Apps for iPhone and Apple Watch
Volary builds apps in Swift and SwiftUI. Five of them are described here, each with its current state.
All of them are work in progress, and none is on the App Store yet. Each page says what works today and what is still missing.
The apps
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Inklight
Coming to the App Store
Reads your own EPUB, PDF, text and Markdown files aloud with a neural voice that runs entirely on the iPhone, offline and without a subscription. With an Apple Watch remote.
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Tolk
Work in progress: early build on my own iPhone
Listens to Swedish spoken in the room and shows it in English, sentence by sentence.
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StoryReader
Work in progress: first milestone built, last worked on in July 2026
A reader for plain-text stories in an iCloud folder. Every story ends with a star rating and a comment.
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TimeBucketDrip
Work in progress: runs as a web app, the iPhone version is not finished yet
A weekly time budget. Every activity gets hours per week, and the hours run down while you work on it.
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RandomWords
Work in progress: the first version works, the next version is specified and not built yet
One button that shows random words, to bring back a dream or another weak memory.
What they have in common
Each app does one thing, and I built each one because I wanted to use it myself. The points below are checked against the code of all five.
- Swift throughout. Four use SwiftUI for the interface; RandomWords, the oldest, uses UIKit.
- No accounts, no advertising, no analytics code.
- The work happens on the device wherever that is possible. Where something leaves the phone, the app page says what and where to.
- Few dependencies. The iPhone code of StoryReader, TimeBucketDrip and RandomWords uses no third-party library, Aloud and Tolk use one each (for the speech model).
The interesting part is usually below the interface: speech models that have to run in real time on a phone, text that has to be parsed without a library, a file format that has to survive a sync between devices.
Where this stands
Volary AB is a one-person company, and the apps are built by Dominic Portain. So far the ones that run are installed from my Mac on my own iPhone and Apple Watch. The plan is to release all of them on the App Store under Volary AB. There are no dates yet, and Aloud is the furthest along.
Volary also takes on app work for clients (see other work on the home page). For that, or for a question about one of the apps, write to info@volary.pro.