Afterglow vs JustReader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Afterglow
Experience ebooks with a personalized ambiance, intelligently generated from cover art. Enjoy a clean interface with customizable typography and layout for comfortable reading in light or dark modes.
- Ebook reading interface
- Cover Tone themes
- Customizable ambience
- Typography controls
- Layout controls
- Light and dark modes
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A beautiful way to read ebooks. With Afterglow, give each book it's own ambience with Cover Tone themes, intelligently created from the book's cover art. Key features • Ebook reading with a clean, focused interface • Custom ambience for each book • Typography and layout controls for comfort and style • Light and dark reading options
JustReader
A free, native reader for Mac, iPad, and iPhone that supports various file formats. It offers a customizable reading experience with multiple themes, fonts, and scroll options, plus on-device translation and no ads or tracking.
- Supports EPUB, FB2, MOBI, HTML, TXT, RTF, DOC/DOCX
- Customizable themes, typefaces, and palettes
- Continuous scroll, paged, or two-page spread
- On-device translation
- Chapter navigation and in-book search
- No ads or tracking
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JustReader is a free, native reader for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Open a book file and read it the way it should look — one book at a time, no library to manage, no account, no ads. OPENS WHAT YOU HAVE EPUB, FB2, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, Markdown, HTML, TXT, RTF and DOC/DOCX (on the Mac), including inside ZIP and RAR archives. Chapters, footnotes and pictures come through, and the app works out the encoding by itself. Manga and comics in CBZ and CBR open as two-page spreads, and Japanese manga reads right to left. Chinese and Japanese books open too, old encodings like GB18030 and Shift_JIS included. Furigana sits above the kanji. THE FULL READING EXPERIENCE Nine typefaces and 41 themes across five palettes, plus Typewriter and Terminal. Continuous scroll, paged, or two-page spread. Real hyphenation in Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic, and Greek. Read Aloud with word-by-word highlighting. On-device translation — nothing leaves your device. Chapter navigation, in-book search, an image gallery, and a fullscreen mode with multiple clock styles. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking, no ads. Files stay on your device. WANT YOUR LIBRARY TO FOLLOW YOU? ContinuousReader is the full version: an iCloud-synced library with your reading position to the exact paragraph on every device, bookmarks and notes, OPDS catalogs, reading statistics, folders, and more. Free.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Afterglow at weekly against JustReader's every 2 weeks. JustReader's advantage is iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.4). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Afterglow ships an update weekly, JustReader every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 5, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Afterglow | JustReader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | — | 50.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Weekly — better | Every 2 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 26.4 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 14 MB | 21 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Mohammad Qureshi | Oleksii Koshkin |
Customer experience
Afterglow
JustReader
In-app purchases
Afterglow
No in-app purchases
JustReader
No in-app purchases









