Readwide

Readwide is a local-first Android reader and file browser for TXT, Markdown, PDF, EPUB, Word-family documents, HWP/HWPX, images, comic archives, and common archive workflows.

It supports local reading, recent files with reading-history search, bookmarks, folder shortcuts, file search and type filtering, in-document text search (including find inside PDFs), archive browsing, archive-backed image viewing, multi-select file operations, local copy/move/delete/extract/compress queues, and text-to-speech with a sleep timer, pause/resume, and a floating on-screen control.

TXT keeps an exact source-page reader model; Markdown uses a rendered WebView visual-page model. PDF in-document find works on digital (text-based) PDFs; scanned or image-only PDFs are not searched, and OCR is not included. HWP/HWPX is text-first and read-only through Apache-2.0 Java libraries, not Hancom-compatible layout rendering or editing. RAR/CBR is read-only and limited: some archives may not open, and full RAR compatibility is not guaranteed.

EPUB offers independent text size, spacing and alignment controls, searchable contents and marked-footnote text popups for supported books. Ready horizontal single-pane sections can show within-section progress; this is not an exact whole-book page count. Fixed-layout, image and vertical sections retain layout restrictions.

The default build does not request INTERNET permission and does not include ads, analytics, telemetry SDKs, Firebase, Google Play Services, an account system, cloud sync, an in-app update checker, or a developer-operated upload backend. Android Auto Backup is disabled. Broad file access is used for local file browsing and management of selected folders and files. Files opened into Readwide from other apps are copied into an app-private cache with filename sanitization, a path check, and a 2 GB per-file limit, and JSON backup import is capped at 256 MB.

Read-aloud passes spoken text to the installed Android speech engine. A network-required voice can use that engine's online service; choose an offline voice for local synthesis. The engine's own data handling applies.

JSON backups include reading metadata and durable TXT Contents options/manual/hidden entries, not document files, imported fonts or storage permissions. Path/content-bound records may not apply after moving or changing a document.

Readwide uses the Android applicationId com.readwide.manager; older TextView Reader builds used com.textview.reader and install as a separate app. The F-Droid build is signed by F-Droid and does not update in place over Readwide APKs from GitHub, which use a different signing key. To switch builds, export a JSON backup from the old one, install the new one, then import the backup to restore bookmarks, reading positions, themes, and settings.