Success
I pressed the submit button and then just sat there for a moment.
It was in the afternoon, the house was quiet, and after six months of work: building, breaking, rebuilding, arguing about button sizes, staying up too late fixing things that didn't matter, … justRead.app was sitting in the hands of Apple reviewers somewhere.
And after last six brutal weeks of finishing the app, that's a strange feeling, when you suddenly have nothing to do.
How and Why It All Started
My son Jachym is 20. He reads a lot and so do I. And about a year ago we started talking about how the reading apps we are using just weren't good enough. Not just talking and bragging, but talking in specific. It is annoying, when you're reading a book and something bugs you every single time.
For Jachym it was the library. He had hundreds of files and no good way to organize them. Just try to sort books by series or length in Apple Books. For me it was typography, as I wanted to use my own fonts. And those damned margins… Why is there about 1/4 of the screen not used for text and empty?
We had both tried Kindle, Apple Books, BookFusion, Yomu, everything. They were fine. Not great, but fine they were.
At some point the conversation shifted from "someone should fix this" to "what if we fixed it?"
I am a developer. I've been writing software professionally for years. But I had never built an iOS app before. Jachym had less programming experience, but was better at design. So we started.
Side note: you can read more about our decisions in the blog, especially here.
Six Months of Reality
I want to be honest about what building justRead.app actually looked like, because the "indie dev launches app" story usually skips the boring parts.
Because the boring parts are most of it.
There were weeks where I spent more time figuring out how Readium works than I did building features. There was a month where we kept rewriting the library screen because it never felt right. There was a period where I seriously considered shipping without statistics, then without the paywall, then maybe without the entire subscription model, because every time I touched one thing, three other things broke.
Jachym tested every build. He has opinions (good ones) about what "feels right" to read on. Half the UX decisions in justRead.app came from him complaining about something in the previous version.
We argued about the comment input field for the whole half of the day.
justRead.app for iPad
What We Built
justRead.app is a native iOS EPUB reader. It's for people who take reading seriously and want an app that respects that.
It has real typography, not just font selection, but proper control over spacing, margins, line height, and how text actually looks on screen. It works with your existing book library. If you use Calibre, your books sync through iCloud with your folder structure intact. No importing, no copying files around, no lock-in. And if you do not use Calibre, no problem, just save your books into a folder and that's it.
It has reading statistics that actually tell you something useful: streaks, daily progress, books per year.
There's a 20–20–20 eye break reminder.
In dark mode, images can be inverted to match — no more bright white illustrations breaking the atmosphere.
It handles big libraries without slowing down.
None of these things are revolutionary individually. But together, the way they work, that's what we spent six months on.
justRead.app for iPhone
The Part I Didn't Expect
I expected building the app to be hard. I didn't expect how much I'd enjoy working on it with my own son.
He has a completely different way of thinking about problems than I do. And his understanding of how a phone app should look and behave is much, much better. I should expect that, right? I grew up with 8-bit computers… while my son was growing with phone in his hand. When I was deep in the weeds on some API implementation, he'd look at what I built and immediately say "that is not the way it works on phones", and he was always right. Not in a technical sense, but in a this doesn't feel good sense that I had stopped being able to see.
I think that's the thing I want to remember about this project, more than the launch numbers or the App Store reviews. We built something together. He's 20. In ten years, this will still be a thing we did together.
And not to mention the whole webpage is his own work.
What Happens Now
Now I wait for Apple to review it. That takes anywhere from 24 hours to a few days, apparently.
If you read EPUBs on your iPhone and you've ever been annoyed by any of the things I described above, justRead.app is for you.
I genuinely think it's the best EPUB reader for iOS. And Jachym agrees. He's biased, but so am I.
Peter is a software developer based in Czech Republic. He and his son Jachym built justRead.app over six months in 2025-2026.
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