Betaworks bought Instapaper, the save-for-later reading app, from Marco Arment earlier this year, and has gone about revitalizing the ecosystem with new iOS, web and now Android apps.
The company behind Digg, Dots and Tapestry has done a great job making the Android version look and feel native — the former “official” Android version was overseen by app house Mobelux — with a slide-out menu bar and background updates. While it doesn’t have the same polish as its iOS counterpart, this is a fantastic reading app, with support for a number of fonts, text sizes, margin varieties and reading modes, that, especially with a larger device, make longform reading a pleasure.
But Betaworks didn’t merely go into this product intending to overhaul merely Instapaper’s look. Competitors like Pocket have moved beyond just saving snippets of text and long-form articles; they want to be the repository for content of all kinds. Instapaper has followed this route and now allows users to save video, photos and practically anything else on the web, facilitated with an easy-to-use browser extension.
The new version allows background updating, and automatically switches to Night Mode when the sun goes down. Like the former version, it supports pagination — the ability to swipe to the side like an e-reading app — but performance is still poor in some areas.
The app still costs just over $3 CDN, a dollar cheaper than the equivalent iOS version, but lacks tablet support for now. It also doesn’t allow native search unless you pony up for Instapaper’s premium service, which will $3 for three months.
Betaworks promises full tablet support, along with “more social and sharing features, non-English language translations, and, always, performance improvements,” in a future version.
[source]Google Play[/source]
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