# Royal Road - Read Stories — The home of web novels

> Web novel platform for fantasy, sci-fi, and adventure stories. (iPhone/iPad app by Not Yet Media LTD.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/royal-road-read-stories/id6456945333 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Not Yet Media LTD](https://appshunter.io/developer/1700691322)
- Category: Books, Entertainment
- Price: Free with in-app purchases
- Rating: 4.80/5 from 5,105 App Store ratings · 261 written reviews indexed
- Age rating: 12+
- Requires: iOS 15.0 · 219 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2023-10-13
- Data updated: 2026-08-30
- Monetization: freemium
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/royal-road-read-stories/id6456945333/reviews.md

## What is Royal Road?

Your main source for Action, Adventure, Fantasy, and Science Fiction. Find many stories within your new favorite genres such as Progression Fantasy, Litrpg, Portal Fantasy and Isekai stories, among many others.

Explore over 50,000 novels and be the first to discover captivating stories.

Royal Road Premium - Subscribe to our Premium service to receive the following features:
- Ad-free reading experience
- Downloading chapters for offline reading
- Premium badge on your comments
- Itemized reading history of individual chapters read
- Replace your standard avatar border with a premium one and unlock a new one for each month of your subscription
- Customize your profile page with a banner

For our terms of service, visit https://www.royalroad.com/tos
For our privacy policy, visit https://www.royalroad.com/privacypolicy

Royal Road Author Premium - We offer a subscription service for authors as well; this gives you all of the benefits above, plus extra benefits available on our author dashboard online. Please note that our app does not have features for authors, this subscription tier is present for convenience.

## Key features

- Vast web novel library
- Multiple fantasy and sci-fi genres
- Over 50,000 novels
- Ad-free reading (Premium)
- Offline chapter downloads (Premium)
- Customizable profile (Premium)

## Pricing and in-app purchases

Base price: Free.

**Subscriptions**

| Subscription | Price | Period |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Premium (Monthly) | $3.49 | per month |
| Author Premium (annual) | $59.99 | per year |
| Premium (Annual) | $34.99 | per year |
| Author Premium (Monthly) | $5.99 | per month |


## Chart rankings

- #136 in Top Grossing · Book (US App Store)

## What do users think of Royal Road?

Overall sentiment: positive

**Pros**

- 👍 Customizable reading experience
- 🚀 Smooth and fast performance
- 💡 Personalized recommendations
- 👍 Convenient for mobile reading
- 👍 Supports a wide range of stories

**Cons**

- 🔋 Battery draining issues
- 🔊 Intrusive audio ads
- 🔘 Lack of font/theme customization
- 🔘 Ads not respecting dark mode
- 🔘 Offline reading locked behind paywall

**Commonly reported bugs**

- Inconsistent dark mode behavior
- Downloaded stories not available offline
- Navigational issues with chapter buttons

**Most requested features**

- Add text-to-speech functionality
- Improve sorting/filtering of reading history
- Allow more control over ad placement
- Implement screen rotation support
- Provide in-app support/feedback options

## Recent user reviews (10 of 261)

All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/royal-road-read-stories/id6456945333/reviews.md

### 1/5 — Stuffed with full screen scummy ads with time locks

*2026-08-14, version 2.47*

Stuck in ad loop bouncing back and forth - do yourself a favor and either use the web app or another site

### 1/5 — Obnoxious Ads

*2026-08-11, version 2.47*

Just today it looks like the Royal Road app launched some new ads between chapters. They are extremely cumbersome to dismiss.
Go back to old ad system or I am gone.

### 1/5 — Get banned for critical reviews

*2026-08-11, version 2.46*

Is there a way to give negative stars? This app will ban you if you give authors anything but good reviews. 

Critical about how the author writes about a character.. banned!

Critical about how a reviewer reviews him.. Banned! 

How long is the ban?? 50 years lol

I highly recommend you don’t use this app. If you absolutely need to .. don’t buy their premium. Apple.. maybe ban this app? 😂

### 1/5 — Go somewhere else

*2026-08-10, version 2.46*

Mods intentionally prevent reviews on writing. Go to another site, the mods for this site are obviously big on censorship.

### 1/5 — I Love Royal Road But…

*2026-07-25, version 2.45*

I have used this app and the website before it for years. I love reading stories on it and used the app ever since it came out. However recently the app has become literally unusable. The app just wont load anything. I can’t even try to login. I just have to use the website like before. I have already made a bug report. I hope the issue is fixed soon.

### 5/5 — Favorite app

*2026-07-24, version 2.45*

Best app I have.

### 5/5 — Decent stories to find.

*2026-07-20, version 2.44*

I love chicks coors light and cheesecake

### 5/5 — Perfect app, thank you

*2026-07-16, version 2.44*

After reading cradle I inevitably stumbled upon royal road and web novels. What a delight that this exists. Free to use and very reasonably priced to pay for and get offline reading etc. couldn’t sing higher praise

### 5/5 — Very good app

*2026-07-15*

I love the fact that I can ddl story.
But I would love something like Google translate integrated nto the app. English is not my first language and sometime I don’t understand words. With my pc I use google translate but sadly I can’t with the app.

### 1/5 — Too much unmarked AI slop

*2026-07-05*

90% of the stuff is (unmarked) AI slop nowadays and if you mention it in the forums your post gets insta deleted… don’t bother with it.

## Frequently asked questions about Royal Road

### What kind of stories can I find on this app?

This app is a primary source for Action, Adventure, Fantasy, and Science Fiction web novels. You can discover stories in popular subgenres such as Progression Fantasy, LitRPG, Portal Fantasy, and Isekai.

### What are the benefits of Royal Road Premium?

Royal Road Premium offers an ad-free reading experience, the ability to download chapters for offline reading, a premium badge on comments, detailed reading history, and customizable profile elements like avatar borders and banners.

### Is there a cost to use the app?

The app offers a free tier for reading stories. A premium subscription is available for users who want an ad-free experience, offline reading, and other enhanced features. There is also a separate premium subscription for authors.

### Can I read stories offline?

Yes, offline reading is a feature available with the Royal Road Premium subscription. This allows you to download chapters and read them without an internet connection.

### What genres are most popular on this platform?

The platform highlights Action, Adventure, Fantasy, and Science Fiction as its main genres. Within these, subgenres like Progression Fantasy, LitRPG, Portal Fantasy, and Isekai are specifically mentioned as popular choices.

## Version history (last 5 releases)

### 2.48 — 2026-08-29

- Critical fix: Crash on app resume.
- Fix: If OS kills the app while app was in background and the app had a popup open, when the user reopened the app, the footer remained disabled.
- Fix: In comments, make the disabled buttons look different from active buttons.
- Fix: TTS/Chapter audio for US voices for words fae, bow, bowed, bowing and NO.
- Fix: TTS/Chapter audio - pressing "next chapter" button in between last sentence and the chapter end announcement, did not cancel the chapter end announcement
- Fix: Quote in text editor caused scrolling.
- Probable fix: TTS/Chapter audio had more delay between sentences when minimized.
- Probable fix: TTS/Chapter audio getting stuck in play mode sometimes.
- Probable fix: Snail paced slow load times on WiFi for users having misconfigured IPv6 settings.
- Misc: Internal updates.

### 2.47 — 2026-08-10

- Fix: Edit suggestions does not highlight the difference in character mode sometimes.
- Fix: On users' demand, return of the Rep button for own comments.
- Fix: For some reason when a book is added twice to the same library list, it crashed the app on the page where the book appears.
- Internal updates.

### 2.46 — 2026-08-01

- Probable Fix: WiFi connectivity issue.
- Probable Fix: Sometimes page colors are not restored when moving from chapter page to any other page.
- Fix: Global filter popup did not search by title in the tags box, it only searched by value.
- Fix: Date fields with "ago" display format did not update.
- Fix: TTS not able to skip back from a sentence that has only non-alphanumeric characters.
- Fix: Do not speak ◊ special character.
- Fix: Scroll position did not restore properly when going back to home page from some other page.
- Fix: Restore scroll position on Library page.
- Fix: Auto download all button text.

### 2.45 — 2026-07-22

- Critical Fix: Audio skip back did not work well when two consecutive sentences were identical.
- Critical Fix: Sometimes, chapter audio automatically started playing after any notification alert sound, even if the audio was manually paused previously.
- Fix: Date time not following user's setting on Notification page and Profile reputation page.
- Fix: Don't show Rep button on own comment.
- Fix: In Report popup, submit button does not show up when top level option is changed.
- Fix: Scroll position mess on popup close and when popup is kept open with audio on.
- Fix: On Chapter page, Zoom image button opened link and open link button zoomed image.
- Fix: System announcement in the book "The Dragon's Slow Vengeance" was repeated twice.
- Remove: "times used" indicator from passkeys.

### 2.44 — 2026-07-15

- Fix: The ghost keyboard appearing again after the external keyboard fix.
- Fix: More fixes for undo/redo stack of text editor, when app is reopened or when multiple suggestions are added to a single comment.
- Fix: The app didn't resize sometimes when keyboard opened for typing suggestions or comments on chapter page.
- Fix: Secondary "select all" OS menu didn't work in the text editor for comment/suggestions in blockquote.
- Fix: Changing orientation to landscape while the fiction cover is zoomed caused the image to cutoff.
- Fix: More fixes for auto-next. If next chapter is auto loaded within 3 minutes of app minimization or screen lock; when screen unlocked or app was maximized, the app jumped back to that auto loaded chapter, no matter how many other chapters he/she auto read after that.
- Fix: TTS/Chapter audio pronunciation of "sake".
- Probable Fix: Login issue faced by some users.
- New: Add option to always show audio skip buttons in chapter.
- Fix: Ghost tap on images made everything in the app unclickable + add an option to cancel the zoom or open link alert.
- Fix: ol tag numbers not respecting margin/padding.
- Fix: TTS voices with word "online" in their title spoke a single "No" as "Nitrogen Monoxide".
- Fix: TTS voices which do not have the word "online" in their title spoke Dr. as "drive" instead of "doctor".
- Fix: Footnotes got covered up / truncated, if they appeared at the end of the screen.
- Fix: Remove the remnant  "manage age" button in the fiction rating blocker.
- Fix: Chapter comments pagination did not work sometimes after posting a comment.
- Fix: Wiki search not working with non-english characters with accents.
- Fix: Text in blockquote was all bold.
- Fix: There was horizontal scrolling in library page.
- Probable fix: Connectivity issue.
- Probable fix: Submitting suggestions after reminder on next chapter didn't work.
- Probable fix: Sometimes, chapter randomly jumped to top on popup close.
- Probable fix: Crash issue while listening to TTS.
- Probable fix: Page not moving to top on next chapter and after navigation.

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## Related topics

[royal road](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/royal-road) · [light novel pub](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/light-novel-pub) · [webnovel](https://appshunter.io/ios/topics/webnovel)

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*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-30.*