Instapaper for Android: Another iOS exclusive bites the dust

Dan Seitz Contributing Writer, Tech

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If you’re not familiar with Instapaper, it’s a fairly ingenious app for iOS. It started back in 2008: you buy the app, and then you simply save articles to read for later. Instapaper reproduces it in plain text on the app, and you can read at your leisure and share with friends simply and directly.

Instapaper

This isn’t from the team that developed Instapaper, though: it’s from a hand-picked development company. So how did they do?

There are good points and bad points to Instapaper for Android. The good news is that most of the flaws are pretty easy to fix: they’re along the lines of broken buttons and other “1.0″ problems that the design team at Mobelux, the developer, are patching as you read this.

Still, there are annoyances. When I tried this out on my Samsung Galaxy and hacked Nook Color, neither would let me go entirely full screen; that status bar stuck around no matter what I did. It’s more of a problem on phones than tablets, however, so it’s hardly a dealbreaker.

The big win is the sharing function. Using Instapaper to share articles on iOS is, frankly, a pain in the ass, at least by app standards. On Android, it’s ridiculously easy, and saving items for later is simpler as well.

In short, if you read a lot of articles online, Instapaper for Android is worth getting, although you may want to wait for an update first.

Instapaper for Android [Mobelux]