Readability for Android now available

Although Readability for Android is an Amazon App Store exclusive for one week in the United States, it is available today to international users from Google Play.

At its core, the app reformats existing web pages for easier mobile reading. The most common interaction is by saving an article from a web browser using a bookmarklet, usually on the desktop. The app itself provides a built-in web browser so that you can navigate to your favourite pages and save specific articles, but that is a far more cumbersome way to do it. At this time the app does not support Android’s built-in Sharing API, so you can not merely press Share from within your phone’s browser and have it save to Readability. This is the only real disadvantage to mainstay Read It Later, which hasn’t been updated in nearly a year.

Readability is functionally identical to its iPhone equivalent, from the app’s hyper-simple UI to its extensive font selection, provided by Hoefler & Frere-Jones. In fact, it seems that the Android version is a direct port of the iPhone app, down to the UA String identifier; if you try to load a page that relies on Javascript, the Android app identifies it as running Mobile Safari. I encountered this with every mobile-formatted WordPress site, which relies on Javascript to identify the device as mobile. Hopefully this is something the Readability team can fix quite soon, as it prevents a good many web pages from working properly.

Other than that, Readability on the Galaxy Nexus arguably provides a better reading experience than the iPhone version, as the increased vertical space (1280 pixels to the iPhone’s 960) means more visible text without scrolling. And since the Galaxy Nexus’ 4.65-inch screen is almost as sharp as the iPhone’s (though text doesn’t look quite as good with its PenTile matrix) there is no argument to be made for Android making for a poorer reading experience.

Check out Readability for Android on Google Play.

Source: Readability Blog