Papyrus for iPhone
The phone is for the twenty minutes you did not plan on: a queue, a train, a corridor between meetings. Papyrus on iPhone is built around reading and capture rather than library administration — but it is the same library, and as of 1.6.0 the everyday filing you actually want to do from a phone is all there.
Pick Up Where You Left
Home leads with the paper you were reading. A full-width Continue card carries the title, the authors, a progress bar, and the page you stopped on — one tap back into the reader, on the page you left, whichever device you left it on. Below it sit the counts, a way into the library, and what you added recently.
Ask Siri, or search from the Home Screen, and you land in the same place without opening the app first.
Reading Without a Signal
Read Later is a download instruction, not just a list. Queueing a paper is an explicit “I will read this on the go”, so its PDF is fetched ahead of time while the queue still has papers waiting. A flight or a commute does not need a connection.
The reader remembers your zoom per paper — as a ratio over fit-to-page, so it survives rotation — and offers Fit Width beside Fit Page, which is the zoom a phone actually wants for a two-column paper.
A Layout Options sheet carries the same page and split controls the iPad reader has: one column or two-up, and a second pane above or beside the first holding another part of the same paper. On a phone the split earns its keep in landscape — a table on one half, the paragraph that reads it on the other.
Filing From the Phone
1.6.0 closed most of the gap with the bigger screens. The things you reach for while reading no longer wait until you are back at a desk:
- Flags. Set one from the quick-state strip, filter the library by Flagged, and tell each flag apart by its shape as well as its color.
- Notebooks. Create, rename, and delete them; file notes onto them and read a shelf straight through.
- Papers. Move to Trash, refresh metadata, and edit the record.
- Folders and projects. Create either one without reaching for an iPad or Mac.
- Per-paper filing. Move a paper between folders and edit its tags.
What stays on the larger screens is the work that wants room: the Evidence Board, project drafting and export, Apple Pencil markup, and the Mac's watched folder and live .bib.
Capture on the Move
A paper you find on your phone belongs in the same library. Paste an arXiv link, a DOI, or a PDF URL into the capture sheet and Papyrus imports it through the same pipeline the Safari extension uses — deduplicated, metadata looked up, PDF downloaded, with progress shown. The Safari extension itself works here too, from the share and long-press menus.
Everything captured syncs to your Mac and iPad through your own iCloud account, so the paper is waiting when you sit down.
Papyrus for iPhone is free on the App Store — the same universal app as iPad.
iOS 17 or later · no account, no telemetry, no subscription.
