I almost quit.
Dark theme persistence with Readium took weeks of pain. Not because it was technically hard — because it was frustrating in ways I couldn't even articulate. You know that feeling at 2 AM when you're staring at the same bug and wondering why you're even doing this?
Then one day it just worked. No elegant fix. No Stack Overflow salvation. Just stubbornness and caffeine.
After the Dark Theme, Everything Looked Different
Originally I leaned hard into OpenRouter — multiple models, maximum flexibility, all the juice you could want.
But the dark theme ordeal made me realize: maybe local could work. Apple Intelligence gave me on-device AI. No API calls. No costs after the app purchase. Privacy-first.
So I kept OpenRouter anyway. Here's why: local is great until it isn't. Sometimes 3B parameters just isn't enough. Sometimes you need GPT-4o or Claude to get the answer right.
The tradeoff is real. Local = private, free, limited. Cloud = expensive, powerful, flexible.
The User
My users? They bring their own EPUBs and PDFs. They have library organization systems most people wouldn't understand. They read 50+ books a year and actually remember what they read.
These people deserve choice. That's why both live in Cognito.
What Almost Dying Taught Me
- The last 10% of any app takes 90% of your energy
- Dark mode isn't a feature you add — it's an expectation you fail if you miss
- Readium is incredible but finicky in ways no documentation warns you about
- I didn't keep going because I was confident. I kept going because I'm stubborn.