Soulfeed App Guide: Feed, Reading Plans, Widget and More

Using the Soulfeed app comes down to one gesture: swipe up to read the next passage of spiritual teaching, and tap Go deeper when one stays with you. Around that simple feed sit a few tools that make a daily habit easier: paths that decide which traditions you see, reading plans that run from a week to a month, a Home tab that tracks the days you show up, a daily widget and reminder, and private saves and notes that sync through iCloud. This guide walks through each part in the order you will meet it.

If you are new here and want the bigger picture first, start with What is Soulfeed?

First launch: telling Soulfeed what you are looking for

The first few screens ask a handful of short questions. None of them are a test and you can change every answer later.

Your reason for being here

You pick what brings you to Soulfeed: Build a daily wisdom habit, Understand the great texts, Get through a hard season, or Replace my doomscrolling. Then you choose a daily reading goal. The app’s own advice on that screen is worth repeating: small and steady beats big and rare.

What you are carrying

Next comes “What are you carrying right now?”, a list of themes such as anxiety, grief, anger, letting go or self-worth. Pick as many as you like. These choices quietly lift related passages higher in your feed. They are stored on your iPhone, not sent anywhere.

Choosing your paths

“Which paths speak to you?” is the most important question. Soulfeed groups its library into paths:

• Vedanta & Yoga: India’s science of the Self, from the Upanishads to its messengers in the West
• Buddhism: the Buddha’s path of awakening, from the early sutras to Zen
• Taoism: the way of water, softness and effortless action
• Sufism: the mystic heart of Islam, sung by its poets
• Christian Mystics: seekers of God through silence, love and unknowing
• Stoicism: ancient philosophy as a daily practice of the soul
• Visionaries: poets and outsiders who saw further than their age, such as Emerson, Thoreau and Gibran
• Awakening: direct teachings on waking up, beyond any single tradition
• Manifestation: the creative power of consciousness, from New Thought (Neville Goddard, the Kybalion) to today

Kabbalah is being added as a tenth path.

Choose one or several. If you choose more than one, Soulfeed asks which is home; your home path leads your feed and your daily passage.

How open you want to be

Last, you decide how much of everything else you want to see:

• Only my path: nothing outside the paths you picked, anywhere in the app
• Mostly mine, a little else: mostly your paths, with an occasional passage from another tradition
• Show me everything: your home path first, but the whole library in the mix

Every passage is explained inside its own tradition, so a Taoist verse is never forced into a Buddhist frame or the other way round.

Your daily reminder

Finally, you choose a time for a gentle daily nudge. Soulfeed asks iOS for notification permission at this point. The reminder is a local notification set on your phone; you can turn it off or move it in Settings whenever you like.

The Discover feed

Discover is the heart of the app: a full-screen, dark, vertical feed with one passage per page.

• Swipe up for the next passage. Each one snaps cleanly into place.
• Longer passages are split into slides you swipe sideways through, marked “continued →”, so the text is never shrunk to fit.
• Double-tap anywhere on a passage to like it.
• Press and hold to copy the passage with its reference.
• The right-hand rail lets you like, write a note, share the text, or make a share card image.
• The “For you” chip at the top opens a filter sheet with search, your path chips and topic chips such as Courage, Peace or Grief. Pick a path and a topic together to narrow the feed, for example Stoicism and Anger.

Go deeper: the study sheet

Under every passage sits a Go deeper tile. It opens a study sheet with the meaning of the passage, key terms and their origins, a short “did you know”, the original public-domain translation with translator and year, related passages from other texts, and a reflection question with space for a private note. You can tap through related passages one after another and step back the way you came.

Original text, or plain English

Passages appear as written, in their public-domain translation. A handful of the oldest classics, such as Meditations, the Bhagavad Gita, the Masnavi and The Cloud of Unknowing, can switch to plain modern English from a small pill at the top of the reader.

The Home tab

Home is where your habit lives.

• Passage of the day at the top, chosen from your paths
• Today’s Reading, showing your active reading plan and how far through it you are
• Choose your plan, a suggestion if you have not started one
• Days opened, with a seven-day tracker and your current streak. It counts real days you opened the app, nothing more.
• Wisdom read, the share of the library you have read so far. A passage counts as read after it has been on screen for a moment.
• Saved, your personal library of passages
• Add a Wisdom Widget, with previews of how it looks
• Settings

The Library tab: reading whole texts

Discover mixes passages from across your paths. The Library tab lets you read a single text in order, like a book.

Tap the title chip at the top and choose a path, then a text, then a chapter. A slim numbered rail on the left shows the verse number you are on (Dhammapada 120, Meditations 2.3 and so on). Tap or slide the rail to jump to any verse. A random button and your liked passages sit in the top-left corner, and the translation pill shows which translation you are reading.

This is the best way to read something like the Tao Te Ching or the Dhammapada from start to finish.

Reading plans

Reading plans give you one short passage a day for a set number of days, each with its meaning and a question to sit with. Most take only a few minutes a day.

Open the plans sheet from Home. Plans are grouped into sections:

• Recommended for Beginners, with a START HERE ribbon on the best first plan for your paths
• Your home path and your other paths
• Across Traditions, for plans that draw on three or more paths
• Other paths, unless you chose “Only my path”

There are 32 plans in total. They include The Tao in 30 days, The Dhammapada in 21 days, Stoic mornings (14 days), Seneca: a week, Bhagavad Gita: 7 days, Rumi on love, Poets of the heart (Hafiz, Khayyam and Attar), The Prophet, a week, Kybalion: 7 principles, Feeling Is the Secret in 7 days, Emerson & Thoreau, Contemplative week, and theme plans such as Letting go, Courage, Finding calm, Kindness and Meeting loss.

Tap a plan to see what it covers, who it is best for and how long it takes, then tap Start Plan. You can have one active plan at a time, but switching keeps your progress in every plan you have started. Daily plan reading is part of Soulfeed Premium; the plan sheet shows the current options, and prices come from the App Store.

For help choosing, see how to build a daily spiritual reading habit.

Search

Search lives in the top-left of Discover and in the filter sheet. It looks through the modern text, the original translation, references, meanings, titles, topics and key terms, and every word you type has to match. Try “anger”, “river”, “Tao” or “Seneca time”. Tapping a result opens its study sheet, and from there you can read it in context.

Saves, notes and share cards

• Like a passage with a double-tap or the heart.
• Save it from the bookmark to keep it in Saved on the Home tab.
• Write a note from the rail or the reflection question. Notes are private. The note screen tells you where they are kept: on this iPhone and, if iCloud is on, in your iCloud.
• Share the text, or tap the camera icon to make a clean image card with the passage, its reference and the Soulfeed name, ready for messages or stories.

The Daily Wisdom widget

Soulfeed’s widget shows your passage of the day without opening the app. It comes in four shapes: small and medium for the Home Screen, and a rectangular and an inline version for the Lock Screen.

To add it, touch and hold an empty part of your Home Screen or Lock Screen, tap edit or the plus button, search for Soulfeed, and choose Daily Wisdom. Tapping the widget opens that exact passage in the app. The widget follows your paths, so “Only my path” holds there too.

A widget is one of the simplest ways to swap a doomscroll for something better: the first thing you see when you pick up your phone becomes a line of wisdom instead of a badge count.

Settings worth knowing

• My paths: change paths, home path and openness at any time
• Daily reminder: on or off, and the time
• Text size: a slider with a live preview
• Theme: dark, light or follow the system
• Modern English for older classics: plain modern English for the handful of oldest texts that offer it
• Credits: the full list of texts and translations in the library
• Restore purchases and Premium status
• Replay onboarding if you want to answer the first questions again
• Reset progress, with a confirmation, if you want a clean start

At the bottom, a single line tells you whether your data is “Synced with iCloud” or saved on this iPhone only.

iCloud sync, with no account

There is nothing to sign up for. If your iPhone is signed in to iCloud, Soulfeed quietly syncs your likes, saves, notes, streak, read progress, plan progress, paths and settings through Apple’s iCloud storage for your Apple ID. Install Soulfeed on a new iPhone and they arrive on their own. If iCloud is off, everything still works and simply stays on that phone.

A simple way to start

If you are not sure where to begin, try this for one week:

1. Pick one or two paths and choose “Mostly mine, a little else”.
2. Add the Daily Wisdom widget to your Lock Screen.
3. Set the reminder for a moment you usually reach for your phone anyway, like your first coffee or just before bed.
4. When a passage stays with you, tap Go deeper and answer the reflection question in one line.

That is all. To see the app and get it on your iPhone, visit the Soulfeed home page.