What Is Topicly? The AI Daily Discovery App, Explained

Topicly is a phone app for iPhone and Android that sends you one short, AI-written article, which we call a discovery, for each topic you follow, at the exact time you choose. There is no feed to scroll. You pick the subjects, the depth and the minute of the day, and the app writes something new for you each day.

#What do you actually get each day?

Say you follow space and set it to 07:40. Around half an hour before that, Topicly prepares your discovery. At 07:40 a notification lands on your lock screen with a short title and a line of text, something in the spirit of "The Moon is slowly leaving us." (that is a real sample title from the app).

Tap it and you get the "In brief" view: a single takeaway plus two or three short sections, somewhere between 90 and 150 words in total. For a lot of mornings, that is enough. If it caught your interest, there is a button that says "Read the full story", and only then does the app write the longer piece.

Under the article you will find "Keep pulling this thread", a row of three to five related concepts. Tap one and Topicly writes a new discovery about that idea. Then there is a short quiz, "Three quick questions", built only from what you just read. You can switch it off in Settings if quizzes are not your thing.

No next item slides up. That is on purpose.

#Why is it built as a discovery and not a feed?

Feeds are optimised to keep you on them. A discovery is meant to finish. You read one thing, you maybe answer three questions, you close the app.

The honest trade-off is that you see less. If you want to track every headline in a fast-moving field, a news reader will serve you better. Topicly is for the person who wants to know a little more about something each day without the pull of the next tap. It is closer to reading one good page of a book than skimming a newspaper.

Discoveries carry one of two labels. "Timeless fact" pieces explain something that will still be true next year, such as how stars forge the elements in your body. "In the news" pieces are grounded in articles a moderator added in the last 48 hours. That second point matters: there is no automatic crawler scanning the web, so news coverage is deliberate and limited, not exhaustive.

#Which topics can you follow?

The catalog currently has 39 categories. They range from broad subjects like space, finance, health, history, psychology and chess to narrow ones like Liverpool FC or Java. Football is split further into the Premier League, La Liga, the Champions League and international football. The team can add categories without shipping an app update, so the list will grow. You can browse the current set on the topics page.

If nothing fits, you write your own. The custom topic screen asks "What interests you?" and gives you 3 to 200 characters. A good entry reads like a goal, for example "I want to improve my Swift skills" or "How ancient Rome kept its water clean". Custom topics are private, so nobody else sees what you are curious about.

#What can you adjust per topic?

Every topic has its own settings, which is useful when you care about some subjects more than others.

Schedules are daily. There is no weekly option at the moment. If you want more than one discovery a day on a topic, Basic and higher plans let you add several delivery times, and you can always ask for an extra read with "New discovery on this topic" as long as you are within your daily allowance.

One detail we like: reading time is a real target. If a draft comes out too short or too long for the length you picked, it is regenerated. We never pad a thin article or chop the end off a long one. The details of that process are in how Topicly writes a discovery.

#Who writes the articles, and can you trust them?

OpenAI's models write every discovery. On the Advanced plan, an independent AI reviewer (Anthropic's Claude or Google's Gemini) checks each draft before it is stored, and a rejected draft gets rewritten. Professional uses two reviewers. Free and Basic plans have no review step.

We want to be very plain about this: AI review is not fact-checking. The reviewers are also language models, and they do not compare the text against original sources. Review catches a fair amount of sloppiness, but the AI can still be wrong. That is why every discovery ends with the line "This discovery was generated by AI and may contain errors. Check original sources for important decisions." Articles also steer clear of personalised medical, legal or investment advice.

So treat a discovery the way you would treat a smart friend's explanation over coffee. Useful, often memorable, occasionally off. If a claim is going to change what you do with your health or money, look it up properly.

#How does it help you remember anything?

Reading something once is a weak way to learn it. Research on the testing effect, most famously Roediger and Karpicke's 2006 work, found that trying to recall material tends to help retention more than rereading it. Topicly leans on that in two places.

The first is the three questions after each discovery. They are multiple choice, drawn only from that article, and each answer comes with a short explanation, whether you see "That is right" or "Not quite".

The second is "Today's questions", a daily set of ten questions per topic pulled from your recent discoveries in it, with a new set each day. Neither quiz counts against your plan's limits.

There is also a streak counter ("{n}-day streak") and a view of your last seven days. Opening one discovery counts for the day, and reading five still counts once. There are no leaderboards, because comparing yourself to strangers is not why anyone picks up a curiosity app.

#What else is in the app?

• Library. Every discovery you have received, with favourites (the heart icon), search and a topic filter. Marking a discovery Interested or Not interested steers what you get next.
• Widgets. Small and medium home-screen widgets on iOS and Android, in light or dark. They show the latest discovery synced from the app. They do not fetch new content while the app is closed.
• Languages. The app and its content work in eight languages: English, Azerbaijani, Turkish, Russian, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Articles are written in your language.
• Appearance. Light, Dark or System, plus "Reduce motion" and "Gentle haptics" toggles.

Sign-in works with Google or email on both platforms, and with Apple on iPhone. You can also try it as a guest first: pick a catalog topic, read the opening of a discovery, and if you sign up, that same article is delivered to you.

On privacy, deleting your account from inside the app removes your profile, topics, history, reading days and custom topics. Your personal preferences are not sent into the prompts that go to OpenAI, and those calls are made with storage turned off.

#Is Topicly free?

There is a Free plan with one topic, one delivery time a day and 15 days of history. Basic, Advanced and Professional raise those limits step by step, up to 30 topics and unlimited history. Prices are not final yet, so we will not quote them here. The full comparison is in is Topicly free?.

#What Topicly is not

It is not a course. If you want to become a Java developer, a daily three-minute article will not get you there on its own, though it can keep you curious between study sessions. It is not a news service either, and it is not a source you should cite. What it tries to be is a small, reliable habit: one good thing to read, at a moment you chose, that ends when it ends.

If that sounds useful, write down two subjects you keep meaning to learn about and the one time of day you usually reach for your phone out of boredom. That is your first setup. Topicly is coming soon to iPhone and Android, and the download page will have the store links at launch.