How many times have you stumbled across an interesting article on the internet, but then decided not to read it because it was too long and you didn’t have enough time to go through the whole thing? That’s a problem that Marco Arment solved by creating Instapaper. In a nutshell, it’s an app that stores articles for you to read at your leisure. It’s a huge hit on iOS, but Marco decided to ignore Android for what feels like forever. Because Instapaper has APIs, third parties made Instapaper apps for Android, but none of them really had the same polish that Marco put in the iOS version. Well, today that changes. Instapaper for Android is now out and The Verge got an exclusive sneak peek at the app and have made a video review that you can see below. They say that it isn’t as good as the iOS version, but it’s far better than said previously mentioned third party Android Instapaper clients.
Now the price, $2.99, might turn a lot of people off. That’s OK since there’s a lot of competition in the “read it later” space. In fact, one of the most popular Instapaper-like apps used to be called “Read It Later”, but recently it’s been renamed to “Pocket”. It does everything that Instapaper does, and more, and best of all it’s free. There’s also Readability, which again, is pretty much an exact clone of Instapaper, but costs $0.00.
Which app is the best? There’s no right answer. Try all of them and then pick the one that you like the most. It’s as easy as that. All we know is that we’re glad applications like these exist, because bookmarking articles that you never come back to, or emailing articles to yourself that end up cluttering your inbox, are terrible solutions for keeping up to date with what’s going on in the world.
Additional Reading: The Verge interviews Marco Arment.