Why You Should Switch to the New Substack App
Substack is a newsletter service that allows you to follow specific authors and get their articles straight to your inbox. Its business model is subscription-based, which allows writers to get paid directly from their audience (while Substack also gets a cut). It’s a great way to get all your favorite writers in one place, but if you’re following a few people on Substack, you’ve probably come across a deluge of email notifications alerting you to new articles. It might be… a little. But now you can collect them all in one app and permanently turn off endless notifications.
The Substack Reader app (available for iPhone) offers a more convenient way to read and lets you follow your favorite writers – without all the notifications. When setting up the free app, just enable the Pause Email Notifications feature. (If you didn’t enable this setting during installation and want to do so now, tap the profile icon at the bottom right of the app and select Notifications . The Pause Email Notifications option is available here.) If you ever stop using the app , Substack will resume sending emails so you don’t miss a single article.
Also, when you sign in to the Substack app, you will be prompted to create a profile and you will see a list of newsletters associated with your email address. These newsletters will be publicly displayed on your profile; uncheck them during installation (or later) by selecting the profile icon > Edit Profile .
You’ll also find a Discover tab in the Substack (a magnifying glass icon) that highlights featured articles. You can also link your Twitter profile to Substack to find a more curated list of articles taken from the reading list of people you follow. (Of course, keep in mind that linking Twitter to Substack comes with a privacy risk.)
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Substack app does not allow you to pay for newsletters using Apple’s payment processor – instead, go to the Substack website and link your credit card to pay creators.
For now, the Substack app is only available on iPhone, but you can join the waitlist if you want on Android.