Thanks to everyone on F-Droid and GitHub for the support and kind words, it really means a lot! I’m happy to share that Aftergleam is now on Google Play too.
Researchers need to keep up with the hundreds of new papers posted every day on arXiv and other preprint servers. Aftergleam learns your interests locally on your phone, so your data never leaves your device, and shows you papers that matter.
It covers computer science, engineering, biology, medicine, chemistry, law and more. You can also set keywords to get notified about the exact topics you follow, and read papers offline as PDF or in Reader mode.
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=si.jakobkreft.aftergleam
Website: https://aftergleam.app/
It’s open source: https://github.com/jakobkreft/Aftergleam
I hope you enjoy and find it useful as much as I do.
You mention F-Droid but then only link Play Store?
Could you please add https://eprint.iacr.org/ for cryptography?
Thanks, good suggestion! I looked into it and it should be quite easy to add. IACR ePrint has an open feed with abstracts and categories, and the metadata is free to use, so it fits the app.
Great idea, installed it immediately. After my studies, I’ve stopped reading scientific outputs, I hope this rekindles my interest.
Thank you, I hope that it does. Enjoy!
Needs a section on veganism (the subject spans climate science, philosophy of mind, ethics, public health, law, biomedical engineering, etc)
Veganism spans so many fields that it works better as a keyword than a section. Add “vegan”, “plant-based” or something as keywords, and matching papers come first from every field the app covers: climate, public health, biology, law and more. I looked into it, and PhilArchive should be possible to add, so I’ll look into adding a Philosophy field.
How do I add by keyword?
I installed the app, opened it, looked for “vegan”, couldn’t find it, and uninstalled the app.
You have a remarkably good UX, except for this. If there’s a way to subscribe by keyword, I think that option should be presented after fresh install (when it asks for subjects and presents a list)
thank you, you should try it again, open settings (top right corner), click on the second option “Keywords”.
i didn’t want to make the onboarding screen more complicated, that is why is slightly more hidden in the settings.
I’m not a scientist, nor do I have a “field” but I do like what I like and it managed to find somewhat relevant papers in one go (it complained about it though) and that’s without further tweaking in the settings.
Very nice. Clean app too.
Amazing! Thank you
With further keyword tweaking, I can get more relevant papers. As the keywords have a limit, if I train it with a certain list of keywords, then delete them and add new ones for further training, is this a way around that limit? Will the training stick for deleted keywords?
I don’t know enough but I feel as though this app will be very helpful for the people that require it. Well done.
oh yes that works, but I would recommend instead to use the search to find specific papers and upvote them to tune the classifier faster. Another way is to import a list of papers from your related work in .bib or .ris file. I will increase the keyword limit, can easily be more, i just didn’t think it was needed. Thanks a lot! And for the feedback!
https://github.com/jakobkreft/Aftergleam/issues/3
I can see that the crux of my problems drilling down on environmental topics may be made more difficult by some missing sources as illustrated in this issue. I’m still training away and getting some good hits so it’s working regardless.
Your app has a lot of potential. I’m going to use it as a positive/factual news source for a while.
Examples that are interesting to me by selecting 2 initial biology and ecology topics and then adding keywords (“soil” and “biochar”):
Coarse Woody Debris of Mixed Tree Species Overrides Soil Matrix Constraints on Microbial Richness and Abundance in an Ancient Broad-Leaved Forest https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.09.757649
Found with Aftergleam, a privacy reader for arXiv scientific papers.
Synergistic effects of biochar and vegetation on microplastic and nanoplastic removal from stormwater runoff in bioretention systems https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv.15010823/v1
Found with Aftergleam, a privacy reader for arXiv scientific papers.
Like I said, I’m not a scientist so I’m using keywords to hit terms that are relevant to me like “tree”, “species”, “biochar”, “plant”, “soil” etc. Then I deleted some after training and added “Australia” “forest” to train more relevant to my location to see what would happen. Then I might add my climate type later to drill further down.
So I can’t really search to find specific papers as I don’t technically know what I’m looking for. I’m extrapolating papers that might be relevant to my environmental line of work. Edit: Searched some individual keywords and I understand what you mean, it’s just time to select the papers that are relevant in that particular keyword. I’ll give that a try for a while and keep my keywords to broaden the feed.
If you were going to develop the app further, it could become quite a nice mixed feed reader for specific topics of interest, maybe with a sharing intent for social media too. I could imagine a News tab separate to For You and Explore that picked up scientific news releases based on keywords as well coming from the main journalistic sites like phys.org, theconversation, mongabay etc.
Thanks for your help.
Thanks, really useful feedback! I’ll look into the missing sources from that issue. It could well be a problem for environmental science and ecology too, since I’m not too familiar with those fields. If you know or find any preprint servers people in your line of work use, feel free to add them to the issue, that would help me a lot. A News tab is an interesting idea, I’ll think about it. I do want to keep it lean and focused on papers, so it would only make sense if it fits without making the app heavier or less private. I also really like how you’re using it. Starting with broader keywords and then narrowing down is something I didn’t think of, but I’m happy you tried it and made it work!
If you know or find any preprint servers people in your line of work use, feel free to add them to the issue, that would help me a lot.
Definitely not my line of work. I’m on the tools - https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2501:_Average_Familiarity
The person that wrote the github issue seemed like they were somewhat aware of sources. Perhaps you could address the comment regarding best place to contact? A dedicated Lemmy community perhaps, spread the fediverse love?
I understand your hyperfocus for the app, because I assume most researchers or PhD candidates are also hyperfocused. I figured that news releases regarding the field of research is also relevant in some way, finger on the pulse sort of thing. Probably not as easy as grabbing the papers as you currently are.
Hi, I’ve been using the app ever since it was on F-droid. I wanted to ask you about the learning/model. The app is under 2MB, so where is the model/learning done ? Is the learning assigned to gemini ?
Wow, great! Thanks for using it! No, there’s no Gemini or any cloud AI. It’s a classic logistic regression model, all inside the app. I tested it against MiniLM, and it did just as well in my tests but would add like 35 MB, so I left it out. I also only build native Android apps, which stay much leaner than apps built with heavier cross-platform frameworks. A lot of apps could also be 10 times smaller if they didn’t include all the trackers and analytics. More details about the model: https://aftergleam.app/how-it-works
Thanks! That was an insightful read. Didn’t know models/learning could be this efficient and small. Main reasons why I asked is, I saw another app on Reddit that mentioned learning is done locally, but others found out it was alloted to gemini on users’ phone (which the dev insisted was done locally but not really privacy respecting imo) and almost every app with such a feature was humongous. Thanks for making Aftergleam and keeping it open source
Here’s the F-droid link
This is fantastic, I’ve been curious for a way to more easily consume science papers than finding them in the wild. This answers that curiosity perfectly! I look forward to the education, thank you
I hope you find it useful! Thank you
So to be clear, these are all papers before the peer review process?
Not everything, no. All papers come from preprint servers like arXiv and bioRxiv, but many are posted after they’ve been accepted. Aftergleam shows that on the card and ranks accepted papers higher. If a paper you skipped gets accepted later, it can show it to you again.
Oh and forgot to add, you can tweak the algorithm in the settings to put more weight on venue.
Neat!
I’ve installed it and give it a try. At the first look, it seems very Nice !! Thanks
I appreciate it a lot, thanks!
A dark mode for the papers (like MJ PDF offers) would be nice.
Yes, you can change the theme. By default its your phone’s theme for the app. Papers in HTML version (Reader mode) can be switched between dark and light theme. But yes PDFs are original.
Ohhhh, I see!
