Trace vs Modrift
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ with what reviewers say about each.
Trace
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You'll Forget What You Read Today. Trace Won't. You read six articles, finished a podcast, and saved three more things to read later. By Friday, most of it is gone. The links scatter across browser history, three news apps, and a save list you never reopen. Trace fixes this with one idea: record the day, not the link. What you finished and what you still mean to get to, in one place. WHAT IT DOES Share anything to Trace as you go: articles, podcast episodes, songs, books. Trace collects them and turns each day into one clean, browsable entry, listed in the order you took them in, with the time on each. Tap a date and you see exactly what went into your head that day. The capture costs nothing to learn, because it rides the iOS share sheet you already use. WHY ONE ENTRY PER DAY MATTERS Most save-it-later tools work one item at a time. Pipe ten articles to Notion and you get ten separate pages to sort through later. Trace produces a single daily report that holds everything, every format in one stream, every title already wrapped as a clickable link to its source. That is the difference between a pile of clippings and a finished record. You stop assembling the day by hand, because the day arrives assembled. ONE LIST FOR EVERYTHING YOU MEAN TO GET TO Every news app has its own save button, and every save list is capped, buried, and walled off from the rest. Save a piece in one app, a video in another, a podcast in a third, and you have three lists to remember and the wrong app to open. Trace pulls them into one stream, each item a tap from its source. Share the things you want to come back to, and they wait in a single place instead of scattered across apps you forget you used. Everything Trace captures lives on your device. Nothing routes through a server. When you want the data elsewhere, you choose where it goes: โข Notion: send the daily report straight into a database, such as your journal. โข Obsidian: export to a vault folder. โข Files: drop reports into any folder, including iCloud Drive. โข Manual: export today as a PDF or your whole archive as a zip. No account. No subscription. No lock-in. The exits are clean, so your record is always yours to take. BUILT TO FEED A SECOND BRAIN The daily report is consistently structured: titles, sources, timestamps, and live links, the same shape every day. That makes it easy for you to read and easy for an AI agent to use. Ask the agent sitting on your Notion, "find the articles I read about the SpaceX IPO back in May," and it works from one well-formed record per day instead of parsing scattered pages or a save list it cannot filter by date. Trace does not try to be the agent. It makes the agent's job easier. FOR RESEARCH, IT WRITES THE BIBLIOGRAPHY Gathering sources by hand means copying a URL, copying the title, then stitching them together in your document, over and over. Trace hands you the formatted, linked list already built. When your reading for a project clusters across a few days, the report is a working bibliography you can lift straight into a draft. When it runs over weeks, the agent pulls the relevant subset out of your daily logs. Either way, the tedious step is gone. WHO IT'S FOR People who read a lot across formats, keep a structured journal in Notion or Obsidian, and want the day consolidated rather than the item saved. If that is you, nothing else does this cleanly. Trace records what you consumed, hands it off to the systems you already live in, and gets out of the way.
Modrift
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Modrift is a lightweight client for quickly opening, reading, and lightly editing files stored in the cloud โ right from your iPhone. Not a heavy notes app: just open, read, and tweak, as fast as possible. Key features - Open Markdown files (.md / .txt / .markdown) with clean formatted rendering - Launch straight from Files or any app via "Open in Modrift" - Keep your own working home (iCloud โบ Modrift): list, create and organise files there - Switch between Home (by place) and Recent (by time) - Toggle between edit and preview with one tap - A formatting toolbar above the keyboard in edit mode โ headings, lists, checkboxes, bold and more, one tap each - Automatic saving (no manual save button) - Full-text search, and sorting by date modified or name - Turn to landscape for longer lines โ easier on long paragraphs and tables - Japanese / English interface Beyond Markdown - View images (PNG / JPEG / GIF / HEIC / WebP) with pinch to zoom โ free - View PDFs with paging and zoom โ Modrift Pro (one-time purchase) - View Word documents (.docx) formatted, with headings, lists and tables โ Modrift Pro - View Excel workbooks (.xlsx) as tables, with sheet switching โ Modrift Pro Markdown, text and images stay free. Only PDF, Word and Excel viewing is part of Modrift Pro โ a single one-time purchase, no subscription. These formats are view-only; they cannot be edited. About your home and editing - Files in your home (iCloud โบ Modrift) are editable in place, and edits sync to iCloud - Files outside your home (Dropbox / Google Drive, or iCloud Drive outside the Modrift folder) are view-only. To edit one, use "Copy to Home" and edit the copy (the original is not written back) - You can choose whether your home lives in iCloud or on this iPhone, in Settings Relationship to the Files app Modrift complements the Files app rather than replacing it. Leave general folder management to Files; Modrift focuses on formatted Markdown viewing, light editing, and tidying its own home folder. The name combines Mo (Mobile / Motion) + drift โ the idea of thoughts and files flowing freely on mobile.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Modrift at every 4 days against Trace's every 2 months. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Trace ships an update every 2 months, Modrift every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on October 24, 2026 and October 7, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Trace | Modrift |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Every 4 days โ better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone | iPhone, iPad โ better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 16.4 โ better |
| Further details โ not scored | ||
| Size | 7 MB | 57 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Masayuki Ishido | Noriyuki Katahara |
In-app purchases
Trace
No in-app purchases
Modrift
No in-app purchases









