Refrain — press kit

Everything on this page may be quoted or reproduced. Updated September 9, 2026.

Refrain brings a few of your Kindle highlights back each day and, on your own device, finds the ideas running between your books. There is no account, no server, and no subscription: the app is free, and a one-time $4.99 unlock adds the discovery layer.

Download the press kit (zip, 11 MB) View on the App Store

The zip holds every screenshot below at App Store resolution, the app icons for iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch at 1024 px, and the mark and lockup as PNG and SVG.

Fact sheet

Name: Refrain — listed on the App Store as “Refrain: Reread What Matters.”
One line: Your Kindle highlights, back in your life.
Developer: Don Browning, working alone. Refrain is his second independent app, after AirStory.
Released: Version 1.0 on August 26, 2026, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch.
Price: Free. One in-app purchase, “The Discovery Layer,” $4.99 once. Never a subscription. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Requires: iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15, or watchOS 11. The watch app is a companion to the iPhone app.
Category: Books.
Privacy: App Store privacy label: Data Not Collected. No account, no analytics, no tracking. Details on the how it works page.
Built with: Swift and SwiftUI, SwiftData with CloudKit for sync through the reader’s own iCloud, and a bundled Core ML sentence-embedding model (bge-small-en-v1.5) for everything that reads passages.
Links: getrefrain.app · App Store · sample library for a hands-on look without a Kindle account.
Contact: Press: don@getrefrain.app. Support: support@getrefrain.app. Both reach the developer directly.

What it is

Kindle readers mark passages and then never see them again. Refrain is a daily return to those passages: a short deck, a few passages from a few books, waiting when you have a minute. One you dog-eared opens it. A rediscovery from a book you haven’t opened in months closes it. No streaks, no scores, nothing to keep up with.

Import is plumbing. Sign in to Amazon inside the app and your highlights arrive with their books, notes, and real covers. Older Kindle, or sideloaded books? Bring over the My Clippings.txt file. Both routes merge without duplicates, and the whole library is free and uncapped.

The $4.99 unlock adds what Refrain makes on top of your passages: Threads, the lines of thought running through your books; Rhymes, passages that resonate by meaning rather than by matching words; Search by meaning; Echoes, a daily line from the wider canon matched to what you’ve been keeping; Insights, your own notes kept with what sparked them; and Go deeper, which gathers a passage and its context into a research brief you hand to whatever you like.

Why it might be worth writing about

There is no Refrain server. Not a small one, not a proxy. The library lives on the reader’s devices and syncs through their own iCloud. Every feature that reads a passage runs on the device, including search by meaning. That’s not a privacy policy. It’s the architecture.
The canon comes down; the library never goes up. Echoes matches a 50,000-quote public corpus (Wikiquote) to the reader’s own threads on the device. It inverts the usual model, where a service mines customer libraries server-side.
Search finds your words. Rhymes find your meaning. A 32 MB bundled embedding model gives a one-time-purchase app the kind of semantic search normally sold as a subscription.
The pricing is the product thesis. Existing highlight tools charge monthly for import and export. Refrain makes the daily act of rereading the product, keeps everything the reader owns free, and charges once for what it discovers.
Coming in Refrain 2.0 (October): a reading beside any passage, on Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Tap Go deeper and Apple's model will write a reading beside the passage, answering the questions the reader chose — why they marked it, the fuller picture, the best objection, one question to sit with. Sent only when the reader taps, returned to their device, never to Refrain; the reading stays with the passage, and its question can ride back in the daily deck. No Refrain server, still; the network surface stays Amazon, Apple, and two static files.
Built for iPhone Duo's launch: the reading app that treats the foldable as an open book. On the Duo's inner display Refrain 2.1 lays out as a spread — the passage on the left page, its facing page on the right (rhymes, the thread it runs through, today's echo, Go deeper) — with the hinge as the gutter, so no line of text crosses the fold. The spread is free; what fills the facing page follows the one-time unlock, with true counts shown before purchase.
A full Apple citizen from one developer: native iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch apps, a Home Screen widget, iCloud sync, universal purchase.

Screenshots

Real captures from the developer’s own library, no frames or overlay text. Click any image for the web-size version; the zip has the originals.

iPhone

The Threads tab on iPhone showing kept threads with passage fragments and counts — Threads: lines of thought running across books.

The Library shelf on iPhone with real book covers — The shelf, wearing real covers.

The deck's closing card on iPhone with today's echo from the wider canon — The closing card, with today’s echo.

A passage and one that rhymes with it, on iPhone — A passage and its rhyme.

iPad

Threads on iPad: kept threads in a list, one selected with its cross-book passages — Threads, with a thread’s passages from three books.

Your Library in Numbers on iPad — Your library in numbers.

Mac

The reading desk on Mac with the passage, a rhymes rail, and keyboard shortcut hints — The desk on Mac.

The Library on Mac: author-sorted shelf with a selected book's cover and passage list — Library on Mac.

Threads on Mac with a selected thread's passages from three books — Threads on Mac.

Your Library in Numbers on Mac — Your library in numbers, on Mac.

Apple Watch

Icon and mark

App icon (1024 px PNG in the zip)

Lockup, SVG

The mark is a repeat sign drawn as a pair of quotation marks: the line that returns. Please don’t recolor it or set it on a photograph.

Boilerplate

Refrain is a Kindle-highlights app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. It brings a few of your highlighted passages back each day and, entirely on your device, finds the ideas running between your books. There is no Refrain account and no Refrain server; your library syncs through your own iCloud. The app is free, with a one-time $4.99 unlock for the discovery layer. Refrain is made by Don Browning and is available on the App Store at getrefrain.app.

About the developer

Don Browning is SVP of Data & Platform Engineering at SoundCloud and previously led engineering at Turner Broadcasting, Yik Yak, and WarnerMedia. He builds focused apps on his own; Refrain is the second, after AirStory. More at donwb.com.

Questions, review copies, or an interview?

Write to don@getrefrain.app. There is nothing to unlock for a review: the sample library exercises every feature, including the paid ones, in a few minutes.