Everything about the app, in short answers. Works offline in the app; nothing here is sent anywhere.
From Home tap Directory to browse a hand-picked catalogue of sources by country and topic. Tick the ones you want and add them to a category: no AI, no cost.
Settings › Language sets the whole interface. It's independent of your sources: you can read feeds in one language while the app's buttons are in another.
Swipe a source and tap the star, or star it from its menu. Favourites gather in one place from the Home quick-actions so you can jump straight to what you read most.
You choose the sources. The app collects their articles, turns them into short spoken pieces, and plays them one after another, including in the car, hands-free.
Your sources → Articles → Spoken → In the car
Paste any website address. The app looks for that site's feed and adds it. You don't need to know what RSS is or find a special link.
If you already use Feedly, Inoreader, NetNewsWire or almost any other reader, export an OPML file from it and import it here. Your sources and folders arrive intact.
A category is a group of sources: World, Sport, Local, anything you want. Categories are what Radio turns into stations, so they're worth a minute of thought.
Discover proposes publications you don't follow yet, checks that each one actually works, and lets you add them in a tap. It works from the very first day, before you've read anything.
Type a publication's name instead of its address, and the app searches for a matching source and adds its feed for you.
Safe & Informed uses AI in a few clearly-marked places. Wherever you see the "AI" badge, that content was generated by artificial intelligence. AI can be wrong or biased: treat it as a starting point and check the original source.
Explore the source directory on our website: browse feeds by topic, discover new publications, and see what others are reading. A good place to start if you're not sure which sources to add.
Open safeandinformed.com ↗Kreel is a free browser extension from the same team. As you browse, it quietly finds the RSS feeds on the pages you visit (including hidden ones for YouTube, Reddit and GitHub) and exports them as an OPML or Excel file you can import straight into Safe & Informed.
Only the natural AI voice costs credits. The robotic (system) voice, reading text, and translation are always free. Here's what each AI-voice action costs:
Every source is tagged with its language, its region, and whether it's a podcast: worked out for you, and yours to correct. Use the filter to narrow a busy category or station.
An offline pack generates the audio for a set of articles ahead of time, so you can listen with no signal: on a flight or the metro. Build one from a category or your queue.
Anything the app plays goes to AirPlay speakers, Bluetooth, or your car just like music. Pick the output from the Now Playing controls or Control Center.
Radio takes a category and plays it as a continuous station. It keeps going on its own: no tapping, no end of list.
Add articles to the queue and they play one after another. It's the manual version of Radio: you decide the running order.
A full-screen view where each article is one card and you flick upwards for the next. Fast way to clear a backlog without opening anything.
The system voice is your phone's built-in speech. It's free, works offline, and reads the whole article. The natural voice is a real-sounding narrator that reads a short summary instead.
System voice → Whole article → Natural voice → Short summary
Playback speed is remembered across sessions. The sleep timer stops playback after a set time or at the end of the current article.
Download your queue before you leave and it plays anywhere: underground, in a tunnel, on a plane.
The app appears on your car's screen as a full audio app, with six tabs. Everything is built from Apple's driving-safe controls: large targets, short lists, no typing.
If your car supports both, a wired USB connection to CarPlay or Android Auto is steadier than wireless. It starts faster, stays connected, and has less lag between a tap and the sound.
Add the app's actions as Siri Shortcuts, then trigger them by voice. Siri starts playback, opens the briefing and controls what's playing, hands-free. You choose the wording; these are just the defaults.
Thirty seconds of setup makes the whole drive hands-free.
Download your queue, a station or a whole category before you set off and it plays instantly, offline, with no gaps: no waiting at the first junction and no cut-outs in a tunnel or on a weak signal.
If you allow location, the app shows the weather where you are and traffic conditions nearby. Location is used at that moment and never stored.
A rule watches for keywords and drops matching articles straight into a folder you choose, so a topic you follow collects itself while you're away.
Settings › Appearance sets light or dark to match your system or lock one in, and a text-size slider makes everything bigger or smaller for comfortable reading.
Strips the page down to the article: no banners, no pop-ups, no cookie walls. Adjust the text size and it stays that way.
The archive is what you deliberately keep. Organise it into folders, add tags, write notes on an article. It becomes your own reference library.
History fills itself with everything you've opened or played. Archive holds only what you chose to keep.
Searches the articles you've collected: titles and full text. Wikipedia results can be included if you want background on a subject.
Finds related articles by meaning, not exact words. Searching "elections" also surfaces pieces about voting and ballots.
For You is a shortlist picked from what you actually open and listen to: not ads, not paid placement. The more you use the app, the better it fits.
Trending surfaces stories that many of your sources are covering at once: a quick read of what's big right now across the feeds you follow.
Settings › Notifications controls breaking-news alerts and the daily briefing reminder. Turn either on or off, and set the time the reminder arrives.
The app watches what you open, finish and skip, and builds a picture of your interests. All of it happens on this device. Nothing about your reading is sent anywhere.
What you read → On this device → Your topics → For You
You don't have to wait for the app to learn. Choose the topics you care about, and how old an article can be before it stops appearing.
The app scores headlines for clickbait patterns and quietly pushes the worst offenders down. It's a filter on presentation, not on opinion or politics.
The app checks your sources in the background and notifies you when something looks genuinely urgent.
When several of your sources run the same story, a small badge shows how many did. Tap it to read each outlet's own headline together, and play them one after another to hear how the framing differs.
Swipe a headline and choose Not interested. It leaves every list, and the app quietly shows you fewer stories like it.
The small buttons on a headline, when you swipe it, open its menu, or view its summary, do this:
While something is playing, these control it:
Around the app, these get you where you're going:
Control playback from your wrist, see what's playing, and pick up where you left off. Complications put it on your watch face.
Pin a widget to your Home Screen or Lock Screen for the latest headlines. While something is playing, a Live Activity keeps the controls one glance away.
The same app runs on iPad and on Macs with Apple silicon, with a layout that uses the extra room.
Your sources, categories, queue, archive and history sync through your own iCloud account, so a new device arrives already set up.
You spend one credit the first time a piece of audio is generated. Listening to it again, or later, or on another device, is free. Nothing is counted twice.
Most of the app is free forever. Pro adds the AI layer: a natural voice, short summaries and the daily briefing.
Every article read in the natural voice uses one voice play. Pro includes 150 a month, and the count resets on the 1st.
If 150 isn't enough, top-up packs add more. They're one-off purchases, not a subscription, and they don't expire at the end of the month.
Subscriptions are managed by the App Store, not inside the app. Cancel any time and you keep the paid features until the period ends.
Settings › Storage shows how much space cached audio, images and offline packs use, and lets you clear any of it in one tap. Cleared audio simply regenerates next time.
You never register. There's no name, no email, no password, no profile, so there's no user database with you in it.
The article's text is sent to our server, which passes it to the AI provider and returns the audio. The request carries no identifier: no name, no account, no advertising ID.
You can choose to contribute anonymous usage figures. Both options are off unless you turn them on, and you can change your mind at any time.
The app asks for as little as it can, and each request has one purpose.
Usually the publisher changed or retired their feed. Open the source and use Check feed. The app will re-test it and tell you what it found.
If a feed in the community directory is broken, dead, or inappropriate, flag it for review with Report feed. It's sent to us anonymously so we can check it and fix or remove the listing.
Check the silent switch and the volume first. They catch almost everyone at least once.
Open the phone's Settings › General › CarPlay, choose your car, and make sure the app is in the visible list. Some cars hide new apps until you add them by hand.
A station needs at least two sources in that category, and those sources need to have published something recently.
Use Restore Purchases in Settings. Make sure you're signed in with the same Apple Account you bought it with.
Write to us. Say which device you're on and what you were doing. It makes the answer much faster.
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