If you searched “wisp” and landed here, there’s a decent chance you were looking for something else — a telehealth company, a wireless internet acronym, a thin trail of smoke. Let’s sort that out quickly, then answer the questions people actually ask about us.
What Wisp is
Wisp is a calm news app for iPhone and Android. You pick the topics you care about — a country, an industry, a sport, a technology, a policy area. Wisp reads every major source covering those topics, recognizes when multiple outlets are covering the same underlying event, merges that duplicate coverage into a single item, and writes one neutral summary of it.
The feed is chronological — newest events first, no algorithm deciding what you “really” want. The language is deliberately flat — no “SHOCKING,” no “slams,” no manufactured urgency. And the feed ends: when you’ve read what happened in your topics, Wisp tells you you’re caught up, and you close it.
That’s the entire product. The tagline is “news without drama,” and the design principle behind it is that most of what makes news feel bad — the anxiety, the compulsive checking, the outrage — comes from how news is delivered, not from the news itself. We’ve written the long version of that argument in How to Stop Doomscrolling and Still Stay Informed.
Is Wisp legit?
A fair question to ask about any free app, so here are the checkable facts:
- It’s a real app with official store listings: Wisp on the App Store and Wisp on Google Play.
- It doesn’t make money from your attention. There’s no ad-funded feed, which means no incentive to keep you scrolling. The business model is subscriptions — you can read why that distinction matters more than any feature in our calm news apps ranking.
- There’s a human on the other end. Wisp is built by a small independent team, reachable at [email protected] and on X. The privacy policy and terms are short enough to actually read.
- We show our work. Every summary is built from real coverage by real outlets, and those sources stay one tap away — Wisp is designed to be checked, not trusted blindly.
What Wisp is not: a news outlet. We don’t report, and we don’t editorialize. Wisp is a delivery mechanism for other people’s reporting, restructured to inform you without activating you.
The other Wisps (who we are not)
The name is common, and the search results are a small comedy of errors:
- Wisp, the telehealth company — a US company that ships prescriptions. If your question is “how long does Wisp take to ship,” you want them. Nothing about our app ships; it downloads.
- WISP, the acronym — “wireless internet service provider.” If you’re researching rural broadband, that’s a whole different rabbit hole.
- wisp, the noun — a thin strand of hair or smoke. We just liked the word: something light where the alternative is heavy.
How Wisp works, slightly less briefly
Three steps, each doing one job:
- Clustering. Dozens of outlets covering the same event get recognized as one event. This alone removes most of the volume of a normal news feed — you were never reading forty stories a day, you were reading eight stories five times each.
- Neutral rewriting. The summary is generated from the full range of coverage, which averages the most outrage-y outlet’s framing against the wire services’ restraint. What survives is the facts. (The mechanics of why this matters: What Is Outrage Journalism?)
- Chronological, finite delivery. Events appear in the order they happened, in the topics you chose, and the feed has a bottom. No engagement optimization at any layer, because nothing in the business model wants your engagement.
If you’re comparing us against the alternatives, we keep honest comparisons — including where competitors are better: Wisp vs Particle, Wisp vs 1440, Wisp vs Ground News, and Wisp vs Slow News Co..
Try it
The fastest way to evaluate a news app is to use it for a week and notice how you feel after each session. Wisp is free on iOS and Android — if it doesn’t make your news habit calmer, delete it and keep the week of calm as a souvenir.
Related: How to Stop Doomscrolling and Still Stay Informed · The Best Calm News Apps in 2026 · Curated News vs. Algorithmic Feeds