Umbral: AI News Briefing

Nine AI news sources, read and scored on your iPhone. One short briefing a day — plus the list of everything it held back, and why. No account. Nothing leaves the phone.

There is no shortage of AI news. That is the problem.

Umbral reads nine sources every day — Hacker News, arXiv, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, The Verge, Simon Willison and Hipertextual — scores every story against the topics you follow, and hands you one short briefing. Not a feed to scroll. A briefing to finish.

SHOWS ITS WORK

Every story carries a bar: amber at one end, green at the other. That bar is how closely the story matched what you care about, and the notch on it is your threshold.

Then the part no other news app has. Tap "All stories" and you see everything Umbral held back — every headline it decided you did not need, with its score and the reason. Nothing is hidden from you. Move one slider and the whole briefing changes.

You can also see the picture it has built of your interests, as numbers you can check. It starts from the topics you picked and shifts, slowly, toward what you actually open and save. What you read never counts for more than 70% — your own choices always keep a say.

NOTHING LEAVES YOUR PHONE

No account. No sign-up. No servers of ours.

The scoring runs on your iPhone using Apple's on-device intelligence. Your topics, your reading history and your archive stay on the device and are never copied anywhere. There is no analytics, no tracking, and nothing collected — on the free plan or on Pro.

Umbral fetches the feeds directly, the same way your browser would. That is the whole of its network activity.

TUNED BY YOU

Twelve topics. A relevance threshold you move yourself. How many stories make the cut. Which hour the briefing arrives. Change any of it, any time — the next briefing follows.

Saved stories stay on your phone and read with no connection.

FREE, AND HONEST ABOUT IT

Free: three topics, twenty saved stories, three written notes a day.

Umbral Pro lifts all three — every topic, an archive with no ceiling, and no daily limit on the written notes. The yearly plan starts with one week free.

There are no ads on either plan. Pro is what pays for the app, which is why there is nothing else to sell you.

A NOTE ON THE AI

The two-line note explaining why a story matters to you is written by Apple Intelligence and needs an iPhone 15 Pro or later. It is also only attempted when the story arrives with an excerpt to work from, and it is discarded if it only restates the headline — a note that invents something would be worse than no note.

On every other iPhone, and on the stories that cannot support a written note, Umbral shows the measurement instead: which topics matched, and how closely. That half runs on every iOS 26 device and is never limited by your plan.

Headlines and excerpts are always shown exactly as the publisher wrote them. Umbral translates only its own words, never the news.

Umbral is available in English and Spanish, on iPhone and iPad.

SUBSCRIPTION

Umbral Pro — Monthly: $2.99 per month. Umbral Pro — Yearly: $19.99 per year, with the first week free.

Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. The subscription renews automatically unless it is cancelled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Manage or cancel it any time in your Apple Account settings.

Privacy Policy: https://umbral-site-999b4f.gitlab.io/privacy.html Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/