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Read or listen on your Apple Watch, one word at a time.

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Fact sheet

Developer: Sean Henley, independent
Release: 15 December 2026
App Store: apps.apple.com/app/id6818735379 (pre-order now)
Platform: Apple Watch with watchOS 27 or later (Series 9 or later, SE 3rd generation, Ultra 2 or later), paired with an iPhone with iOS 27 or later. You read on the watch; the iPhone app brings books, articles and news to it.
Price: Free, and books have no limit. Wristread Plus is one optional purchase: US$4.99 until 31 January 2027, then US$6.99. No subscription and no ads, and Plus is shared through Family Sharing.
Reads: Public-domain classics from Project Gutenberg, DRM-free EPUB, PDF, plain text, Markdown, web pages and RTF, articles shared from Safari, news from any site's feed, and, with Plus, OPDS libraries such as Calibre and Readwise Reader
Language: English
Privacy: No accounts, no analytics, no tracking. The developer runs no servers and receives no data.
Contact: seanhenley@gmail.com

About Wristread

Wristread shows you words one at a time, in one steady place on your Apple Watch. Each word is lined up on its focus letter, so your eyes stay still and the words come to you. A queue, a coffee, the walk to the station: a few spare minutes become a few pages.

Or put in your AirPods and listen. With Read Along, each word is spoken as it appears, in the voice you choose, even your own Personal Voice, and it keeps reading with your wrist down.

Your iPhone brings things in, and they arrive on your watch by themselves: thousands of free classics, your own books, articles you share from Safari, and the newest stories from the sites you follow. Reading books is free, with no limit. Wristread Plus is one purchase, yours for good, with listening, unlimited articles and news, your own libraries and Readwise, and Apple Intelligence features such as Today in Brief, a calm two-minute read of the day's news.

What sets it apart

Honest about speed. Speed-reading apps sell numbers. Studies of reading one word at a time find that understanding holds up at ordinary speeds, around 250 to 350 words a minute, and falls away well above them. So Wristread starts you just above your own natural pace, asks two short questions after a chapter (with Apple Intelligence), and reports your effective speed: speed times understanding. "How Wristread reads", in the app, sets out the research with its sources.
It reads like reading. Commas, new chapters and new names get a little more time. Lost the thread? Hold the screen to glance back at the sentence so far. Walking? Wristread notices and shows short phrases at an easier pace.
Made for the wrist. Tap or Double Tap to play and pause, turn the Digital Crown for speed, lower your wrist to stop. Siri on the watch knows "Continue reading in Wristread", "Save that in Wristread" and "Read for five minutes in Wristread", which opens the unread piece that best fits the time at your speed. Now Reading sits on the watch face, and Continue Reading in Control Center and on Apple Watch Ultra's Action button.
Your own reading, not a store's. No DRM and no catalogue to buy from: Project Gutenberg's classics, your own EPUBs and PDFs, a Calibre library over OPDS, and your Readwise Reader queue, archived in Reader when you finish an article on your wrist.
Private by design. Your library and your reading stay on your iPhone and watch. Today in Brief is written by the iPhone's on-device model. Recaps, questions about your book and word meanings use Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and see only text from before your place in the book, or the sentence on screen.
Small and self-contained. Built by one developer with Apple's frameworks alone: no third-party code, and its own ZIP and EPUB reader.