Troubleshooting

Solutions to the most common issues. If you don't find your problem here, ask in the Readest Discord or check the issues tracker.

Can't connect to a local OPDS server on iOS or macOS

If you tap a catalog hosted on your home network (a private IP like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, a .local hostname, or your own Calibre Content Server) and nothing loads — even though the same URL works in a browser — the cause is almost always the system-level Local Network permission.

Public OPDS catalogs (Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg) don't need this permission because they're not on your LAN.

Related: Library → OPDS catalogs.

CJK text renders as empty boxes on Linux Flatpak

The Flatpak sandbox can't see system fonts by default, so Chinese, Japanese, and Korean glyphs fall through to the "missing glyph" boxes on some distros.

Fix

Grant Readest read-only access to the system font directory:

flatpak override --user --filesystem=/usr/share/fonts:ro com.readest.Readest
flatpak override --user --filesystem=xdg-data/fonts:ro com.readest.Readest

Restart Readest. System CJK fonts should render correctly.

Full details on the Flatpak Font wiki page.

Verifying that a download is genuine

Not a bug, but worth checking when you downloaded an installer from anywhere other than the official Releases page — or just to be cautious. Every desktop installer is signed with minisign and comes with a matching .sig file.

See Advanced → Verify release files for step-by-step commands.

Still stuck?

Search open and closed issues — many errors have been reported and resolved already.
Ask in the Readest Discord or email support@readest.com.
When reporting a bug, include your Readest version, operating system version, and the exact error message or screenshot.