Save from your browser. Read on your phone.
The Stiva extension is a companion to the Android app. Press Save on any article and it lands in your Stiva library, ready to read offline, without the clutter, or to listen to.
No Stiva account. No server in between. Your articles travel through your own Google Drive or Dropbox.
How the Stiva extension works.
Four steps, and the first two only happen once.
Install the extension
Add Stiva from the Chrome Web Store or from Firefox Add-ons (beta). A button appears in your browser toolbar.
Connect the same cloud as the app
Open the extension's Settings and connect Google Drive or Dropbox, the same account you use for sync in the Stiva app. If you connect both, you choose which one is active.
Save from the toolbar
On any article, click the Stiva button in the toolbar, then Save to Stiva. With Extract content on, which is the default, the article text is read from the page and saved along with the link.
Open Stiva on your phone
The article is waiting in your library the next time the app syncs, ready to read offline or to listen to.
What happens when you press Save.
Stiva has no backend of its own, so the extension and the app need a place to meet. That place is your cloud storage.
Your cloud is the bridge
The extension writes the saved article to your Google Drive or Dropbox, and the Stiva app reads it from there. The cloud account is a private relay between your devices, not a place where Stiva keeps a copy of your reading.
The text comes along when it can
The extension pulls the article out of the page, without menus, ads or popups, and saves it with the link. When a page can't be read that way, only the link is saved and the app downloads the text for you afterwards.
Saves aren't lost when you're offline
If the connection drops while you save, the article waits in a queue inside the browser and is sent again every five minutes until it goes through.
What the extension can access.
Browser extensions ask for permissions, and it's fair to know what each one is for.
The article you're on, after you click
To read the page it needs permission to run on the tab you're looking at, and it only does that once you open the extension from the toolbar. It has no standing access to the sites you browse. On Firefox it also needs to read the title and address of the tab, only to know which page to save.
Your cloud, and nothing else
To connect Google Drive or Dropbox it can sign in and talk to their servers. Those are the only network addresses it is allowed to reach: no Stiva server, no analytics.
Your settings
Storage is used to remember which cloud you connected, your language and whether Extract content is on.
Retrying a save
A timer wakes the extension every few minutes to send any article that couldn't be saved earlier.
The extension is one half of a read later setup that runs on your phone. To see what the app does with what you save, start from the Stiva home page, or read how offline reading works.
Common questions.
- Do I need a Stiva account to use the extension?
- No. Stiva has no accounts and no servers. The extension connects to your own Google Drive or Dropbox, the same one the Stiva app syncs with.
- Does the extension save the full article or just the link?
- By default it reads the article text from the page and saves it together with the link. If the text can't be extracted, the link is saved on its own and the Stiva app downloads the text for you later. You can switch off Extract content in the popup or in Settings.
- What happens if I save an article while I'm offline?
- The save is kept in a queue inside the browser and retried every five minutes until it goes through, so you don't lose it.
- Is there a Firefox version?
- Yes, a beta version is available on Firefox Add-ons. It works like the Chrome one, but it's newer, so you may run into the odd glitch. If you do, please tell us.
Stiva is out on Android. iOS is next.
Leave your email and we'll let you know the moment the iOS version lands.
Built for saved reading, not feeds, ads or engagement loops.