Boundless Reader arrives on your phone with nothing in it. No catalogue is bundled, no sample chapter waits for you, no account screen blocks the door. I built it that way on purpose. This is the reasoning, and the limits that come with it.
Empty because that's the point
The app ships with zero content sources included, so there is nothing to browse until you add one. You point it at a source repository, a URL that lists installable sources, and content shows up once you install something from it. The official one is:
https://boundless.moe/repo
I keep it narrow on purpose. It carries only public-domain and openly licensed material, nothing else.
Today that's two sources. Project Gutenberg is a catalogue of more than 70,000 public-domain books, with search, genre filtering, and real chapter splits rather than one long wall of text. Komga Demo connects to Komga's own public demo server, so you can look at what a self-hosted comics and manga library feels like inside Boundless before you set one up yourself.
You can add any other repository by URL, and the app will run it. I can't vouch for one I didn't publish. Adding a repository means running its code on your device and letting it fetch from whatever site it targets, using your connection to do it. Add the ones you trust.
No account required, and what skipping one costs you
Signing in is optional. Nothing in the reader sits behind it, and you can use Boundless indefinitely without ever making one.
Signed out, everything lives on the device you're reading on: your library, your position in every chapter, your history. Nothing is sent anywhere. Delete the app and that data goes with it: library, progress, history, and downloads, gone from that device the moment Boundless is.
Your reading position doesn't follow you between devices while you're signed out. Read on an iPhone and an iPad and each one keeps its own place. A wiped phone starts over unless you made a backup first. An account can close that gap, once you turn on Account Sync, which is off by default. Signing in on its own doesn't move anything. With Account Sync on, your library, progress, and settings follow you between devices, and that's also where your privacy settings and parental controls live.
Where it runs
Boundless is on the App Store for iPhone, running iOS 15.1 or later, and iPad, running iPadOS 15.1 or later. On a Mac there is a native app as a direct download, and an Apple Silicon Mac can also run the iPad app from the same App Store listing. Android needs 7.0 or later and is a direct download, with a Google Play release in closed testing ahead of going public.
On iPad and Mac, long-form screens are width-capped and centred so text keeps a comfortable measure instead of running edge to edge. The library grid adds columns as the window grows, rather than stretching every cell to fill it.
What isn't here
Other reading apps train you to expect these.
- Comments, profiles and shelves belong to the optional account. Posting needs a signed in account, and the reader itself never asks for one. There is no direct messaging.
- Boundless doesn't host, proxy, or cache anything you read. Sources are extensions that run on your own device and fetch straight from whatever site they target.
- No filtering of what a third-party source hands back, and no way for Boundless to vouch for a repository it didn't publish itself.
- No account requirement anywhere in the reader, which also means no profile to fill in and no sign-up wall between you and a chapter.
These aren't gaps I'm planning to close. Signed out, there's no server between you and your library, so if I vanish tomorrow it doesn't go with me.
If you want to see the shape of all this before setting up anything of your own, the Komga Demo source is the fastest route in. Add the official repository, install that one source, and you're looking at a real self-hosted library with no setup of your own required. Getting started walks through the rest, the FAQ covers accounts and syncing in more detail, and both platforms are on the download page.