’s server — lovely right up until you board a plane.

I wanted the other thing: a quiet place to put the articles, videos, and podcasts I’d get to later, one that works the same in a subway tunnel as it does on wifi. So I spent a year building it. Squirrel Reader is out today on the App Store.

(Yes, the name is the “putting things away for later” joke. That’s the only time I’ll make it.)

Three rules

Every feature in the app had to justify itself against three rules.

The reader is the product. Saving, syncing, organizing — all of it exists so that when you finally open an article, reading it is good. Squirrel Reader parses articles server-side into clean, clutter-free text, then gives you real typography controls: font, size, line height, margins, justification, and a choice of scrolling or a book-like paged layout, with a two-page spread on iPad. There are five themes — Light, Sepia, Gray, Dark, and True Black — and all five are free. Charging for Sepia felt wrong.

Offline is the default, not a mode. Your entire library lives in SQLite on your device. Saving, reading, searching, tagging, and highlighting all work with zero connectivity — not “recent items are cached,” but everything, always. A custom sync engine queues your changes and reconciles them when you reconnect, and reading progress merges forward-only, so the device that read further never loses your place. Search runs on SQLite FTS5, entirely on-device, and is just as fast in airplane mode.

Calm, not addictive. There’s no algorithmic feed, no recommendations, no social layer, no streaks. There are also no ads, no analytics, and no crash-reporting SDKs — the only third-party SDK in the app is RevenueCat, which handles App Store billing. That’s not a privacy-page platitude; it’s the kind of claim you can verify by grepping the binary, and I did.

What ships today

Sign in with Apple, Google, or plain email. That’s the tour.

Free and Premium, honestly

The free tier is a working app, not a demo: 500 saved items, 3 collections, 50 highlights a month, 10 stored downloads at a time, and search across titles, tags, notes, and transcripts. The full reader and all five themes are included. Premium is $4.99/month or $39.99/year, billed through the App Store, and removes the numbers: unlimited items, collections, highlights, and downloads, plus full-text search inside every saved article, a custom reader theme builder, highlight export as Markdown, and Send to Kindle. And there are no ads on either tier, because there are no ads.

What’s shipped since this post

Updated July 21, 2026. This post is doing double duty as the launch announcement and, increasingly, a stale feature list — so here’s an honest patch note instead of quietly rewriting history above. Since the App Store listing went live, we’ve shipped:

None of this needed a new app rewrite; it’s the same three rules from above, just applied to more of what you read. There’s a full write-up of everything on the blog.

What’s next

Android is still the big one. The app is a single codebase and the Android build already runs — including the share target for saving from other apps — but purchases are iOS-only today, and I’d rather ship Android complete than ship it soon. Beyond that, expect the pace above to continue: mostly making the reader and the library better, which is still the whole point.

Go read something

Squirrel Reader is on the App Store today for iPhone and iPad, with a Chrome extension for saving from your desktop. If Pocket’s shutdown left your reading list homeless, the import screen is waiting.

Questions, bugs, or strong opinions about Sepia: support@squirrelreader.com.