Read Forge vs Aloud
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Read Forge
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Read Forge turns anything you can read into a stream of focused words, so you read faster with less effort. Instead of dragging your eyes across lines of text, Read Forge shows one word at a time in a fixed spot — your eyes stay still, and the text comes to you. GET TEXT IN FROM ANYWHERE • Highlight text in any app — Safari, Mail, Messages, anywhere — and tap Share → Copy to Read Forge • Share a whole article page from your browser and Read Forge extracts the readable text, minus the menus, banners, and clutter • Import books and documents: EPUB, PDF, TXT, and non-DRM MOBI, with chapter navigation • Or just paste READ YOUR WAY • Focus mode: one word at a time, with an optional red anchor letter that holds your eye on the optimal recognition point • Overview mode: a full block of text with a moving highlight, like following a finger across the page • Tempo from a relaxed 120 up to 900 words per minute, with natural pauses at sentence and clause boundaries • Six reading fonts, adjustable size, light and dark appearance YOUR LIBRARY REMEMBERS • Imported books are saved on your device with your reading position • Scrub anywhere in a text, jump back a sentence, or restart a chapter • Time-remaining estimate at your current pace PRIVATE BY DESIGN No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no tracking. Your books, articles, and reading habits never leave your device. Whether it's the morning news, a long read you've been putting off, or an entire novel — Read Forge helps you power through it, one focused word at a time.
Aloud
Convert any readable content into spoken audio with natural-sounding voices. Save articles, PDFs, or pasted text to listen to later, even offline. Customize playback speed and enjoy a private, ad-free listening experience.
- Convert articles, PDFs, and text to speech
- On-device voice generation for privacy
- Offline listening support
- Adjustable playback speed (0.5x to 3x)
- Hands-free autoplay and lock-screen controls
- Save and organize content for later
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No subscription. No ads. No tracking. Nothing you read ever leaves your iPhone. Aloud turns anything you can read into something you can listen to. Share an article from any browser, open a PDF from Files, or paste any text — Aloud reads it aloud in a natural voice, sentence by sentence, with your place kept perfectly. FOR THE READING LIST YOU NEVER GET TO Saving articles is easy; finding an hour to sit and read them is not. Aloud turns that pile into something you get through on the commute, the walk, the washing-up — so you keep up with the world without giving up an evening. Turn on autoplay and it announces the next piece and keeps going, hands free. AND FASTER, IF YOU WANT IT Read from 0.5× to 3× without the voice turning into a chipmunk, and switch on Shorten Pauses to trim the silence at every full stop. At 2× a thirty-minute article fits a fifteen-minute walk. The voices are generated entirely on your iPhone. There is no server doing the talking, which is why Aloud never needs an account, never meters your listening, and keeps working in airplane mode. Each voice downloads its model once — about 190 MB for the English voices, about 390 MB for the one that reads the other thirty languages — and after that, the internet is optional. LISTEN TO ANYTHING • Web articles — share from any browser or paste a link, Aloud extracts just the story • PDFs — including scanned ones, recognized on-device • Any text you paste, from notes to your own drafts A READER, NOT A MEDIA PLAYER • The sentence being spoken is lit; the rest of the page waits quietly • A margin rail shows the whole document — hold and slide to scrub • Your position is saved the moment it changes, per document • A speed dial from 0.5× to 3×, and time remaining that respects it • A sleep timer that fades out instead of cutting you off mid-word • Reader mode: hide the player, lift the whole page, read with your eyes • Find in article, and your choice of size, font, paper and column width MADE FOR LISTENING ON THE MOVE • Keeps reading with the screen locked • Lock-screen and AirPods controls: play, pause, skip 15 seconds • Optional autoplay: when a piece ends, Aloud announces the next and keeps reading • Two shelves — to read, and read — each sorted your way by date, length, or title, with search across titles and sites • An optional unread count on the app icon • Your place remembered in everything FOURTEEN NATURAL VOICES Ten US and UK English voices with real warmth, and four voices that read thirty more languages — all generated on your iPhone. Anything else falls back to the system voice that speaks it. Audition any voice with a tap. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE Once a voice is on your iPhone, Aloud makes no network requests to read to you. Articles are fetched by your phone the way a browser would, the voice models download once from a public host, and everything after that — extraction, speech, your library, your listening history — stays on the device. The App Privacy label says "Data Not Collected" because there is nowhere to collect it to. ONE PURCHASE, YOURS FOREVER Aloud is free to try: the shelf holds three pieces, with every feature included — the natural voices, PDFs and scans, the lock-screen player, all of it. A single purchase lets the shelf hold as many pieces as you like, forever. No subscription, nothing recurring, and your listening is never metered either way. If you read with your ears — long articles, research papers, contracts, fan fiction, your own writing — Aloud was built for you. And if you rely on spoken text every day, we would especially love to hear what you need next.
Screenshots
Verdict
Read Forge and Aloud are too close to call on the numbers: across 5 compared parameters — price, ads, in-app purchases and device support among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
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. Read Forge sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Aloud sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
| Parameter | Read Forge | Aloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | — | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | — | 100.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | — | 2 — better |
| Update frequency | — | Every 8 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | — | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.6 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 1 MB | 29 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Ben Spears | Fotios Avgidis |
In-app purchases
Read Forge
- Read Forge Pro$7.99
Aloud
- Lifetime Unlock$9.99









