We built the app we kept wishing existed.

LongformU started with a commute and a frustration. Two of us were listening to more books than we were reading, and every app we tried treated a novel like a playlist — autoplay into something else, a home screen selling us things, our place lost somewhere between the car and the kitchen.

So we made something narrower. The app opens on your library, because that’s where you were. The player does the six things you actually do and nothing else. Your position syncs to the second, because losing your place in chapter nine of a twenty-two-hour book is its own small grief.

We also decided early not to run a membership. Subscriptions turn a bookshop into a tap you’re afraid to turn off. So you buy a book, you own it, and we have no reason to nudge you into anything else.

The catalogue is picked by people, not by a chart. We listen to recordings before they go in, and we turn down books we love when the narration doesn’t do them justice. Fewer titles — but you can pick something at random and trust it.