Nana’s Focus
iPhone app · Read and remember

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.

Free on the App Store

Supper is on the table. Version 1.0 went into the App Store on 25 August 2026 — free, for iPhone on iOS 18 or later, in ten languages.

Get it on the App Store See the other apps
3
ways to read
4 of 7
days is the weekly goal
Offline
nothing leaves the phone
Spot mode. The word “lists” sits alone in the middle of the screen with a single letter picked out in green, the whole sentence runs in italics underneath it, and a “Keep this sentence” button waits below. The bar at the bottom reads 927 of 2727 words, about six minutes left.
One word, one spot, one letter marked where your eye should land.
A study plan called Memory midterm, nine days out. Three tiles read 34 per cent read, 0 notes, 6 cards. Underneath, a card says two minutes a day plus two cards, and explains that this fits the material into the first five of the nine days so the rest are left for review alone. Below that the exam date, a daily reminder switch, and short notes on active recall and spaced repetition.
Give her the exam date and she spreads the material over the days before it.
A review card, one of four. The question reads “The forgetting curve”, and the answer underneath: Ebbinghaus, 1885. Without review, about a third of the material is left after a day. Three buttons at the bottom — No idea, Barely, I remember — and a line explaining you swipe right if you knew it and left if you didn’t.
What you answered at the end of a sitting comes back just before you’d forget it.
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.

Ten languages, and she follows your phone

English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese. Not the buttons only — the lessons on how to study, the memory techniques and the reading test are written out in every one of them. There is no language switch inside the app on purpose: she speaks whatever your phone is set to, so you never set the same thing twice.

No connection, at all

The whole app works with the phone offline. Nothing you read, highlight or answer is sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it: no account, no server, and not a single line of code in the app that opens a network connection.

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 minute You’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 head That 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 training No 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 typeface No 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 everyone One 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 diagnosis The 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 phone No 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.

Fresh from the oven

Changelog

1.025 August 2026New
  • Nana’s Focus is in the App Store. Free, for iPhone on iOS 18 or later, in ten languages: English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese.
  • Three ways to read. One word at a time in a fixed spot, a sentence at a time with a pointer leading your eye, or ordinary pages you mark with a finger. Read-aloud runs with any of the three.
  • A question at the end of every sitting. Whatever you answer becomes a card and comes back a few days later, just before you would have forgotten it — and the queue can be laid out against an exam date.
  • Your own books. PDF, EPUB, MOBI, DOCX and plain text come in, notes go out as Markdown, and the whole thing works offline with no account.
Out of the oven

Sit down. She saved you a seat.

Nana’s Focus has been in the App Store since 25 August 2026, and it costs nothing. Version 1.0 reads your own books, asks what stayed at the end of a sitting and brings the answer back before you forget it. Everything happens on the phone.

Get it on the App Store See the other apps

Made for iPhone on iOS 18 or later, in ten languages: English, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese. It works with the phone offline, and your books, your highlights and your answers stay on the device.

She’ll ask whether you’ve eaten. Don’t take it personally, she asks everyone.