Third-party integrations worked, but the experience was crude. Perhaps your favorite RSS reader displayed one kind of Instapaper dialog, while a Twitter app showed no Instapaper interface at all. With time, Instapaper – just like many other web services – started appearing as a custom sharing service in native apps (such as Twitter or Reeder), but because of the lack of a unifying sharing layer throughout the OS, implementations varied and you needed to log into Instapaper every time. The bookmarklet worked, but the installation process was cumbersome, annoying, and it required people to swipe through screens of instructions that could be easily misinterpreted. Since the beginnings of the App Store, Instapaper had to rely on a browser bookmarklet to let users save articles from Safari to Instapaper. And more importantly, the features that betaworks added and their plans for Instapaper’s future suggest that I made a good decision in switching back to it. I’ve been trying Instapaper 6.0 since last month, and while the reading experience and structure of the app are the same, its iOS 8 enhancements make it feel like the Instapaper I always wanted.
Instapaper for safari update#
With today’s launch of iOS 8, betaworks is introducing a major update to Instapaper: version 6.0, available on the App Store, makes Instapaper free, brings changes to the Browse section, adds a Today widget, and includes a sharing extension to save articles from anywhere with two taps and no more bookmarklets. There are many great read-later apps, but Instapaper is what feels best for me. But the environment that the app creates and the sense of reading that it transmits are, for me, far superior to any fancy interface, third-party integration, or iCloud-only perk that I may get with other services. Some articles don’t even look that good in Instapaper. Instapaper is built with the experience of reading in mind rather than the mere technological feat of being able to save articles on any platform. I realized that Instapaper works for me because its design and features accomplish an obvious but arduous task: they make words by others feel like something I want to read rather than an obligation or an unread badge that needs to be taken care of. I came back to Instapaper earlier this year, after Marco Arment sold it to betaworks and after I worried that its owners would turn it into some kind of Techmeme or news aggregator. For a couple of months, I even kept a Markdown list of links I wanted to read. I tried to star every article that I wanted to read in my RSS reader, and that didn’t work well in the end, either. I thought that Reading List – another solid addition to Safari with a nifty system integration and reliable iCloud sync – would solve the problem of not reading what I was saving. Then I tried to simply leave tabs open in my web browser, thinking that permanence and tab sync would be enough to shame me into reading and closing those tabs. For a brief period of time, I switched to Pocket – a fantastic app that can save almost anything for later. I’ve tried many read-later solutions over the years. Instapaper respects text and the person who reads it. And Instapaper, thanks to a thoughtful design based on a clear focus and goal, makes me want to read more and carve out time for reading because it is designed for one element: text. The problem isn’t quantity it’s attention and time. For the work that I do on this website, Relay, and, lately, a weekly newsletter, I have no shortage of links with interesting facts or opinions that I want to consume and absorb. Instapaper is an app that lets me read more.
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