Goodable Alternatives: What Happened to the Goodable App

Updated September 1, 2026 · 7 min read

If you searched for Goodable recently and mostly found information about a business product instead of the good news app you remembered, you were not imagining it. Here is what changed, how to verify the current state for yourself, and which apps now do the job Goodable was best known for.

What happened to Goodable

Goodable built a real audience around a simple promise: a feed of only good news, so you could check your phone without bracing for it. For several years it was one of the most recommended names in the category.

As of August 2026, the company's primary focus is a business product: an emotional intelligence API called IRIS, which it sells to organizations. The consumer good news app is now positioned as secondary to that business. Much of the blog content the company published over the years has also been removed from its site.

To be clear about what this is not: the app has not shut down, and a company choosing to focus on a business product is a normal decision, not a scandal. But it does change the calculation for a reader deciding where to put a daily reading habit, and especially a subscription. An app that is a company's main product and an app that sits beside a company's main product tend to get different amounts of attention over time.

One practical warning: most "best good news apps" roundups on the web were written years ago and still describe Goodable as a consumer-first company. If you are comparing options, work from something current, like our updated comparison of the best good news apps, and from the live listings themselves.

Check the current state yourself

This page carries a date at the top for a reason: positioning and pricing can change again. Before you subscribe to anything, Goodable included, spend two minutes on the primary sources.

• Visit goodable.co and see what the site leads with today.
• Open the Goodable App Store listing and check the date of the last update, the current price, and the most recent reviews, sorted by newest.

We are deliberately not quoting Goodable's subscription price here, because a number copied onto a third-party page is exactly the kind of thing that goes stale. Read it off the listing.

What Goodable users actually came for

Strip away the branding and the thing people loved was specific: a daily feed containing only good news, so there was no doomscrolling to resist in the first place. Not a filter bolted onto a normal news app, but a feed built from positive stories at the source. That approach is what defines the whole category, and it is why the alternatives below are genuine substitutes rather than lookalikes. We wrote a longer explanation of how source-level curation works in is there an app that only shows good news.

One related note: if what drove you to Goodable was politics fatigue rather than negativity in general, that is a slightly different problem with different tradeoffs, and we covered it separately in finding news without politics.

The alternatives, compared honestly

Transparency note: we make Uplifting News, one of the apps below. We have tried to describe every option accurately, including where ours is the wrong choice.

Uplifting News (iPhone and iPad)

Our app. The free tier is 10 stories a day plus 10 saved favorites, permanently, with no ads, no tracking, and no accounts; the App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected." Unlimited reading is $4.99 a month or $47.99 a year with a 1 week free trial. Stories come from about 10 positive news publishers, including Good News Network, Positive News, Reasons to be Cheerful, and Squirrel News, and many open as full text inside the app. The full list is on our good news sources page. Two widgets, Top Story and Daily Sunshine, put a headline or a daily positive thought on your Home Screen or Lock Screen, and a flag button removes any story you would rather not see. Wrong choice if you are on Android.

Good News Network (iOS and Android)

The app arm of a website that has been publishing good news since 1997, which makes it the deepest archive in the category. The app is free with ads, with an optional paid ad removal. If you want volume and do not mind advertising, it is a solid pick; if the whole point is a calmer, quieter phone, the ads work against that.

Squirrel News (iOS, Android, web)

Free, nonprofit, and donation funded, with no ads. It curates about 10 solution focused articles a day, drawn from serious outlets. Of everything here it is the closest to constructive journalism and the least like a mood app: fewer animal rescues, more credible reporting on what is actually working. It is also the strongest cross-platform option.

Nice News (email, not an app)

Worth naming because it appears on app lists where it does not belong: Nice News is a free daily email newsletter with more than 1,000,000 subscribers, supported by sponsors. There is no Nice News app. If your Goodable habit was really a morning briefing habit, an email digest may honestly suit you better than any app.

If you were paying for Goodable

Some readers paid Goodable money precisely because they wanted a good news product to exist, and if the shift in focus stings, that is a fair reaction. The instinct itself is sound, though. In this category a subscription is less about unlocking features and more about which incentive you want your news app to have: answering to readers, or answering to advertisers.

Whatever you pick, start free. Uplifting News has a permanent free tier and a 1 week trial on Unlimited, and Squirrel News is free outright, so you can confirm the habit sticks before any money moves.

If you want free, here are the tradeoffs

Free is genuinely available here, it just comes in three different shapes.

• Free with ads: the Good News Network app. The most content at no cost, but the ads bring the usual clutter, and a calmer phone was probably the point.
• Free on donations: Squirrel News. No ads and no paywall, funded by readers who choose to give. The catch is simply that its 10 daily picks are a digest, not a bottomless feed.
• Free tier of a paid app: Uplifting News. Ten stories a day with no ads and no account, forever; the subscription exists only to remove the cap.

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