Every Kokoro TTS app on the iPhone App Store

Search for a Kokoro text-to-speech app for the iPhone and you get a roundup naming three of them. The number is wrong. On the US App Store on 14 September 2026 there were at least nine shipping apps whose own listing says they run Kokoro — an ebook narrator, a $3.99 universal reader, a voiceover studio, a 1.9 GB local-AI suite, a couple of general readers, and the one I make.

What follows is the whole field as far as I could find it, including the apps that beat mine at things it does not do, such as playing a whole book with the screen locked. A roundup that leaves out the stronger competitors is not a roundup, it is an advert with a table in it.

These four are built around a library: import a file, keep your place in it, come back tomorrow. They are the closest thing to direct competitors of each other.

These three are not book readers and should not be compared with the ones above. They are in the list because their listings name Kokoro and someone searching for a Kokoro app will meet them.

VoiceMake is a voiceover studio: system voices, Kokoro, and VOICEVOX character voices including Zundamon, with pitch and intonation tuning and audio export. Its pricing is the widest spread here — $4.99, $49.99 a year, or $174.99 for a lifetime unlock.

On-Device AI: Private Workspace is a 1.9 GB local AI suite — chat with local Gemma, Qwen, DeepSeek and Mistral models, a listening library with OCR, RSS, voice notes, transcription — in which Kokoro is one of six TTS options alongside Apple voices, PocketTTS, Qwen 3 TTS, CosyVoice and VibeVoice. If you want a local model playground and speech is one part of it, nothing else here is comparable.

Vocalize AI markets itself at developers: it exposes a local web and API interface so your Mac can send text to your phone for synthesis. Its 36 MB download is far too small to contain Kokoro’s weights, and the listing does not say where the model comes from or when, so treat “100% offline” as a claim to verify rather than a fact established by the listing.

Koro Voices is the one to be careful with, because the name reads like Kokoro and it is regularly listed as a Kokoro app. Its current listing — version 2.0.1, on the store on 14 September 2026 — does not contain the string “Kokoro” anywhere. It describes an offline reader with voice blending, phoneme-level pronunciation, Whisper transcription and a local summarisation model, free with a $1.99 “Koro Unlimited” unlock. It may well use Kokoro; the listing does not say so, and a roundup that cannot cite its own inclusion criteria is not doing the reader a favour.

Piper - Neural TTS is a different model altogether. Piper is its own open-source engine, and the app is genuinely multilingual — 19 listed languages — but it belongs in a Piper roundup, not this one.

Every app above is playing the same 82-million-parameter file, so the voice is not the variable. Four things are. (Because the voices are shared, you can hear them once before choosing any app: Kokoro runs in a desktop browser too.)

Where the weights live. A 390 MB or 484 MB download is carrying the model; an 11 MB or 28 MB one is going to fetch it. Neither is wrong, but only one of them works on the plane you installed it on.

What happens to your text before the model sees it. A PDF exported from a journal is full of hard line breaks and hyphenated word splits. An app that feeds those straight to a speech model reads them as sentence endings. This is the single biggest audible difference between two apps using identical weights, and almost nobody advertises it.

Whether it streams. Generating a chapter before playing anything makes the first tap feel broken. Generating sentence by sentence with a look-ahead buffer makes it feel instant. Same model, same phone, completely different product.

What the app does with the GPU when you leave. Which brings us to the one row of this comparison Sandbook loses outright.

Neural speech is generated continuously while you listen, and iOS limits what an app may do once it stops being the app on screen. So “it reads aloud” and “it keeps reading with the screen off” are two different claims, and they separate these apps more sharply than voice quality does.

Éist, KO Reader, Local Narrator and Play Text all state background or lock-screen playback on their listings. Sandbook's real-time reading pauses when the screen locks, and its App Store description explained why on 14 September 2026: “Because it runs a large model on your device, Apple forbids apps that use high GPU/VRAM from running in the background.” Since 1.0.3 it can prepare one chapter's audio ahead of time and play that chapter locked.

That is still a real limitation, not a rounding error. If you want to put the phone in your pocket and listen to a whole book, pick one of the other four. Sandbook is built for the case where the text is in front of you, following a chapter with word-by-word highlighting, getting through a paper, hearing your own draft back.

• Will the screen be off for a whole book? If yes, Sandbook is out. Éist and KO Reader are the two strongest book-shaped options; Play Text also lists background playback.
• Do you want to pay nothing, ever, with nothing held back? Sandbook and Play Text are the two readers here with no in-app purchase section on the listing at all. Sandbook has the library, the read-along and all 41 voices unlocked; Play Text has the background playback.
• Is the phone old? Éist has the lowest floor here, iOS 17 with no chip line at all. Sandbook (as of 1.0.4) needs an iPhone 12 or later, and Local Narrator an iPhone 15.

Said as plainly as it can be said by someone with a horse in the race. Sandbook is my app, so the first bullet is the one to read most sceptically — and all three name only apps already described above, from their own listings, on 14 September 2026.

• Pick Sandbook — the app this site is about — if you will be looking at the page while it reads, and you want to pay nothing with nothing held back. All 41 Kokoro voices in six languages from first launch, no in-app purchase section on the listing at all, a real library that opens each book where you stopped, word-by-word highlighting, camera scanning, and PDF line breaks and hyphenation repaired before anything is spoken. It needs an iPhone 12 or later on iOS 18.2. It is the wrong choice for listening to a whole book on a commute.
• Pick Play Text if you need lock-screen playback and still want to pay nothing. It is the only other reader in this list with no in-app purchases on its listing, it uses Kokoro as its default engine, it sweeps a highlight across each word, and it keeps playing when the screen locks. What you give up is the bookshelf: it is version 1.0 with no library and no per-document position, so it reads one thing at a time. If you want background playback and a library, Éist and KO Reader are the two to look at instead — Éist free for three books and three voices, KO Reader $3.99 once.
• If you need more languages than Sandbook's six, compare the listings' own language counts. KO Reader lists nine, for $3.99 once, and Éist’s engines cover dozens, free for three books and three voices.