About BookGate
The short answer
BookGate is an independent iPhone app that turns reading into a nightly appointment: an alarm at an hour you pick, a camera check that starts the session by showing a physical book, and the apps you nominated shielded until you close it. It has no account and no server for your reading data by design, which rules out sync and a web version — a deliberate trade, not an oversight. The only thing it sends is anonymous usage statistics.
Why I built it
I built BookGate because this is something I genuinely wanted to improve in my own life. I wanted to read consistently, I already owned the books, and I usually had time in the evening. But scrolling repeatedly displaced the physical book I intended to open.
I did not need more advice about reading. I needed the decision to happen before the tired part of the evening arrived: an alarm at a time I had chosen, a physical book in my hands, and the distracting apps unavailable long enough for reading to begin.
What I decided, and what it cost
Every one of these made the app worse on some axis. They are here so you can judge whether the trades match what you want.
No account, no server for your reading. Books, session photos, spoken takeaways and streaks live on the phone and nowhere else. That is the strongest privacy position available, and it costs you sync between devices, a web version, and any way to recover your history if you lose the phone without a backup. The app does send anonymous usage counts — which screens are reached, whether sessions get finished — so I can see what is broken; they contain none of that content and are not linked to you.
Try everything before paying. Eligible new subscribers get every feature for three days, then choose a monthly or yearly subscription if BookGate has earned a place in their evening. There is no advertising or attention-based business model: the subscription pays for an independent, private product.
Nights, not pages. No page count, no reading speed, no words per minute. Pages punish a dense book and reward a skimmed one; the number that predicts whether you read tomorrow is whether you read tonight.
A camera check, which is friction. You hold the book up for about two seconds to start a session. It is the most-questioned decision in the app, and the one we are most confident about: it is what separates deciding to read from opening the book. The photo becomes that night’s journal entry and never leaves the phone.
You can always end a session. BookGate is not a lock and not parental control. If it could not be ended it would be dangerous, and if it were effortless to end it would be pointless — so it sits deliberately in between.
What BookGate is not
It contains no books and sells none. It is not a reading tracker, not an ebook reader, not a screen-time dashboard, and there is no social layer, no leaderboard and no feed. The comparison of iPhone app blockers explains where it sits among the tools that do overlap.
How it is built
iPhone only, because it depends on two Apple frameworks with no Android equivalent: AlarmKit, so the reading alarm rings through Silent mode and Focus the way a real alarm does, and Screen Time / Family Controls for shielding. That second one is worth understanding: those frameworks hand an app opaque tokens rather than app names, so BookGate is never told which apps you open. It cannot report your usage because it is never shown it.
Who makes it
BookGate is made by Collin Mendons, an independent developer based in Switzerland. It is one person, not a company: I design and build the app, write these guides, and answer the support email. BookGate is funded entirely by subscriptions. There is no investor, advertising business or data business behind it.
If something here is wrong, unclear, or you want to argue with one of the decisions above — hello@bookgate.app reaches a person.