Create and play interactive fiction
About this app
Create and play interactive fiction on your Android phone or tablet. Also known as text adventures, interactive books, playable novels, z-machine, glulx, tads, terps. Fun for adults and also a great way to encourage children to read and develop their imaginations.
Fabularium can play all of the major formats: Adrift (including version 5), AdvSys, the Adventure Game Toolkit (AGT), Alan (2 and 3), Glulx, Hugo, Level 9, Magnetic Scrolls, Scott Adams Adventures (Scottfree), Tads (2 and 3) and Zcode (Infocom). It also includes a simple integrated development environment (IDE) for creating your own Glulx, Tads 3 and Zcode games.
Fabularium supports Unicode games, so if you would prefer to play in a language other than English, no problems! Either define your own keyboard via the keyboards.ini file (see examples in that file) or disable the built-in keyboard via the settings, to use your system keyboard. Keyboards defined via keyboards.ini can have multiple layouts and each key can be programmed to generate one Unicode character, a complete command, or even multiple commands, that are fed to the interpreter one by one. As with anything else in fab.ini, you can set the different keyboards you've defined in keyboards.ini to automatically load with different game and terp combinations.
Fabularium takes accessibility seriously. Much of the app is now TalkBack enabled and the built-in keyboard supports "explore by touch" and "lift to type" technology. Accessibility features will continue to improve over the coming releases. If you are blind or vision-impaired and would like to help me with this (e.g. testing and feature suggestions), let me know.
We care about typography! While the default settings should work for most games, Fabularium is also highly customisable. Make the margins as narrow or as wide as you want. Don't like the default fonts and colours? Change them. Adjust line spacing. Fiddle with other typographical features. Optimise that game for your device's screen. For maximum screen space, try using a hardware keyboard.
Fabularium is and always will be completely free, with no ads, and open source. It does not come bundled with any games; you will need to obtain these separately. There are many games freely available at www.ifdb.tads.org and www.ifarchive.org. You can download these games anywhere to your internal storage/SD card and then add them to your library from within the app. The app is also able to extract files from ZIP archives.
Inspired by the great Gargoyle interpreter by Tor Andersson, Fabularium implements Andrew Plotkin's Glk 0.7.5 spec in Android and can therefore support any glk-enabled interpreter. More interpreters may be added in the future.
For further information see the in-app help.
Licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later, by Tim Cadogan-Cowper.
What's New in v1.5.1
Imported from the F-Droid repository index.
Version history
Jan 13, 2025 · 18.3 MB · Android API 16–28 · code 27
Imported from the F-Droid repository index.
SHA-256 043b224460dbf4d1e4b7f7bff6d11a861138400e0de1b0c15fefd0670f72ae59
Oct 3, 2019 · 18.4 MB · Android API 16–28 · code 26
Imported from the F-Droid repository index.
SHA-256 e56386233fc5dd1360fbbc28496153fb0607bfe7731e063652cba593604d87cf
Will it run on your device?
87%
- Runs on a broad range of modern Android versions.
- Multiple CPU architectures are covered.
Installation Guide
Open Settings on your Android device
Go to Security → Unknown sources (or Install unknown apps)
Enable "Allow from this source" for your browser or file manager
Open the downloaded APK file from your Downloads folder
Tap "Install" and wait for installation to complete
Launch the app from your home screen
Make sure to re-enable Unknown Sources restrictions after installation for security.
How to install this safely
How to verify the file you downloaded
Before you install anything, confirm the file is the one described here. On a computer, run shasum -a 256 your-download.apk (macOS or Linux) or certutil -hashfile your-download.apk SHA256 (Windows), then compare the output character-for-character with the SHA-256 on this page. If a single character differs, the file is not the build we recorded — delete it.
What the signing certificate proves
Every Android app is signed with a private key that only its developer holds. The fingerprint on this page is a hash of the matching public certificate, and it proves continuity rather than identity: it tells you a build came from whoever signed the earlier ones. Android enforces this at install time — if a package claiming to be io.davidar.fabularium is signed with a different key, the system will refuse to install it over your existing copy. A fingerprint that changes between releases is worth pausing on, because a repackaged app that has been modified by someone else cannot keep the original signature.
How to roll back to an earlier version
If the current release misbehaves, 1.5.0 is the last build before it. Android will not install an older version code over a newer one, so you must uninstall Fabularium first — which clears its local data unless you have a backup. Reinstall the older APK only if its signing fingerprint matches the build you already trust, and check the API range: an older release may target an Android version your device has moved past.
Why we list sources instead of hosting everything
The official store channel is almost always the right choice: it updates automatically and carries the publisher's own distribution guarantees. A direct APK is useful when a device has no store access, when a rollout has not reached your region, or when you need a specific version — and only when the publisher has authorized that copy. APKBrowse does not list pirated, cracked, or unauthorized rebuilds of Fabularium, and a listing is removed when the evidence for it stops holding up.
Get Fabularium
Every source we list for io.davidar.fabularium is legality-reviewed. Pirated or cracked builds are never offered.
Other sources
F-Droid listing
officialF-Droid builds this app from source and signs it. This is its official listing, with older builds and full release notes.
Source code
verified publisherThe upstream repository this build is compiled from.
We check legality and signature continuity, but device behaviour still varies. Install at your own discretion.
App Information
Security Verification
We record provenance; we do not run malware scans. Verify the hash yourself before installing.
SHA-256 Hash
043b224460dbf4d1e4b7f7bff6d11a861138400e0de1b0c15fefd0670f72ae59
Signing certificate
9abaf8ae84c59dbfe672d31b3d9b290613fcc22db7b04ded274ffd906eebbcb5
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Previous Versions
The signing certificate fingerprint for this release is on record, so a build that does not match it did not come from this publisher.
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