For iOS and Android. Nightjar plays books from your phone, your cloud or your own server. No account, no ads, no tracking: your books go straight from your storage to your device.
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes chapter 2, The Red-Headed League
13% of the book is on this phone
Tap anywhere in the book. Nightjar fetches that spot and nothing else.
Files on the device, Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, or a WebDAV server — Nextcloud, Yandex Disk, pCloud, Koofr, Icedrive, Box, Synology and more. Nightjar has no book catalogue and no library of its own — it plays what you already have.
Download a book for the flight with a visible progress ring, pause and resume it, and free the space again with one tap.
Share and “Open with”, AirDrop and the Finder folder on iOS, folder trees from the file manager on Android, transfer from a computer over Wi-Fi, or a direct link to a file of your own. A ZIP archive can come in the same way — shared, picked, sent over Wi-Fi or from a link — and Nightjar unpacks it on the device.
Point at the top of a collection and Nightjar walks the tree: an m4b is one book, a folder of chapters is one book, multi-disc folders are stitched into volumes.
Chapters and bookmarks, playback speed, sleep timer, precise resume, lock-screen and headphone controls, plus silence skipping, volume boost and an equalizer on Android.
Ten handcrafted themes, five light and five dark, and a daily local backup of your listening progress that you can restore or export.
Cloud storage usually offers a choice: wait for a 300 MB file, or don’t listen. Nightjar takes neither. Press play and it pulls the minute you are on. Skip to chapter fourteen and it pulls chapter fourteen. The rest of the book stays where it is, and the parts you did hear stay on the phone.
Playback begins as soon as the first piece arrives — the same whether the book runs one hour or twenty.
Going back to re-hear a passage, or forward past a chapter, pulls just that spot. You never have to fetch the middle of a book to reach its end.
Parts you have played remain on the phone between restarts, up to a limit you choose — two gigabytes by default. The book you are listening to is never cleared to make room for something else.
A failed piece is retried with a growing pause, what is already on the phone keeps playing while the network is gone, and when the cloud’s access expires the app renews it in the background instead of stopping the book.
Books on a WebDAV server stream the same way. The server has to be able to send a file in pieces, as Nextcloud, Yandex Disk, Synology and other popular servers do; one that cannot is not supported, and Nightjar says so when you import from it. And when you want a book on a plane, downloading it in full is a separate, deliberate action: the file is kept apart from what streaming leaves behind, and the two never compete for space.
Plays directly
Converted on import
Unpacked on import
Not supported
Details in the Privacy Policy.
There is no Nightjar server.
Your library, positions and settings live on the device; requests go straight to your own services.
Credentials stay on the device.
WebDAV passwords and Dropbox, Google and Microsoft tokens are held in the platform’s secure storage and are never sent to us.
No ads, no tracking.
No analytics, attribution or measurement SDKs, no usage statistics. Crash reports are the only diagnostics that reach us on their own: the App asks about them the first time you open it, and you can switch them off at any point. A diagnostic log reaches us only if you send it yourself.
Free
Everything local is free: the full player, every way of importing, Wi-Fi transfer and a light and a dark theme.
Nightjar Pro
Pro adds network sources — Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive and WebDAV — with offline downloads from them, and the other eight themes. It comes as a monthly or yearly subscription or a one-time lifetime purchase, with a 7-day free trial; the app shows the price in your local currency. Books you have already downloaded keep playing if Pro ends.
Bring the books you already have.
Free for files on your phone.