Manual

One page at a time. READ pulls the article. PAGE keeps the layout and kills the colour.

HowAds blocked, scripts yours to switch off site by site, images optional, video refused. A terrible place to lose an hour.

Feeds you picked. Nothing else gets in. Then it ends.

HowRSS. You subscribe, it arrives, you finish. Full articles, not ragebait headlines.

On iPhone, your real lists, including whatever you told Siri in the car. On Android, a list of your own that tells you on the minute.

HowOn iPhone, the same lists as Reminders: tick it here, it is ticked everywhere. Android has no reminders of its own to share, so there they live in 1bit and sync with it.

Plain text files, voice memos in the same list. No formatting rabbit hole.

HowNotes are .txt you can drag off over USB. Voice memos are .m4a beside them.

Alarms, a timer on a split flap board, a stopwatch.

HowReal system alarms on iOS 26. Notifications below that, quiet on Silent. On Android, alarms that ring through silent.

Day or night, theme and depth, type size, pixel face, wheel mode, which rows show, what syncs.

HowHide any section. The widgets follow. Nothing gets deleted. On the iPhone, the gate opens the apps you pick on a 1bit page first.

1bit starts in black and white. Settings, theme lists the others, each row drawn in its own two colours, and pressing one puts the whole phone in it. Night swaps the two colours round. A few themes that are dark already look the same at night.

Turn through them puts the same list on the wheel. A turn is the next theme, the skip keys jump to the next family, play flips day and night, the middle keeps the one you are on and menu puts back what you had.

Make your own opens a mixer: ink and paper, thirty-two steps a channel, or one colour that sets the rest. It will not wear a pair it cannot read, so the last good pair stays on the screen. Swap trades the two, reset goes back, and save keeps it. Going back with something moved asks whether to save or undo it. Wear a theme of yours and you can edit it, share it as a link or delete it, and add a shared theme by copying its link. Wallpaper makes a picture of the theme you are wearing: Android sets it, and on an iPhone it goes to Photos for you to pick in the Settings app.

Depth, in settings, is how many colours a screen uses. 1-bit is two. 2-bit adds two tones between them, drawn flat where 1-bit dithers. 8-bit adds a colour for the selected row and shows pictures in 256 colours.

Sync is iCloud between your own devices, or your own Google Drive on Android. No account of ours. Each kind of thing is a switch, and the app works with all of them off.

Decisions travel: feeds, positions, notes, pins, playlists, alarms. Photographs travel too, once you switch them on. Recordings stay on the phone that made them.

On iPhone, plug in and open Finder, your phone, Files, 1bit. Drop folders in. AirDrop reaches the same place. MP3, AAC, WAV, AIFF and FLAC all play.

Or skip that: Music's source row switches to the library already on the phone and plays those songs where they sit.

On Android, copy folders into Music/1bit over USB. Allow 1bit to read your music and it lists every song on the phone where it sits.

Settings, home screen makes 1bit the home screen, and pressing home lands on the list. Installing 1bit does not do this by itself, so nothing changes until you ask.

Your other apps are one row away. The same screen gives the home screen back at any time, and nothing in 1bit locks that away, even after the trial.

Today shows what is on, what is due and what has landed while you were away. Each of those is a switch under settings, today.

The morning paper is the same day set as a front page, with the weather and the news. One silent note says it is ready, at seven unless you pick another hour, and that is the only one. It asks before it sends anything, and settings, today changes the hour or stops it. That morning the Today widget turns into its front page.

Launcher, clock, Today, weather, and one big button for the feature you use most. They draw what the app last knew, and say so when that is old. On Android, settings, widgets places them for you.

The bank, the bus card. Settings, other apps gives one a row above settings: type its name and 1bit fills in its link, or run a Shortcuts shortcut by name. iOS lists no apps, so nothing is there until you add it. The launcher widget lists one only if you pick it in its edit sheet.

• Hold a time on the calendar day timeline to start an event there.
• Throw the transport bar sideways to stop playback for good.
• Swipe a News row for what you can do to it.
• Hold an artist, an album or a song in Music to add it to a playlist.
• Tap three times on the blank strip at the foot of the launcher.

A few things leave with one tap: a call to the dialler, a message to your messaging app or Signal, WhatsApp or Telegram, a route to another maps app for a spoken voice, and on iPhone a library track the media server will not stream to the Music app.