The best apps for curious people who love rabbit holes

By the edgi team Facts checked September 30, 2026

The best app for curious people who love rabbit holes is edgi, if you want the rabbit hole to leave something behind. It's free, a Lesson takes about a minute and ends by asking where you want to go next, and each idea you finish becomes a card on a Map next to the ideas it connects to. If you'd rather read without end, use the Wikipedia app, or race through it with The Wiki Game. Atlas Obscura is for strange places, Neal.fun for an evening of clicking, CuriosityStream for a whole documentary, and Are.na for keeping what you find anywhere on the web.

We make edgi, so weigh this accordingly.

Details come from each app's US App Store listing or its own site, checked September 30, 2026.

What a rabbit hole leaves behind

Curiosity usually shows up while you're busy with something else: a word in a video, a name in a footnote. If chasing it means stopping to type a search, the question is often gone before the page loads.

Chase it, though, and it pays. In a 2014 study in Neuron, people read trivia questions and waited 14 seconds for each answer. A day later, they remembered the answers they'd been curious about better than the rest. Even an unrelated face, shown during the wait, stuck a little better when they'd been curious.

So a rabbit hole is a good way to learn. Keeping what you learned is the hard part. Two hours on Wikipedia or YouTube ends in a browser history and a row of open tabs, and the facts that didn't attach to something you already knew fade. Every app on this page is good at finding the next strange thing. They differ on what's left when you stop.

edgi: a rabbit hole that keeps a map

edgi is for the person who'll happily lose an evening to 16th-century clothing or odd facts about geography. A Lesson takes about 60 seconds, so you can follow a question while you still care about it. When you finish, the idea becomes a card and edgi asks "Where to next?" It offers a few connected Lessons, each labeled with why it's there, like "Zoom in" or "Bigger picture", and "Surprise me" deals a random one if none of them grabs you. Follow 15 in a row and the chain ends on a screen that lists the route you took.

Every card stays on your Map, so the rabbit hole is still there the next day, and you can tap any card to see where else it leads. The map holds more than 104,000 ideas joined by 296,000 connections, and 44,000 of them have a Lesson. We measured it: any two ideas are typically about seven steps apart, and Dinosaur gets to Black hole in four.

Dopamine is a good place to start. In that study, curiosity showed up on brain scans as extra activity in the dopamine circuit. Dopamine itself has less to do with pleasure than with wanting: a rat with its dopamine drained still likes sugar, but won't walk over to get it. The Lesson plays here, no account needed.

Dopamine Dopamine is a chemical messenger that nerve cells use to communicate with one another.

60-second Lesson

Dopamine

Dopamine is less about pleasure than wanting. It fires when something turns out better than you expected.

Play it here Read about dopamine

On edgi's map, Dopamine leads on to six ideas, among them addiction and serotonin, and serotonin leads on to the gut-brain axis. There's also a feed of short videos from educational creators, and a streak if you want one.

Wikipedia, and the apps built on it

The Wikipedia app is free with no ads, and built for wandering: a trending feed, a map of articles about places near you, and tabs so a side question doesn't lose your place. On the website, the Random article link drops you somewhere you'd never have searched for.

Two free iPhone apps turn Wikipedia into a feed. Rabbit Hole: Curious Feed, released in September 2026, mixes it with artworks from the Met and NASA's picture of the day, and its Deeper button follows the thread into related stories. Cards you save export as Markdown. Wiki Rabbit draws on Wikipedia's Good Articles and shows the trail of links you followed.

The Wiki Game makes it a race. Each round has a Start article and a Goal article, and only the links inside the articles get you across. The site calls it finding the "degrees of separation" of "sometimes wildly different topics." We asked the same question of edgi's map, and the typical answer was seven steps.

Beyond Wikipedia

Atlas Obscura's free app puts its whole database on one map of the world. You can keep lists and mark the places you've been. It's the pick if your rabbit holes end with wanting to go somewhere.

Neal.fun is a free website of interactive projects. The Deep Sea has you scroll down through the ocean to the Mariana Trench. Infinite Craft also has a free iPhone app.

CuriosityStream has thousands of documentaries, with presenters including David Attenborough and Michio Kaku, and you can download them.

When another app is the better pick

You want to keep what you find anywhere on the web. edgi keeps what you learn in edgi, not what you find elsewhere. Are.na calls itself a place to "connect ideas," and its App Store listing names "rabbit-hole enthusiasts" among the people it's for. For your own notes, Obsidian's free app has a graph view.

You want a course with built-in review. Kinnu is free, with 100 pathways of lessons and a Memory Shield feature that its App Store listing pitches as a way to never forget what you've learned. edgi has no review schedule.

You want to get good at math. Brilliant, for math and coding. edgi explains ideas; it doesn't set practice.

You're on Android. Wikipedia, Atlas Obscura, CuriosityStream, Are.na and Kinnu all have Android apps. edgi's Lessons play in any browser at edgi.tv/learn.

FAQ

What's the best free app for going down rabbit holes? edgi, if you want what you find to stay on a Map. The Wikipedia app, if you want to read without end. Both are free.

How do I keep track of a rabbit hole? In edgi, each Lesson you finish becomes a card on your Map. For Wikipedia, Wiki Rabbit shows the trail of links you followed; for the whole web, use Are.na.

How many steps apart are two random ideas? In edgi's map of 104,000 ideas, more than half of all pairs are six or seven steps apart, and almost none are more than ten. Dinosaur to Black hole takes four. The full numbers are at edgi.tv/data/rabbit-holes.

Is edgi free? Yes. Lessons are free, and so is the Map that keeps your cards. An optional Pro subscription raises the limits on making your own Lessons and adds offline access.

Is edgi on Android? Not as an app. edgi runs on iPhone, and its Lessons play in a browser without an account at edgi.tv/learn.