Marvin Is Dead. Long Live justRead.

There's a special kind of grief that only software can cause.

The quiet kind, where an app you loved simply stops. No announcement, no "what to do", no goodbye. One day it's just gone from the App Store, and the copy on your device keeps working only because you never deleted it.

If you read ebooks seriously on iOS, you know exactly which app I'm talking about.

In memory of Marvin

For a decade, Marvin was the answer. Whenever someone asked a question "what's the best EPUB reader for iPhone?", the serious readers (the ones with a Calibre server running, the ones who highlight in five colors and export everything) would simply say one word: Marvin.

The app earned its reputation. Marvin 3, that was released in 2016 by the one-person studio Appstafarian, was exactly what we were looking for, because it had (among all):

• Deep View: scan a book and it would give you the characters, places, and recurring names, count their frequency, and let you pin Wikipedia-style articles about the book or author into a built-in browser. Nothing else on iOS did this.
• A native Calibre driver: not a hack, an actual two-way connection. Send any format from your Calibre library (MOBI, FB2, TXT) and Calibre would convert and send it straight into Marvin, managing collections from the desktop.
• Highlights and annotations that put Apple Books to shame, with real export.
• Aloud text-to-speech, karaoke speed-reading, gorgeous typography, deep theming, and full Bluetooth-keyboard control for the keyboard-warrior crowd.

It was better than Kindle and iBooks at the things power-users cared about. And then it stopped.

The developer's last public word was in 2017. The app limped along through a few iOS releases, and at some point, quietly and without a bang, Marvin vanished from the App Store.

Today, if you go looking for it, you'll find it "not available in your region." Forum threads with titles like "So Marvin's Gone!" and "We thought Marvin was gone, but we are smarter than Apple!" are its tombstone: a community exchanging side-load tricks to keep it breathing.

If you still have it installed, every iOS update is a coin flip. There is no path forward. There is no Marvin 4.

Marvin is dead. It deserved better, and so do you.

The hole it left behind

And what is worse about those last years: nobody really replaced Marvin.

The mainstream apps got worse around ownership, not better. Kindle can't open a plain EPUB without round-tripping it through Amazon. Apple Books is welded to iCloud and the store (although you can add epub files into it). Google Play Books buries your uploads in a 2,000-file cloud cap with no documented iOS upload path. Kobo only counts books you bought from Kobo. Every one of them is a storefront with a reader bolted on.

The indie scene that Marvin belonged to, thinned out too. KyBook is abandoned now and its paid sync cloud has been throwing 500s error ever since. Moon+ Reader never came to iOS. The one genuinely active rival, Yomu, does the Calibre/OPDS basics well, but has no stats, no audiobooks, and the UI is confusing.

So the Marvin-shaped hole sat there. A reader who owns their files, self-hosts their library, annotates heavily, and wants their data to stay theirs had nowhere modern to go.

That's the hole justRead was built to fill.

Long live justRead

justRead isn't a clone of Marvin. It's what Marvin would have become if its developer had kept going for another eight years, through 64-bit, through SwiftUI, through CloudKit, all the way up to today's iOS 26 with Liquid Glass. It takes the things Marvin got right and rebuilds them on a foundation that's actually maintained.

The Calibre connection lives on… and it's two-way. justRead auto-discovers your Calibre content server over Bonjour, authenticates, browses multiple libraries, and imports incrementally. Then it does the thing even Marvin couldn't: it pushes your reading metadata back (ratings, progress, finished state, even streaks) into mapped Calibre columns. The desktop and the phone finally agree.

You still own your library, more of it than Marvin let you. Point justRead at any folder of DRM-free books: local, iCloud Drive, or whatever Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive sync into Files… and it bulk-imports recursively. The folder stays the source of truth; pull to refresh and it updates what changed. And unlike Marvin, it treats PDF as a first-class format. Highlights, in-document search, table of contents, page-jump, fit modes, and exact scroll-position restore. Marvin never read a single PDF. justRead puts EPUB, PDF, and your own audiobooks into one app.

Your highlights get out. Marvin understood that annotations you can't export are annotations you'll lose. justRead pushes highlights straight to Readwise, or exports them as PDF or Markdown (or renders them as branded quote cards you can share). Six highlight styles, full multi-line notes per highlight, a cross-book highlights browser. Apple Books still has no official export at all.

It syncs through your iCloud, not a company's servers. This is the part Marvin never had and the company-cloud apps get wrong. Reading position, progress, sessions, bookmarks, highlights, finished state, per-book settings, even your custom fonts and themes sync device-to-device through CloudKit: your own iCloud account. Cancel a subscription and you don't lose your environment, because it was never on someone else's cloud.

The typography obsession is intact. Import any font (OpenDyslexic included), tune line height and word/letter/paragraph spacing, set per-orientation margins, and (the part most readers never find) apply different settings to a single book, or different layouts on iPhone vs iPad. Custom color presets that auto-activate by sunrise/sunset and system appearance. Marvin's themers would feel right at home, with more knobs than they had before.

And then justRead keeps going past where Marvin stopped. A real motivation system Marvin never attempted. Daily goals, reading streaks with milestone badges, a GitHub-style calendar heatmap, hour-of-day breakdowns, and a Spotify-Wrapped-style Reading Recap you can share. Home-screen and lock-screen widgets. Spotlight indexing. OPDS catalogs with Project Gutenberg built in for 70,000+ free books. Collections, multiple sorting options and powerful filters. Full VoiceOver and Dynamic Type accessibility. Sixteen languages.

An honest word at the wake

I'm not going to pretend justRead does everything Marvin did. It doesn't.

Marvin's Deep View, that uncanny character-and-place extraction with pinnable research articles, has no equivalent in justRead. Marvin's Aloud text-to-speech (work in progress) and its karaoke speed-reading aren't here either: justRead plays your own audiobook files and offers synced read-along where a book ships with narration, but it won't read arbitrary EPUB text aloud, and there's no RSVP speed-reader.

If those three features were the entire reason you loved Marvin, justRead won't fully scratch that itch yet. But if you loved Marvin for the combination: owning your files, the Calibre connection, serious annotation that exports, deep typography, and a reader built by someone who actually reads… that combination is alive again, and this time it runs on devices Apple still supports.

Long live the king

Marvin showed a generation of readers what an iOS reader could be, then froze in 2017. The grief was real because the loss was real: nothing maintained had stepped into its place.

Until now.

justRead.app