What's new since launch: files, feeds, recipes, and more
Squirrel Reader launched a week ago. I said in that post that what’s next was “mostly making the reader better,” and then proceeded to add an entire second reading surface, a subscription model, and a kitchen mode. In my defense, all of it was already half-designed — read-it-later apps have a way of surfacing exactly what they’re missing the moment real people start using them. This is the roundup post for everyone who saved the app on day one and has understandably not been reading the changelog.
A place for your own books and PDFs
The library used to be exclusively things fetched from a URL. Now you can upload an EPUB or PDF directly, or just open one with Squirrel Reader from Files or Mail. Books get the complete reader — typography controls, all five themes, paged mode, highlights, synced progress, the works. PDFs open in a native page viewer that remembers your page across devices, since re-flowing a PDF’s layout is a different (and much worse) problem than re-flowing an article. Free accounts get 100 MB of storage for this; Premium gets 10 GB.
One detail I like: if you upload the same file on two devices, or upload a book you already had, it de-duplicates by content hash instead of quietly making a second copy.
Recipes
A surprising number of recipe sites embed structured data for Google’s benefit — ingredients, steps, timing, servings, all machine-readable if you know to look. So now Squirrel Reader looks. Save a recipe URL and instead of a wall of ad-supported prose about someone’s grandmother, you get a proper recipe view: servings you can scale up or down with ingredient amounts recalculating live, a unit toggle (Original, Metric, or US), checkable ingredients, and a full-screen “In the Kitchen” mode that walks through steps one at a time with the screen held awake. You can attach your own photos of how it actually turned out, which sync like everything else.
RSS feeds and newsletters, without the flood
This is the one I went back and forth on most. Feed readers have a way of turning into a second inbox that’s somehow more stressful than your first one — 200 unread items sitting there radiating quiet judgment. So subscriptions in the new Feeds tab default to manual: new entries show up as browsable metadata, and nothing becomes a real saved item in your library until you tap to add it. You get to decide what’s worth reading, the way you would with an actual newsletter, not a firehose.
If you genuinely want the old always-import behavior — for a podcast, say, where you basically want every episode — flip that one feed to auto-add and it behaves exactly like a podcast subscription always has. Either way, a subscription is a real library item: tag it, file it into a collection, and everything you save from it inherits that filing automatically.
Stash: a third place for things
Inbox and Archive turned out not to be enough. Sometimes you’ve looked at something, you’re not ready to read it, and you’re definitely not ready to say you’re “done” with it — which is what Archive has always implied. Stash is the answer: pulled out of the inbox, kept easy to find, no judgment either way. Archived items still resurface later on Home’s Rediscover shelf, for when you forgot you saved something great.
Notes on the whole article, not just a highlight
Highlights have always supported notes on a specific passage. Now an item can carry a note of its own — for the “here’s why I saved this” thought that doesn’t attach to any one sentence. There’s a dedicated button for it in the reader, and every note you’ve written across your library gathers in one place (Home’s Article Notes shelf, or /notes directly).
An AI panel that grew up
Article summaries shipped at launch. They’ve since been joined by Key Points (the article’s claims, distilled to a skimmable list), Questions (things worth sitting with after you finish), and Ask — a chat grounded in the actual text of what you’re reading, for when you want to interrogate an article instead of just finishing it. All four run on Apple Intelligence, on your device, on iOS 26 and up. Summaries, key points, and questions sync like any other field on the item; Ask conversations are deliberately not saved anywhere, by us or by the app itself — more on that trade-off in our privacy post, which I updated alongside this one.
Know your reading habits
Settings now has a Reading Stats screen: total time reading, listening, and watching, today and over the last week, plus a breakdown of what’s in your library and how much of it you’ve actually finished. It sums counters that live on your own devices — there’s no server-side analytics behind it, just arithmetic on numbers you already own.
A few smaller things
Long-pressing an item now opens straight to a metadata header — title (tap to rename), collections, and tags — instead of making you dig through three menus to see what something’s filed under. And the post-signup setup flow got longer on purpose: a short survey now sets up your Home screen’s shelves to match what you actually read, instead of shipping everyone the same generic default.
Go see it
All of this is live now — update the app, or grab it fresh on the App Store. If you want the full technical tour of any one of these, I write those up here as they ship; this post is deliberately the short version of all of them at once.
As always: support@squirrelreader.com, especially if Stash and Archive still don’t feel like the right two words for what they do. I’m not fully sure either.