One word at a time.
Your eyes stay put.

One word at a time, when you want it

Focus shows a word, or a short group if you prefer, in the same spot on the screen. Hold to read and lift to pause, or use the Play and Pause buttons if holding gets tiring. Long words get a flash to themselves and a group never runs past the end of a sentence. You choose whether new pieces open here or in Reader.

• Pausing shows the words around your place. Drag sideways to go back or forward, or jump back one sentence.
• Pinch the word to make it bigger or smaller.
• Share a passage as a short Focus clip.
• Choose where to start: a section, a paragraph, a word, or a search. Or select any word in Reader and pick Focus from here.
• Nudge the speed while you read, or type any speed from 100 to 4,000 words per minute.
• Focus opens on top of a PDF or EPUB, so switching back doesn't reload the document.

The whole page, set up your way

Reader is the full piece with its headings, lists, quotes, tables, images and footnotes in place. Tap any word to carry on in Focus from that exact spot.

• Scroll, Paged, or Book layouts. Book has two-page spreads on wide screens, and its pages can curl as they turn.
• Eight themes, including Sepia, high contrast, and OLED Black. Any article can keep its own theme without changing the rest of the app.
• The controls slide away once you start reading. A quiet line keeps your page and the minutes left.
• Jumped somewhere from the contents, a search or a link? Back to takes you where you were.
• Footnotes open in a small sheet, and tables show as real tables.
• Turn pages with a tap, the volume keys, a keyboard, or a Bluetooth page turner.
• Images sit right on the page, and tapping one opens it full screen.
• Pinch to change the text size.
• Select text for a small toolbar: Highlight, Add note, Listen, Copy, or Focus from here.

Highlights and notes that leave the original alone

PDFs and EPUBs open as they were made. PDFs scroll smoothly in Tether's own viewer, with pinch and double-tap zoom up to 5×. Tether keeps your marks in its own library and never writes into the file you imported. Focus and Listen still work on the same document.

• Highlight in yellow, green, blue, pink, or purple, and add notes.
• Search, contents, page previews, bookmarks, and saved places with notes.
• Read any PDF as text, in your own font and theme.
• PDF fit width, optional page gaps, a two-page spread in landscape, and night or sepia paper.
• Per-book theme, text size, spacing, and margins for EPUBs.
• Each document has a details page with its cover, reading position, and file info.

Listen instead

Tether can read a piece aloud through your phone's text-to-speech. Select a sentence and choose Listen to start right there. The current word is highlighted as it's spoken, in articles, PDFs, and EPUBs.

• The player collapses into a small bar while you keep reading.
• It keeps going with the screen off. Pause or stop it from the lock screen or your headphones.
• It uses the voices already on your phone. Nothing is sent anywhere.

A library that stays tidy

Shelves like Reading, Not started, and Finished sort themselves as you go, next to your own collections. Home puts whatever you didn't finish at the top. Got a few minutes? Pick 5, 10, 20 or 30, and Tether finds something that fits.

• Import your Pocket, Instapaper, or Omnivore export.
• Collections, pins, and up to ten tags on each piece.
• Auto-file by website puts new articles from a site into a collection on their own.
• Pick a folder on your phone and import its files in one go.
• Long-press to select several pieces, then move, tag, or delete them. Deleting comes with Undo.
• Finished something? "Read it again" puts it back on your shelf.
• Export the whole library to a backup file and restore it later.

Follow sites without filling your library

Paste a website's address and Tether finds its feed, or pick from 125 suggested sites, sorted by topic, region and language. New posts collect in Following, with no unread counts, so they don't crowd the things you chose to read. A post only joins your library when you add it.

• Your sites sit in a row with their icons, and each one has its own page. Posts are grouped by day.
• Mark a site as quiet to keep it out of New, Home, and notifications.
• Bring your sites from another reader as an OPML file, or export them.
• It checks when you open it, or every 3, 6, or 12 hours if you choose. Pull to refresh whenever you like.
• New-post notifications are optional, off by default, and silent overnight.

A gentle look at your week

Progress shows the days you read this week and the pieces you finished. Words read are counted no faster than a steady reading pace, up to 600 a minute in Focus and 450 in Reader, so jumping to the end of a long article doesn't inflate the number.

• Pauses in Focus don't count as reading time.
• Finishing the same piece twice counts once.
• A daily word goal if you want one. It's off by default.
• There are no streaks to lose.
• A weekly card you can share if you want to. It's made on your phone.

None of this measures comprehension, and the app doesn't pretend it does.

Articles, text, PDFs, and EPUBs

One button on Home takes a link, pasted text, or a file. Share from your browser or any other app, including news apps that share a picture with a link, and it lands in Tether. Articles are fetched and cleaned up on your phone, with images, tables and quotes kept in place.

Some pages need a sign-in or JavaScript to show their text. For those, Tether opens a temporary browser where you sign in yourself and import what's on the screen. It doesn't get around paywalls, and its cookies are cleared when you close it.

PDFs, EPUBs, Word documents, plain text and Markdown files can be added one at a time or a folder at once. Imported originals are kept in Tether's private storage so they still open next week.

Set it up for your eyes

• Libron, Lexend, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Literata, OpenDyslexic, and DM Mono.
• Eight themes: Dark, Light, Sepia, Solarized, OLED Black, and high-contrast options.
• A reading ruler for staying on the current line.
• Tint overlays in cream, blue, green, and peach.
• Focus Letters, which bold the start of each word, in two strengths.
• Separate pauses for periods, commas, semicolons, and colons.
• Motion follows your system setting, or choose Full, Reduced, or Off.
• Works with TalkBack, which gets the full Reader instead of flashing words.

The first run only asks two things: Focus or Reader, and a pace. The rest is here when you want it. Some of these settings are experiments. If one helps, keep it. If it doesn't, turn it off.

Quiet unless you ask

A reading app shouldn't be one more thing tapping you on the shoulder. These are the defaults, and each one is a single switch.

Haptics

On, and easy to turn off

Completion sound

Off. Respects silent mode and Do Not Disturb

Reading reminder

Off. At most once a day if you turn it on

Following checks

Only when you open it, unless you set a schedule

New-post notifications

Off. Never between 10pm and 8am

Daily goal

Off

Motion

Follows your system setting

Your reading stays on your phone

Tether has no accounts, ads, analytics, or social backend. Your library, highlights, notes, and reading history are stored on your phone. You can export everything to a backup file whenever you like.

• Articles are fetched and extracted on your device. Earlier builds used a small server for this. That's gone now.
• The temporary sign-in browser clears its cookies and site data when you close it.
• The weekly card only leaves your phone if you choose to share it.
• Feedback from the app sends what you type, with your app and Android version. A screenshot or your reading log goes along only if you add it, and nothing else from your library.

Adding web articles and checking feeds need a connection. Everything else works offline. The full details are in the privacy policy.