Unstyle: Read just the text of any website on your iPhone or iPad

18 October 2015, 05:00

Unstyle, available free in the App Store, is a browser that makes use of iOS 9’s new ability to filter web content. However, here it does more than block ads – it reduces entire sites to their core text content. Ads are gone. Pictures are gone. Unstyle even banishes the site’s style sheet, doing away with text decorations. Instead, everything’s formatted in an elegant serif font.

The benefit of Unstyle is that web pages can be grabbed quickly on even the slowest connections. This is terrific for cellular data users, and cheap too if you’re being charged by the gigabyte. The bad news is that web pages can be a little hard to navigate. That style sheet is there for a reason. It tells on-page elements where to go. More often than not you’ll have to scroll past a series of menus before you get to the page content, for example. But this ain’t exactly difficult to do.

What I like ever better about Unstyle is that by tapping the menu button at the bottom right you can switch to viewing Text + Images, or just headlines within the piece (without even the body text), or just images. It’s like you’re being given a variety of ways to consume the core content of the web.

  • Take a look at Unstyle. It’s a great little app.

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