Huxe is gone. The app built by the former Google team behind NotebookLM wound down in May 2026, pulled itself from the App Store and Google Play, and deleted user data shortly after, as TechCrunch reported. If you were one of the people who built a morning around it, you woke up one day to find the habit had no app.
This post is for you. Not a generic "here are ten apps" roundup, but a straight answer to the only question that matters: where do you take the specific thing you loved about Huxe now that it is gone?
What you actually loved about Huxe
Strip away the marketing and Huxe did one thing that people genuinely built a routine around: a short, personalized daily audio briefing you could listen to without looking at a screen. You connected your accounts and the writers and topics you cared about, and each morning it handed you a tight rundown of what was new. The commute, the walk, the kitchen at 7am. That slot is where Huxe lived.
The other features (the on-demand DeepCast topics, the interactive voice questions) were the demo. The daily brief was the habit. Habits are what you miss when an app disappears, and a habit built on your own inbox and interests is exactly what Junco was built to keep alive.
What Junco is
Junco is an iOS app that turns the newsletters in your inbox into a daily podcast. Connect Gmail (read-only) or use the personal inbox address you get at signup, point it at the senders you care about, and a short episode covering everything that arrived overnight lands in your queue every morning, with a notification when it is ready.
If Huxe was "a daily audio brief built from my email and my interests," Junco is the focused version of that for the part most people listened to most: the newsletters and writers you actually subscribe to.
How Junco maps to the Huxe habit
Here is an honest comparison, including where the two differ.
| Huxe | Junco | |
|---|---|---|
| Personalized daily audio briefing | Yes | Yes |
| Built from your own inbox and the writers you follow | Yes | Yes |
| Screen-free, listen on a commute or walk | Yes | Yes |
| Real podcast player (queue, lock screen, offline, sleep timer) | Limited | Yes |
| Discover new sources to add | Twitter, Reddit, RSS, blogs | 100+ curated newsletter catalog |
| Combine several sources into one longer listen | No | Yes (Mixtapes) |
| Calendar integration | Yes | No |
| Interactive voice questions mid-listen | Yes | No |
| Still operating | No | Yes |
The two things Junco does not copy are the calendar read-out and the interactive "ask a question" voice mode. If those were the core of your day, Junco will feel different. But if the core was a daily listen pulled from your newsletters and the writers you follow, Junco does that part better, because it was built end to end for exactly that job rather than as one feature among many.
What Junco adds that Huxe never had
- A real podcast player. Queue, lock-screen controls, background playback, a sleep timer, and offline downloads. The audio is the product, so the player is built for the daily-listen pattern, not bolted on.
- Mixtapes. Stitch several newsletters into one longer episode for a longer walk, instead of a stream of separate clips.
- A personal inbox address. Every account gets
you@listen.tryjunco.com. Subscribe to newsletters with it and never hand a writer your real email. You can skip connecting Gmail entirely. - A discovery catalog you can subscribe to anonymously. Browse 100+ curated newsletters and add one with a tap. Junco forwards through a managed address, so the writer never sees your real one.
- Voice choice, per source. A basic on-device voice or premium natural cloud voices, and you can give different newsletters different voices so your daily episode does not sound flat.
About your data
When Huxe shut down, user data went with it. That is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the real cost of building a daily habit on a service that can vanish.
Junco's approach is deliberately low-stakes to adopt and low-stakes to leave. Gmail access is read-only and optional. If you would rather not connect it at all, the personal inbox address does the whole job: you subscribe newsletters to it directly and Junco never touches your main inbox. There is nothing to untangle if you ever walk away, and nothing a writer learns about you that you did not choose to share.
Why a focused app is the safer bet
Huxe did not fail because the idea was bad. It failed because generic "prompt, then get a podcast" generation got absorbed into Spotify, Google, Amazon, and a dozen others almost overnight, and a standalone app could not hold a position on top of a feature everyone was shipping for free. The same TechCrunch piece lays out that squeeze.
Junco is not playing that game. It is not a general audio generator competing with platform giants on raw text-to-speech. It does one specific, durable job: take the newsletters you already pay attention to and turn them into a daily listen, with the player and the workflow that habit needs. That is a narrower bet, and a more defensible one. We wrote more about why a dedicated app beats a generic tool for this in why we built a podcast app, not a reader, and about the NotebookLM-style format specifically in Junco vs NotebookLM, which is relevant given where the Huxe team came from.
How to switch in about two minutes
- Download Junco from the App Store.
- Choose your source. Connect Gmail and pick the senders you care about, or use the personal inbox address you get at signup and subscribe newsletters to it directly. No Gmail required for the second option.
- Add from the catalog (optional). Browse 100+ curated newsletters and subscribe with one tap, anonymously.
- Press play tomorrow. Your first daily episode lands in the morning, with a notification when it is ready.
If you want the longer version of how to rebuild this habit from scratch, how to turn newsletters into a podcast walks through every method.
FAQs
Is Huxe shutting down? Huxe has already shut down. The app wound down in May 2026, was removed from the App Store and Google Play, and user data was deleted shortly after.
What is the best Huxe alternative? For the daily-briefing habit specifically, Junco is the closest fit. It turns the newsletters and writers you follow into a short personalized podcast episode every morning, with a real podcast player built for daily listening.
Does Junco do daily briefings like Huxe? Yes. A short episode covering everything new from your selected sources lands in your queue each morning. The main difference is that Junco focuses on your newsletter subscriptions rather than calendar events or interactive voice questions.
Do I have to connect Gmail like I did with Huxe?
No. You can skip Gmail entirely and use the personal inbox address (you@listen.tryjunco.com) you get at signup, then subscribe newsletters to it. If you do connect Gmail, access is read-only.
Will my data disappear if I leave? Junco is built to be low-stakes to adopt and to leave. Gmail access is optional and read-only, and the personal inbox address means there is nothing tangled into your main account to unwind later.
Is Junco free? Junco is free to start, with premium voices available above the free tier.
Losing an app you built a morning around is a real annoyance. The good news is that the habit was never really about Huxe. It was about a few quiet minutes of audio that caught you up before the day started. Download Junco and put that back where it belongs: in tomorrow morning's queue.
For the original announcement, see Huxe's site at huxe.com.