Kept Close vs Lector

Your address book is finally worthy of the people in it. Kept Close is a quietly powerful contacts app for people who care about their relationships. It clears the clutter, restores order, and helps you stay close to the people who matter: all with a craft and privacy you can feel. No account. No servers. Nothing ever leaves your iPhone. EFFORTLESS ORDER Merge duplicates with an engine that's genuinely smart: it recognizes nicknames and won't confuse family members who share a name or a line. Surface incomplete and messy cards with Contact Checkup and fix them in a single pass. And when you clean house, nothing is ever lost: everything rests in a 30-day Recycle Bin, ready to restore. MADE TO BE YOURS Profile photos throughout your list. Favorites pinned where you want them. Your own card, set once and shared in a tap. Search that understands you—simply type "tag Sam as VIP" or "doctors in Boston." Light or dark, exactly as you like it. RELATIONSHIPS, TENDED Never be the one who forgets a birthday. A gentle quarterly nudge keeps your address book pristine. And with Kept Close Pro, the full relationship toolkit is yours: • Smart lists that update themselves, with custom icons • Auto-tag your entire address book by role and company • A map of everyone you know, by location • Keep in Touch: a cadence for the people you never want to drift from • Connections and a living family tree • Business card scanning that even captures LinkedIn, Instagram, and X • Unlimited photos per contact • Effortless export and group outreach PRIVATE, ABSOLUTELY Kept Close has no servers, so there is nowhere for your contacts to go. Everything you do stays on your device, full stop. The single exception is the optional map, where Apple's geocoder turns an address into a pin (addresses only, never names). Privacy isn't a setting here. It's the foundation. Beautifully on-device. Quietly indispensable. Kept Close. — Kept Close Pro is available as a monthly or yearly subscription (with a free trial) or a one-time lifetime purchase. Prices are shown in the app and may vary by region. Subscriptions automatically renew unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period; manage or cancel anytime in your App Store account settings. Terms of Use: https://keptclose.app/terms Privacy Policy: https://keptclose.app/privacy

Lector turns your documents into speech, spoken by your iPhone, on your iPhone. Import a PDF, an EPUB, a Word document, RTF, Markdown, or plain text — or share an article straight from Safari — press play, and listen while your hands and eyes are busy: while you work, while you drive, while you walk the dog, while dinner cooks. The name is Latin for reader. For two thousand years a lector has been the one who reads aloud so that others can attend to what they are doing — the appointed reader in church, the monk reading to a silent refectory, the hired reader on a platform above the cigar rollers of Havana and Tampa. Lector puts that old office in your pocket. WHAT IT DOES • Reads PDF, EPUB, Word (.docx), RTF, Markdown, and plain text • Imports articles shared from Safari, and reads text you type or paste • Highlights each sentence as it speaks and scrolls the page for you • Turns a PDF's table of contents into real chapters, with a navigator to jump anywhere • Exports any document — or a single chapter — to an M4A audio file • Keeps reading in the background, with Dynamic Island and Lock Screen controls • Six Siri and Shortcuts actions: play, pause, resume, stop, next, previous • Sleep timer, speed control, voice favorites, light and dark appearance • Honors large Dynamic Type sizes throughout VOICES Lector speaks with Apple's voices, generated entirely on the device. Every voice installed on your iPhone appears in the app, grouped by language, with your favorites pinned to the top. One recommendation: download an Enhanced or Premium voice (Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content → Voices). They are free, and they are markedly closer to a human reader. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE No account. No analytics. No server. Documents are read and spoken on the phone and never uploaded anywhere — there is no backend to upload them to. The privacy label says Data Not Collected because that is simply true. ONE PRICE, ONCE Everything in Lector is free to use. The free library holds three imported documents at a time — delete one and the slot opens again — and typed text and shared articles never count against it. A single purchase removes the cap for good. Not per month, not per year — once. The developer was tired of apps that offered a three-day trial and then wanted a hundred and twenty dollars a year, so Lector is built the other way around: the free version is the full app, and the only thing money buys is a bigger bookshelf. Requires iOS 17 or later.