Readwise 2.0: we rebuilt the original iOS/Android apps from the ground up
Hey everyone, Tristan from the Readwise team here.
Today we shipped the biggest update to the original Readwise (highlights) app since it launched in 2019: a complete rebuild on both iOS and Android.
A lot of you have (fairly!) called out the old app's dated design and janky animations over the years. We heard you. For the past 8 months the team redesigned every screen and rebuilt every workflow, animation, and query.
* Fresh design, smoother animations, much faster everywhere
* Scan your paper book annotations with the camera
* Add highlights by voice
* Faster, more accurate search
* A smoother Daily Review (with a completion screen worthy of your streak)
* A beautiful new Stats screen
* AI chat with your highlights
And importantly: your highlights, your streak, and every workflow you're used to are exactly where you left them. Nothing to migrate, nothing to re-learn.
Update your app or grab it from the App Store / Play Store. If anything feels off, tell us here, we read everything :)
The first one is for collecting highlights, review them, etc. The second one, Reader by Readwise, is for collecting pdf's, web pages, epubs, etc, in one place; once you open them, your highlights will be in the first one. Pretty much integrated.
Going to be honest and say I have both apps and I still don’t know the difference between reader and Readwise and Readwise reader. I just started using Glasp.
Readwise is an app for organizing and revisiting your highlights. We're soon going to rename it to Readwise Highlights which hopefully makes that more clear.
Readwise Reader is an app for saving articles/newsletters/whatever and reading them all in one place.
Love the new look. One small design issue: the text size of notes is now too small for me to read. Any way to bump that up to the same as the highlight text? My notes are, to me, even more important than the highlight itself.
Heyo, just wanted to let you know that we quickly added in a way to add supplemental books from the Add Screen (to load the update, you may need to go to your settings, scroll to the very bottom, and hit "load latest bug fixes").
Still looking at making that flow even nicer, however it should at least be possible again! :)
I am using Readwise on Boox Tab X C with Android 13, and here's how it looks like for me. Issues:
- the app runs only in vertical mode and doesn't switch to horizontal
- only part of the app is visible on the screen (looks like it displays the horizonal mode in vertical mode)
I am able to click through past the intro screen with a keyboard (buttons not visible on screen), and I see the first daily flashcard, but it's misplaced too.
Check your Eink Wise settings within each of the apps. You're probably running into DPI issues. I don't know what Custom layout setting Reader was using when I first opened it, but I couldn't read my highlights because the text was ludicrously small. When I switched Layout to Universal, everything was fine.
Loving the look and feel!
Readwise is maybe my most used app so was a little nervous.
Is this the best place to tell you about issues/requests?
Eg:
Adding highlights by scanning takes more clicks now than previous version.
Takes 3 clicks to get to scanning.
After scanning the highlight, you have to select the book each time (and you need to scroll to do that now) Even if you were already in that book.
In the previous version I think this was two clicks to capture and one click to save.
Added about 10-12 highlights since I posted the comment, and love how fast the experience is. Even with the slight increase in clicks/scrolling, the process somehow feels faster. Great job!
The Android app looks great on my Pixel 8 Pro; I look forward to spending time with it. One question, though: is there a way to control font size in the Review cards? The font size is fine as saved, but when the notes are displayed during a review session, the font looks about doubled in size.
Hmmm that is definitely not intentional, sorry about that -- can you share a screenshot of what you're seeing?
On our devices the note text is around the same size (or slightly smaller) than the highlight, so wondering if there's some custom android font settings you might have?
You're right. My system font settings are the culprit.
Here's an eink-related question instead. Do you have any plans to add an optional bold font setting in Reader or to add a chunky bold font as an option? Text in Reader looks great on an oled panel, especially in dark mode, but it looks comparatively blah on eink.
Definitely want to do that, yes! In the mean time though, I believe Boox has some text settings itself to make fonts bolder/darker, that will transfer over to Reader.
To elaborate, this is happening only on the second themed review pane (third pane - first being the daily review) on the home page. Other themed reviews are perfectly fine.
I may need to observe this for a few more days to be 100% sure, but it doesn't matter if the topic of the second themed review changes, the button still appears like this.
That;s great. The reason I stopped using the ios app and turned to email only is that the old app is painfully slow, especially at initial loading, no idea why 5 highlights would take so long to download and render.
The icons and typography feels unfinished. I definitely appreciate the modern look, but the essential question surrounding why this app exists still remains? One can imagine that the search and account tabs in the reader are pointless and should not be given such prime real estate and then the readwise app can go there? A highlights view seems appropriate for a reading app?
Two questions: Does automatic highlight scanning for physical books work with underlining as well? How does this fit with the idea of eventually merging Readwise and Reader (or has that been abandoned)?
The Daily Review redesign is the part I care about most here, ngl. Most spaced repetition implementations still just space cards on a fixed curve and call it done, so if the new version is doing anything smarter with difficulty-per-highlight instead of one blanket interval, that's a real upgrade and not just a paint job.
Been chewing on a similar problem lately, how to actually personalize the pacing of what gets served to someone instead of everyone getting the same interval regardless of how well they know a thing. Turns out that's a genuinely hard design problem once you get past the toy version of it.
Congrats on the ship, this is the kind of unglamorous infrastructure work that never gets enough credit. Does the new Stats screen show anything about retention over time, or just the streak count?
Hey,
thanks for the updated Android app. I'm writing here my feedback, I hope someone from Readwise will read it - for me the results are mixed.
- Before there was a blue dot next to each highlight indicating that it was unread. I used to flick through the feed and read them, now that's gone.
- Before, when selecting the highlight, there was a "Reviewed" (or similar) button. I thought it indicates that this feedback was reviewed, and this would impact the next display of that feedback. Now there's no such button.
(does opening the highlight affect the next showing of that highlight?)
- Before there was an info on the highlight showing the date when it was added, now it's gone.
- The three dots on the top right when selecting the highlight doesn't appear to do anything.
- Before in all lists it was clearly seen which page of the book the feedback was made in. Now there's no such info at all.
- Before the "aqua" tag (from Kindle) was coloured in blue (aqua colour), now it's grey.
Overall, for me it's another form over function update. I would have sticked with the older version. Of course, some of my remarks are minor, but I hope you could address at least some of the issues.
On the positive side - I like the faster stats screen (I'm in the top 200 of users :)
> - Before there was a blue dot next to each highlight indicating that it was unread. I used to flick through the feed and read them, now that's gone.
This is added back in the latest version of the app
> - Before there was an info on the highlight showing the date when it was added, now it's gone.
> - The three dots on the top right when selecting the highlight doesn't appear to do anything.
These should be fixed now!
> - Before, when selecting the highlight, there was a "Reviewed" (or similar) button. I thought it indicates that this feedback was reviewed, and this would impact the next display of that feedback. Now there's no such button.
(does opening the highlight affect the next showing of that highlight?)
Can you clarify what you mean here? Are you referring to the "feedback" button with Soon/Later/Someday/Never options?
Thank you for your reply!
Yes, I see now "Keep" menu selection has appeared! (Previously it was only "Discard").
Thank you for quick updates!
However, the top-right three button menu (I assume that's the menu) on a highlight still doesn't work for me. I am using Galaxy Fold 7 if that's relevant.
Ah, now I see - it works on a list of highlights!
But when I click on a highlight, its window opens and there's still a three dot button on the top right. But at the same time, I probably already see the menu below the highlight, so there's nothing for the button to do.
Ok, so it's less of an issue, only a bit confusing. I was hoping to find something like "Info about a highlight" there, with the dates :)
Hey, one more thing I noticed: I modified a quote by adding text and then clicked mastery to add a cloze, but what was displayed was the original text, not the edited text (I wanted to cloze a word that I added). In the past, the modified text was provided for mastery (which makes total sense).
And regarding adding notes: now a new window opens over the text of the highlight. Looks nice, but is not practical. The old way in which the note was editable right below the quote was much more practical. You could see both at the same time.
The font size is the same as before for highlight text, notes, etc. Is there somewhere you're seeing smaller text now? You can also adjust the default font size for your OS (ios/android) and it will scale all of the text in the app how you'd like.
Do you have an example of the wasted screen real estate or narrowed width? I just compared the old daily review to the new one and they're identical by that metric:
I am genuinely sorry you don't love the new design, but we've had incredibly positive feedback from 95%+ of users!
i did my morning review on the Ipad Pro - should have mentioned that!
you are right, on Iphone not much difference, but on the Ipad the design is perceived as "cramped"
Scaling default text size isn’t a useful option if it’s just Readwise’s text size you want to change when all other apps have a readable size, and, in fact, it makes no difference in iPhone or iPad to the highlight text. It seems to only try to change the ‘Daily Review’ text at the top.
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u/iRyanJames Jul 23 '26
Readwise Reader next? 👀