Questions, answered plainly.
What Kiveo is, what it costs, and where your reading actually lives. If yours isn’t here, write to us.
About Kiveo
What is Kiveo, exactly?
A private space to save quotes, reflect on what you read, and watch your reading life take shape over time. A reading journal, with a timer attached.
Who is it for?
Readers who’d rather finish one book well than start five. Book-club members, students, journalers, and anyone who’s been keeping a commonplace book in the back of a Notes app and wanted somewhere proper to put it.
How is it different from Goodreads or StoryGraph?
Those apps are built around social signals: public ratings, shelves other people can see, comparisons with friends. Kiveo has no public timeline, no feed, and no social proof of any kind. It’s a single-player experience by design. We wrote a longer, fairer comparison of all four apps if you want the detail.
What does “no leaderboards” actually mean?
There is nowhere in Kiveo where you are ranked against another reader. No surface shows what other people are reading, or how fast. Your reading is between you and the book.
Do I need to read a lot to use it?
No. Whether you read daily or once a month, Kiveo is about noticing what stays with you. Nothing in the app measures you against a pace.
Is Kiveo a real word?
It’s invented, but not arbitrary.
It draws on kivi, the Finnish and Estonian word for stone: stillness, grounding, permanence. The soft “eo” ending keeps it open.
Which is what we wanted the app to be. A quiet, enduring place to gather your thoughts, like placing markers along a path.
Price and platform
Is it really free?
Yes. Kiveo is free to download on the App Store, with no account required and no ads. Supporters can leave a tip and unlock custom app icons, but everything you need to track your reading is already there.
Is Kiveo on Android?
Not yet. Kiveo started as an iOS app, and we want the Android version to feel just as considered before we share it. It’s genuinely in progress rather than aspirational.
Do I need an account?
No. The app works fully without one. If you want your notes on both an iPhone and an iPad, that uses your existing Apple ID, and Kiveo never sees your email address.
Privacy and data
Where do my quotes and reflections live?
On your device. We don’t host your reading data on our servers. Turn on iCloud sync and it uses Apple’s standard end-to-end encrypted mechanism, which means we still can’t read any of it.
Is my data safe if I lose my phone?
With iCloud sync on, your library restores with your device. You can also export everything yourself at any time: books, shelves, quotes, and reflections.
What about book recommendations?
We’re building a quiet recommendations feature that draws only on the books already in your library, and runs anonymously. We will never build a behavioural profile of you, and there’s nothing to sell because we don’t collect it. The privacy policy says the same thing in longer form.
Using the app
What happens if I pause or abandon a book?
It stays in your library under Paused or Set aside. Nothing in the app treats that as failure; some books just aren’t right for right now, and the library will hold it for whenever you come back. You can hide set-aside books if you’d rather not see them.
What does the Nightstand do?
It holds a queue of seven books: the ones you’re actually reaching for next. Promote books to it from your library and reorder them whenever you like. The cap is intentional. More on how it works.
Can I bring my library over from Goodreads?
Yes. Export your Goodreads library and import it into Kiveo, and your books, shelves, and reading dates come with you.
Does it track my reading time automatically?
Only when you start a session. Kiveo keeps time in the background and shows a Live Activity on your Lock Screen while a session runs, and you can log a session afterwards for reading that happened away from the app.
Still wondering?
Write to us. A person reads every message, and we answer in the same plain English we’ve used here.
Send us a question