Curio and Deepstash both get called the TikTok for reading, and the label hides how different they are. Both put one idea on a card and let you swipe. Past that they are separate products built on opposite bets, and the split is where the words come from: ideas pulled out of books, or writing made for the feed.
One housekeeping note first, because there are two Curios. This page is about the Curio at trycurio.app, listed on the App Store as Curio: Feed Your Curiosity — written cards in a swipe feed, founded in 2026. The other Curio, at curio.io, is a London company from 2016 that turns journalism from major newspapers into professionally narrated audio. Different company, different founders, different product. If a review mentions narrated articles, it is describing that one.
What Deepstash actually is
Deepstash is the classic answer in this category: idea cards distilled from books and articles, in sessions that run one to five minutes, on iOS, Android and the web. If what you want is the self-improvement shelf in snippet form — the core ideas from books you keep meaning to read — it is the strongest version of that.
The trade is baked into the format. Deepstash cards are excerpts and distillations: someone pulled an idea out of a longer work, and the card keeps that origin. It reads like a highlight, not a story. For plenty of readers that is the point — the card is a pointer back to a shelf. But it is not writing made for the format, and you can feel the difference by the tenth card.
What Curio actually is
Curio takes the other route. Every card is a short story or explainer written for the feed itself: one idea per card, about thirty seconds to finish, quality-checked before it publishes. The feed is full-screen and vertical, swiped like short video, across a dozen categories in English, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese. When a card catches you, Curio AI can explain it deeper, make it simpler, or quiz you on it. It is free to start, and you can read without an account.
The honest limits run the other way. Curio is iOS only — Deepstash also runs on Android and the web, so if you are not on an iPhone this comparison is already over. And Curio is the newer, smaller product, founded in 2026 by one software engineer, while Deepstash is the name people already know.
Which one for daily reading
Pick Deepstash if the goal is coverage: the ideas from many books and articles, in snippets, on whatever device you happen to hold. Pick Curio if the habit you are replacing is the scroll itself — a feed with short-video pacing where the thing you consume is written, and it ends.
And if what you actually want is whole books compressed into 15-minute summaries, that is Blinkist's category, not either of these.
A disclosure, so you can weight everything above correctly: I build Curio. It is an iOS app that serves five short curiosity stories a day, and this page exists because I think the written-for-the-feed bet is the right one. If you want to test that yourself, it is free to try — Curio on the App Store. And if Deepstash's shape fits your reading better, use Deepstash. Either way you end up reading, which beats the scroll you were about to do instead.