Swipe left! Swipe right! Win streaks! Time to gamify your read-later pile
Ending the day with 50 unread Safari tabs isn’t good. But nor is sending articles to a read-later service and then instantly forgetting about them. Alfread (free + optional subscription) helps you grow your reading habit, so you chip away at your pile of articles on a daily basis.
Get started with Alfread
Install and launch Alfread. During onboarding, you can opt to start fresh, or connect Alfread to Pocket or Instapaper. If you use one of those services, we recommend connecting it, because this retains a single repository for your read-later articles, and gives you the flexibility to access them in both the original app and also Alfread.
Next, choose how many articles you’d like to read weekly, whether you’d like a daily reminder, and if articles should be archived if unread after a month.
Read and enjoy
Share sheet
If you are using Pocket or Instapaper, you may already have saved articles. If not, save some. Otherwise, use Safari’s Share sheet to send articles directly to Alfread.
The main Alfread interface appears as a stack of cards. To archive the topmost article, swipe left. If you don’t want to read it right now, swipe right to return it to the queue. To read something, tap it.
Swipe left! Swipe right!
The article view can be adjusted in the ‘…’ menu. When you’re done reading, you can flag the item as a favorite, share it, and/or mark it as read. You can also use the ‘<’ button to back out into the card stack again.
Should you want a more conventional list to browse, use the search tab, where articles are categorized into unread, for later, read, archived, and other groups.
Tweak Alfread settings
Alfread’s settings
Tap the profile tab to check out your basic stats, including whether you’ve hit your weekly goal. More advanced stats – along with highlighting and full text search – are available in a paid tier ($4.99/£4.49 per month or $39.99/£34.99 per year), but the free app has no major limitations.
To adjust your settings, tap the cog icon. There, you can change your theme and onboarding settings, and get a refresher on how the app works via ‘How To Save’.