PageEcho 1.5.5 is on the App Store. This one is about the reader and the library: how the page looks while you read, how you find things inside a book, and what the free store offers. It also carries the one fix that shipped as 1.5.4 earlier this week. Here is what changed, in the order you are likely to notice it.
Focus on the page
Dialogue highlight tints quoted speech, so a conversation stands out from the narration around it. Reading focus, in page mode, dims everything except a line ruler or the current paragraph; tap the edges of the page to move the band. Both are off until you turn them on in the reader settings.
Books sometimes bring their own styling: tiny fixed text, black text that disappears on a dark theme, white boxes behind paragraphs. The reader now follows your font size and theme instead of the book's rules.
Search inside a book
Search in a book has whole-word, regular expression and "near" modes, optional tolerance for typos, and returns up to 1,000 results without freezing the page.
Notes and quote cards
Exports of your highlights and notes can include the sentence around each highlight and an open-in-PageEcho link that jumps back to the passage, and you can leave out chosen colors or styles. Quote cards get new layouts, sizes and palettes, plus an optional QR code.
Sync that never moves you backwards
Editing a highlight on one device no longer moves the reading position on another device backwards. When another device read elsewhere in the book, the reader offers to go there instead of jumping on its own.
Siri and Search, only if you want it
New, and off by default. One switch in settings lets Spotlight find your books and highlights, and lets Shortcuts open a book or jump to a highlight. What the system index receives is titles, authors, highlighted passages and your notes. Book text is never shared, and the same switch turns all of it off again.
Wikisource in four languages
The free store's Wikisource section now comes in Korean, Japanese, Chinese and English editions, each with a starter shelf of public-domain classics. Works that exist in several versions get an edition picker, downloads are lighter, and books arrive with clean typographic covers. Six more languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Czech) are available through search. Project Gutenberg and arXiv are unchanged; An iPhone app that reads books, PDFs and web articles aloud lists everything the store offers.
In the library and the footnotes
Titles with numbers sort the way you expect (1, 2, 10 rather than 1, 10, 2). A "Time left" sort orders books by how long they would take to finish, with an optional time-left label on each book. In the reader, more footnotes are recognized, and a footnote inside a footnote opens in the same sheet; How to listen to EPUB books on iPhone has the details.
The 1.5.4 fix
1.5.4 fixed one thing: after "Start with a sample" in onboarding, the reader could show the library's bar instead of its own, with no Back button and no Stop button while listening. The reader now always keeps its own bar.
What stays the same
Everything above happens on your device. Voices, translation, summaries and answers run on the iPhone, there is no account and no PageEcho server, and the Network Transparency screen lists every place the app can connect to. Siri and Search is the only new way anything leaves the app, and it is off until you turn it on.
The full list is in the App Store release notes. If something in this update does not behave as described here, write to us; the guides on this site are checked against each release and this one was checked against 1.5.5 on November 7, 2026.