FoxLeaf is coming soon to iOS and Android, which means we can describe it fully before you can open it. So here is the tour. This is everything in the app, in roughly the order you would meet it.
Foxy's Library. The first screen worth spending time on is the shelf. Foxy's Library is a browsable catalog of public domain audiobooks drawn from the Internet Archive and LibriVox, built into the app, free and legal to listen to. It exists so you never face an empty library on day one. LibriVox volunteers have been recording public domain books aloud for two decades, and the catalog runs to tens of thousands of titles: the classics everyone was assigned and never finished, plus a long tail of forgotten adventure serials, travel writing, folklore, and early science fiction that reads like it was written last year. Your own audio files sit on the same shelf (MP3, plus M4A and MP4 on Android). There is no separate mode for them. You do not need an account to browse or listen, and The Wind in the Willows comes already illustrated as a free sample, so you can see the whole idea working before paying for anything.
Choosing a style. Before you press play you pick one of twelve art styles. This matters more than it sounds, because ten people who read the same novel picture ten different books, and there is no single correct look for a story. Match the register: something soft for a gentle book, something heavier for a mystery. You are not locked in. Style can be changed in the middle of a chapter without restarting, without waiting, and without losing your place, because the engine tracks who the characters are separately from how they are drawn.
Playback. Press play and the book starts immediately. There is no processing step, no queue, no progress bar standing between you and the story. Scenes are generated in real time from what the narrator is actually saying and change as the story changes, so what is on screen is where the book is right now. This is the part that is hard to convey in a screenshot and obvious within two minutes of using it: when the scene shifts, something shifted in the plot, which is exactly the moment attention usually slips away without you noticing.
Characters that hold. Across the whole book, the people stay themselves. The protagonist in chapter thirty is recognizably the protagonist from chapter one, the house stays the house, the ship stays the ship. This is the single hardest thing FoxLeaf does and the reason Tom Moore, who designed and built FoxLeaf, wrote our own engine rather than calling somebody else's. Generating one beautiful image is easy. Generating the ten-thousandth image of a specific person, hours in, still matching, while the narration keeps moving, is a different problem entirely.
Mirroring to a television. Put the audio and the visuals on the TV and a book becomes something a room can do together, which is not normally possible with reading. This is screen mirroring rather than a separate TV app: on Android, FoxLeaf sends you to your phone's mirroring settings, and on iPhone the audio can route over AirPlay while you start mirroring from Control Center. It works particularly well for the cases where audio alone is a hard sell: kids who will sit for a story with something to look at, an older relative who finds print difficult, a partner who would never pick an audiobook but will watch what is already on.
Your library and your place. Everything you listen to lands in a personal library that saves your progress per book. Coming back after four days is the moment most books get abandoned, and returning to a picture of where you were is a far softer landing than returning to a voice mid-sentence.
Privacy and price. Playback, transcription, and the image rendering all happen on your device rather than on our servers, so your audio files are never uploaded and there is no growing record of your reading life somewhere else. Deciding what each scene should show does need a connection, because a short passage of the transcript goes out to build the prompt before the picture is rendered locally. And there is no subscription. Pricing starts at $2.99 per book and scales with the length of the file, so months when you do not listen cost nothing and the books already in your library stay there.
That is the whole app. No tiers, no ads, no account required to browse the shelf. We will post here on launch day.