Substack is a newsletter service that lets you follow specific writers and receive their articles directly to your inbox. Its business model centers around a subscription that allows writers to get paid directly from their audience, (while Substack also gets a cut). It’s a great way to collect all your favorite writers in one place—but if you follow several people on Substack, you’ve probably experienced the barrage of email notifications alerting you to new articles. It can be…a bit much. But now, you can collect them all in one app and shut off the endless notifications for good.
The Substack Reader app (available for iPhone) offers a better reading experience and a hub to follow your favorite writers—without all the notifications. When you set up the free app, simply enable Pause email notifications. (If you didn’t enable this option during setup, and you want to now, tap the profile icon in the bottom-right corner of the app and select Notifications. The Pause email notifications option is available here.) If you ever stop using the app, Substack will resume sending emails, so you don’t miss any articles.
Also, when you sign in to Substack’s app, you’ll be prompted to create a profile, and you’ll see a list of newsletters associated with your email address. These newsletters will be publicly displayed on your profile; uncheck these during setup (or later), by going to profile icon > Edit profile.
You’ll also find a Discover tab in Substack (the magnifying glass icon), which highlights featured articles. You can also choose to link your Twitter profile with Substack to find a more curated list of articles, sourced from the reading list of people you follow. (Of course, keep in mind that linking Twitter to Substack comes with a privacy risk.)
And finally, it’s worth noting that Substack’s app doesn’t allow you to pay for newsletters using Apple’s payment processor—go to Substack’s website and link your credit card to pay creators there instead.
At the moment, Substack’s app is available only on iPhone, but you can join the waitlist if you want it on Android.
