Readlang, but as a real iPhone app

Side by side

Checked against readlang.com and the official Readlang forum on 24 August 2026. Prices in USD.

A native app instead of a home-screen shortcut

Readlang's own documentation is straightforward about this: the way to get it onto a phone is to open the site in Safari or Chrome and add it to the home screen. In Steve Ridout's forum post the promise is that Readlang "will work full screen without the annoying address bar" — which is exactly what a web app pinned to the home screen does, and exactly where its limits are.

Readlang Mobile is built in SwiftUI for iOS. Text selection is the system one, the reader keeps your place, the keyboard and share sheet behave the way every other app on the phone behaves, and the App Store handles the subscription. If most of your reading happens in bed, on a train or in a queue, that difference is the whole product.

Translation that happens on the phone

Tap a word and the translation appears inline, in the sentence you are reading. Tap the first and the last word of a phrase and the whole phrase is translated together — which matters, because idioms fall apart word by word.

Under the hood Readlang Mobile uses Apple's Translation framework, so on iOS 18 and later the work happens on the device once the language pack is downloaded — no request leaves the phone for the translation itself, and there is no per-request quota on our side to pay for. When a language pair is not available on-device, the app falls back to the server. The trade-off is the language list: you get the roughly twenty languages Apple ships, not Readlang's hundred.

Books, not just pages

Readlang starts from the page you are already on — that is its design, and the Chrome extension is the best part of it. Readlang Mobile starts from a library: books already graded A1 to C1, so you can pick something slightly above your level instead of drowning in the first paragraph of a novel. Several titles come with narration, so you can listen and read at the same time. Your own EPUB files can be uploaded on the paid plan.

Every word you translate is saved automatically, and practice is built from the sentences where you actually met the word — not from a bare word-translation pair.

What Readlang does better

A comparison page that finds nothing good in the competitor is not worth reading, so plainly:

• Languages. 100+ against roughly twenty. If you are learning Czech, Greek or Hebrew, Readlang is your answer and Readlang Mobile is not.
• The desktop browser. The Web Reader extension turns any page — a forum thread, a news site, documentation — into a clickable text. Readlang Mobile asks you to paste a link instead.
• Video. Readlang plays YouTube with clickable subtitles. Readlang Mobile has nothing like it.
• Spaced repetition. Proper flashcards with an SRS schedule, plus a vocabulary manager and custom dictionaries.
• Track record. Over a decade of development, hundreds of thousands of learners and an active forum where the founder answers questions himself.

Plenty of people keep both: Readlang in the browser at a desk, Readlang Mobile on the phone. Nothing about the two stops you.

If you move over

Readlang Mobile cannot import a Readlang word list today, so plan for the vocabulary you have already collected to stay where it is — export it from Readlang if you want to keep a copy, or keep the account alive alongside. What carries over is the habit: tap, read on, review later. The reading itself works the same way in both.

Questions people ask