App: History Book - Browse & Search
Developer: And a Dinosaur
Genres: Productivity, Utilities

History Book automatically saves your browsing history for searching later.

By default, it only auto-saves pages that contain an article, so you don’t have to worry about it saving your sensitive data.

If you want, you can configure it to auto-save every webpage. If you are feeling paranoid, you can disable auto-save entirely. You can also exclude websites that you never want to auto-save.

You can use it as a read-it-later app, but I mostly use it as a search app.

For privacy reasons, History Book stores your browsing history in iCloud. Apart from the iCloud sync, History Book does not collect, store, or transmit any personal information.

History Book has no in-app purchases, no ads, and no tracking. It’s a universal purchase, so you only have to buy it once to use it on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Caveat:
- The app uses readability.js to check whether a webpage is readable. It is likely to produce both false positives and false negatives.
- The app is written in SwiftUI, which means there are some not-quite-standard behaviors and UI bugs that I can’t fix.
- The app uses iCloud for syncing.

Note: The “can read and alter webpages” text in the permission section is just unfortunate wording. History Book needs access to the web page to save the content. It’s not doing anything creepy!

Release notes:
Pages visited in Private Windows will no longer be automatically saved.