A lightweight text-mode browser for Android. It fetches web pages and PDFs and shows them as clean, readable text — no rendering engine, no ads, no clutter. A mobile port of the terminal browser text_browser.py : https://github.com/adegard/terminal_text_browser
Browsing the web usually means fighting pop-ups, autoplay videos, and heavy layouts. TextReader strips all of that away and gives you just the words: articles, blog posts, forum threads and PDF documents as plain text that is fast to load and comfortable to read. It is also privacy-friendly — ad and tracker links are filtered out by default (safe mode).
Get the latest APK from the Releases page:
Download app-debug.apk and open it on your phone to install (you may need to allow "Install unknown apps" for your file manager).
- Search — 5 search engines: DuckDuckGo Lite, DuckDuckGo HTML, Brave, Bing, and Google (text mode). Every engine falls back to DuckDuckGo Lite if it returns nothing.
- Article reader — extracts the main text from any web page (largest-content heuristic), along with its links, title and image. Unreadable clutter (scripts, nav, ads) is removed.
- PDF reading — open any
.pdfURL and read its text, page by page, with the title taken from the document metadata. Parsed text is cached so revisiting a PDF loads instantly (cache is kept only for bookmarked PDFs). - Progress indicator — a thin bar shows while pages, PDFs or searches are loading.
- Block navigation — text is split into blocks; turn pages by swiping left/right or with the ◀ ▶ buttons. Multi-page articles (
/page/N) load the next part automatically at the end. - Vertical scroll — when a block is taller than the screen, drag to scroll (a scrollbar appears on the side).
- Bookmarks — save the current position of any page and resume exactly where you left off. Remove them via ⋮ → Remove bookmark or the Remove… button in the bookmarks list.
- History — a chronology of visited pages (length configurable, deduplicated).
- Links list — view every link found on the current page and open any of them.
- I'm feeling lucky — type
ifl queryto jump straight to the first search result. - Share — share the current page title and link via the Android share sheet.
- Ask AI (Groq) — ask a question, or leave the field blank to get a summary of the current page. Powered by the Groq API (
llama-3.1-8b-instant); set your API key in Settings. - Compact URL — the address bar stays on one line and the page header shows the URL with its middle shortened.
- Text zoom — adjust the reading text size with A+ / A− (10–28sp), persisted.
- Read aloud (TTS) — tap TTS in the bottom bar to hear the current page read out loud, block by block. The sentence being read is highlighted; when a block finishes it auto-advances to the next one. The voice auto-detects the language of the page you're reading (from
<html lang>or a content heuristic) and uses it for both engines. - Voice modes — Settings → Voice: auto (offline engine, online fallback), offline only, or online always. If your phone has no TTS engine installed, the app automatically uses an online voice — no engine needed.
- Voice speed — Settings → Voice speed lets you set 0.5×–2.0×, applied to both the offline engine and the online voice.
- Day / Night / OLED themes — cycle via ⋮ → Toggle theme. OLED uses a pure-black background, light-grey text, and black buttons with thin grey borders.
- Data backup — Settings → Export/Import saves your settings, bookmarks and history to a JSON file (via the system file picker), so you can move them between devices.
- Settings — search engine, results per page, paragraphs per page, max characters per block, chronology length, text size, Groq API key, voice mode/language/speed, toggles for showing the page title, page number, and compact URL.
- Type a URL (e.g.
en.wikipedia.org) or a search query into the top field, then tap Go. - Swipe left/right — or use ◀ ▶ — to move between blocks of text.
- Use the ⋮ menu for Home, Links, History, Settings, Share, I'm feeling lucky, Ask AI, Save/Remove bookmark, text zoom, theme, and Exit.
- Tap ✕ to clear the address bar.
- Tap TTS to read the page aloud (tap again to stop). Use Bookmarks to manage saved pages.
- Swipe up/down to scroll when a block is taller than the screen.
The APK is built by GitHub Actions on every push (assembleDebug) and uploaded as the app-debug-apk artifact.
./gradlew assembleDebugAPK output: app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk