Softcover vs Spine
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Softcover
Track your reading progress, manage book lists, and connect with a community of readers. Discover new titles, follow friends, and engage in discussions. Features include detailed statistics, release notifications, and home screen widgets.
- Track reading progress (page/percentage/time)
- Manage reading lists (Currently Reading, Want to Read, Finished)
- Follow friends and explore trending titles
- Community book discussions and curated lists
- Detailed reading statistics and annual goals
- Release notifications for anticipated books
- Home screen widgets for reading progress
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Your favorite book tracking companion is here! Softcover brings the power of Hardcover to your iPhone with a beautifully designed, native iOS experience. Track Everything You Read Manage your Currently Reading, Want to Read, and Finished lists with ease. Update your progress by page, percentage, or time—perfect for both books and audiobooks. Stay Connected Follow friends, explore trending titles, discover curated community lists, and engage with book discussions. Join a vibrant community of passionate readers. Beautiful Home Screen Widgets Keep your reading progress at your fingertips with elegant widgets showing your current books and reading goals. Smart Features • Detailed reading statistics and annual goals • Release notifications for anticipated titles • Comprehensive book search with ratings and reviews • Edition selection Seamlessly Syncs with Hardcover All your reading data stays perfectly in sync with your Hardcover.app account across all your devices. Requires a free Hardcover.app account.
Spine
This app enhances audiobook listening with features like listener levels, daily streaks, and shareable year-end recaps. It offers a beautiful, integrated player and syncs with Hardcover, all while keeping your data private on-device.
- Integrated audiobook player
- Listener levels and daily streaks
- Hardcover sync
- On-device AI summaries
- Shareable year-in-review recap
- Lock screen and widget controls
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Spine is the audiobook app you'll actually leave open. It streams from your own cloud library, syncs with Hardcover, and turns the habit of listening into something worth coming back to with listener levels, daily streaks, and a year-in-review Recap bright enough to share. Built native for iOS 26, with Liquid Glass, serif typography, and a player carved into the book's detail page. No subscription. No ads. No in-app purchases. No account to create with us. Bring your own library, keep your own data. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT • ONE PAGE FOR THE BOOK: No separate Now Playing screen. Cover, scrubber, transport, speed, sleep timer, chapters, and bookmarks all live inline on the detail page, on an ambient backdrop tinted by the cover. • CHAPTERS THAT JUST WORK: Single-file M4B audiobooks expose their chapters automatically. Cloud folders with multiple M4Bs split into separate library entries. No manual editing, no reprocessing. • HARDCOVER SYNC: Just listen. Spine logs progress and finished books to Hardcover, pulls cover art, genre, and structured series data, and keeps your shelves in sync. • ON-DEVICE INTELLIGENCE: Open the next book in a tracked series and Spine writes a two-sentence "previously on…" recap from what you've already finished. It also rewrites bloated marketing descriptions into a calm summary, captions your Recap, and cleans up filename-salad titles. All on Apple's on-device foundation model. Nothing about your library leaves the phone. • LEVELS, STREAKS, AND GOALS: Lifetime hours unlock six tiers, from Sapling to Oracle. A unified daily/yearly goal card, a streak chip, and a year-spanning heatmap show the shape of your habit at a glance. • A RECAP YOU'LL WANT TO SHARE: Five bright screens covering hours, finished books, top author and genre, monthly rhythm, and the books you marked Read on Hardcover. One tap stitches the whole thing into a postable image. • PLAYBACK THAT PAYS ATTENTION: Step away for a moment and Spine rewinds a few seconds when you press play. The sleep timer fades audio gently to zero. Finish a series entry and the next book surfaces automatically. • LIVE ON THE LOCK SCREEN: Live Activities follow the current book onto the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, with a tappable Play/Pause. The home-screen widget mirrors the same control on a cover-tinted backdrop, toggle playback in one tap, even when Spine isn't running. • BOOKMARKS WORTH KEEPING: Tap to mark any moment with a written note. Tap to jump back later. • SEARCH THAT POINTS SOMEWHERE: Open the search tab cold and you get a trending-genre card tuned to what you actually listen to, a Discover list of Audible new releases, and trending shortcuts. Most people aren't searching their own shelf, they're looking for the next thing. • EVERY BOOK IS A DOORWAY: Detail pages carry "More by author", "Top in genre", and a "Part of {Series}" rail that interleaves the books you own with the Hardcover siblings you don't, in reading order, right under your bookmarks. • CLOUD LIBRARY, REPAIRED IN ONE TAP: When a cloud title expires or goes stale, Spine flags it on the detail page and offers a one-tap re-download. No re-adding, no losing your progress. • SPOTLIGHT-INDEXED: Search your library from anywhere in iOS. PRIVACY BY DEFAULT Spine has no servers, no analytics, and no third-party SDKs. API keys live in the iOS Keychain. Your library, listening history, and bookmarks stay on your device (and sync via your own iCloud, if you enable it). The on-device AI features run on Apple Intelligence — your books never leave the phone. REQUIREMENTS • iPhone running iOS 26. • A cloud audiobook library. • A free Hardcover account is recommended for metadata, search, and read sync. • Apple Intelligence-eligible device is required for the optional AI features (everything else works without it).
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Spine at 86% against Softcover's 33%. Spine also leads on rating (4.8 vs 4.3) and in-app purchases (none vs 5). Softcover's advantage is iOS requirement (18.5 vs 26.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Softcover sells 5 one-off in-app purchases. Spine asks for nothing beyond the download.
Spine holds the better App Store score, 4.8 against 4.3. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Spine has 30 ratings behind it against 3, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 33% of Softcover's written reviews are positive against 86% of Spine's.
Softcover ships an update every 6 weeks, Spine every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 28, 2026 and October 25, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Softcover | Spine |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (3 ratings) | 4.8 (30 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 33.3% of reviews | 85.7% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 3 | 30 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 6 weeks | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, Apple Watch |
| Requires iOS | 18.5 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 27 MB | 15 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Robin Bolinsson | Accelyze Inc. |
Customer experience
Softcover
Spine
In-app purchases
Softcover
- Liten dricks$0.49
- Mellanstor dricks$1.99
- Stor dricks$4.99
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- Softcover Supporter Pack$7.99
- Generous Supporter Pack$11.99
Spine
No in-app purchases









