Why I Built Moji
I built Moji because I was drowning in saved articles. Every read-it-later app I tried became a graveyard of unread links — no structure, no way to surface the right article at the right time. Moji is a native iOS read-it-later app that saves articles for offline reading and organizes them automatically using smart collections.
The name "Moji" comes from 墨迹 (mòjì) in Chinese — it literally means "ink traces," but colloquially it means being slow or dawdling. Felt fitting for an app that lets you save things to read later — no rush.
Smart Collections — the core idea
Instead of manually tagging or filing articles, you define criteria and Moji continuously filters your library for you. Criteria combine with AND logic between types and OR logic within a type, so you can build surprisingly precise filters:
- Domain: arxiv.org, paperswithcode.com + Saved: This Week → Fresh ML papers
- Keywords: "SwiftUI", "Combine" + Unread → Your iOS learning queue
- Reading Time: > 15 min + Unread → Weekend deep dives
- Domain: news.ycombinator.com + Saved: Last 7 days → This week's HN saves
- Language: zh + Reading Time: < 5 min → Quick Chinese reads for your commute
Four system collections come built in — Unread, Quick Reads (<5 min), Deep Dive (>10 min), and This Week — so it's useful out of the box. Pin your favorites to the filter bar for one-tap access.
Other features
- Native SwiftUI reader — Articles render as native SwiftUI views, not a WebView. This means real offline reading, smooth scrolling, and proper typography controls (font size, serif/sans-serif, line spacing).
- On-device AI summaries — One-sentence TL;DRs powered by Apple Intelligence. Runs entirely on-device, no cloud calls. Supports 10+ languages.
- Full-text search — Search across titles and content with context snippets that jump you straight to the match in the article.
- Reading position memory — Remembers exactly where you left off, down to the block and scroll offset.
- Image viewer — Pinch-to-zoom, double-tap, pan, alt-text display.
- Save PDFs — Import and read PDFs directly in Moji with full-text search and smart collection support.
- PDF export — Save any article as a styled PDF.
- Share extension — Save from Safari in two taps.
- Safari extension — Save articles directly from Safari with a toolbar button.
- Language-aware reading time — Calculates differently for CJK (260 WPM) vs. English (200 WPM) vs. Arabic/Hebrew (150 WPM).
- iCloud sync — Optional CloudKit sync across devices.
- Privacy-first — All processing happens on-device. No analytics, no tracking.