You read the whole chapter. Now tell her what stayed.
Three ways to read, and one of them puts a single word in one spot so your eyes stop
hunting across the page. At the end of a sitting Nana asks you one question: what stayed?
Whatever you answer comes back a few days later, when you’re about to forget it. It all
happens on your phone, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Coming to iPhone
It isn’t on the App Store yet and there’s no date. Nana doesn’t announce a supper before
it’s in the oven.
She asks whether you’ve eaten before she asks about the chapter.
One word, one spot, one letter marked where your eye should land.
Plain text, page by page. This is the mode where you highlight and take notes.
Three ways in
The same text, three different ways to get through it
You pick the mode per text, and you change it mid-sitting if it isn’t working. The one Nana suggests comes out of the short reading test she runs the first time you open the app.
Spot
One word at a time, always in the same place on the screen, with one letter marked so your eye knows where to land.
For the days when your eyes slide off the page and every line has to be read twice.
Line
The whole sentence in front of you, with a pointer moving underneath the words instead of over them.
For when you want the sentence in one piece but need something to keep the pace.
Traditional reading
Plain text, page by page, at whatever speed you feel like. This is where you highlight with your finger and make notes.
For studying, and for the evenings when you just want to read like a person with a book.
Everything else she does
The quiet half of the app
Reading is the part you see. This is the part that decides whether any of it is still there next week.
Bring your own books
PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DOCX and plain text. Point Nana at a file in Files and she does the rest: pulls the chapters out of the bookmarks, spots the pages of publishing small print at the front and asks whether to skip to chapter one. She asks rather than jumps, because being thrown past a preface you wanted to read is worse than turning a few pages yourself.
Highlights that know what they are
Drag across a sentence and say what it is: a definition, a date or number, a key point, or something you don’t get. The first three become cards to answer later. The fourth doesn’t, because a sentence you don’t understand yet isn’t ready to be memorised.
Notes that leave in one piece
Send the whole set out as Markdown, grouped the way you tagged it, ready to land in whatever you keep your notes in. It leaves your phone when you send it and not a moment sooner.
Cards that come back at the right moment
Whatever you answered at the end of a sitting turns into a card, and the card returns just before you’d have forgotten it. Spacing reviews out and answering from memory are the two study habits with the strongest evidence behind them (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013).
She reads out loud
Nana can read the text while you follow it on screen, and the pointer follows her voice rather than a timer, so the two never drift apart. Reading and listening at the same time is one of the few things with proper evidence in ADHD and dyslexia (Elkind 2004, Bonifacci 2022).
A breath before the first sentence
One, three or five minutes of the cyclic sigh: in through the nose, a small top-up, then a long breath out through the mouth. Five minutes a day is the dose that was actually studied (Balban and colleagues, 2023), and the app says so on the screen where you pick.
Day, Dusk, Night, or by the clock
Three moods and an automatic one that follows the time of day and tells you which one it has just chosen, so nothing changes behind your back.
English and Polish, and no connection
Nana speaks both, and she is a slightly different person in each, because a few of her lines would lose their tone translated word for word. The whole app works with the phone offline. Nothing you read, highlight or answer is sent anywhere.
A week that forgives a day
The streak counts days when something stayed, not days when you opened the app, and the goal is four days out of seven. Miss one and nothing is taken away from you. As the Today screen puts it: a day counts from a finished sitting, not from good intentions.
Before you get your hopes up
What this app does not promise
Reading apps are a category built on promises nobody checks. Here is everything Nana won’t tell you, and why.
No number of words per minuteYou’ll get faster at some texts and not at others, and we have no idea by how much. Any app that gives you a percentage before it has met you is guessing.
She won’t switch off the voice in your headThat voice is the classic promise of speed reading courses. Silencing it sounds like it should work, and the evidence for it is thin. Nana leaves it where it is.
No brain trainingNo working memory drills, no Schulte tables, no games that claim to widen your attention. They train you at the game. The improvement doesn’t travel to the book in your hands.
No magic typefaceNo Bionic Reading, no dyslexia font. Both are popular and neither has held up when tested. The type on your screen is a serif you can size yourself, and that’s the whole trick.
Spot mode is not for everyoneOne word at a time helps readers with ADHD. In people without it the same technique tends to make comprehension worse. We’d rather tell you who it’s for than sell it to everybody.
The reading test is not a diagnosisThe three paragraphs on the first run measure how fast you read them and how often you drifted off. That picks your starting settings. It is not a measure of your attention and it says nothing about whether you have ADHD.
She can’t silence your phoneNo app is allowed to turn off your notifications, so Nana doesn’t pretend she can. She asks you to do it yourself before a sitting, and the asking turns out to be most of the job.
Everything left on this page is either something the app does or something with a study behind
it. Where the evidence is thin, Nana says so on the screen itself, not in the small print.
Almost out of the oven
Sit down. She saved you a seat.
Nana’s Focus is finished enough to read a whole book on and not finished enough to sell. It isn’t on the App Store yet, there’s no price and there’s no date. When it’s ready, this page will say so first.
