Instapaper

Tried to read some recently saved articles and waited over five minutes while it slowly loaded old articles one by one but wouldn't show me any of my recent saves. I thought maybe I was too optimistic about my sync settings, so I set the sync settings to the lowest amount. Didn't help. Uninstalled, restarted phone, reinstalled with lowest sync settings... again, one by one my older articles were slowly loaded at a pace of maybe one every 8 to 10 seconds, and I couldn't refresh to get the new saves. What is the point of this? How is this convenient if, by the time the app is ready to show me the article I wanted to read, my window for reading it (say, over a very quick breakfast) has closed? Am I supposed to wait, after saving an article, until the next day to read it, or would the app just continue to slowly load up old content at its leisure while ignoring me? Do I need to keep it open and on screen for one or more *hours* before I can start using it? I paid for premium, too, so i feel like a rube who just wasted his money. Back to Reader, I guess, even though its parsing engine gets worse by the month. At least with Reader I can access my saved content a few seconds after saving.

I’ve been using this on and off for over a decade. Yeah, Pocket caught my eye and I was on it for a bit but I am back to Instapaper for good because it’s simply better. It focuses on what the user needs, not what can make the company money. Pocket harvests your data and makes you pay for text while showing you ads. Instapaper simply lets you save what YOU want to read later. It doesn’t tell you what to read. Doesn’t have a need to try to entice you into staying on the app in hopes you read a suggested article so they get a cut of the ad money. Their premium features are very few but worth it if you like them and they don’t nag you to upgrade. If Mozilla really cared about user privacy like they claim they’d have integrated this app into their browser rather than the other one which may look slick but doesn’t offer much. Speaking of looks, the minimal design of Instapaper is everything you need in this app. No need to complicate it any further. I love this and always will.

Update after developer review: they’re aware of issues and working on fixes and improvements, so that ups it to 3 stars; happy to go 4 stars once the spacing issue is fixed with upper and lower borders on iPhone X in iBooks pagination mode, then 5 stars once they dim out the Home indicator. Thank you for listening, Instapaper folks. 🙌🏼📖📰👀 Update for 7.5.2 on Jan 23, 2018, which purportedly hides Home indicator when you’re in full screen mode, however, I just tried it, in full screen mode, after closing all apps and restarting, and the home indicator is still there no matter what I try. See below comments with hopes those will get fixed as well as they’re still sane after 7.5.2. Previous: I’ve been a huge fan of Instantpaper for many many years, I love it, but one thing that’s always bugged me, is that there is no full justified text feature to make the margins on either side balance out like you can with Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc. Also, the pagination feature to use iBooks like page turns on an iPhone 10 just doesn’t work properly, there’s a huge gap at the bottom of every page, while the top part of the screen and the text is way too close to the upper edge, I just need a simple fix, and maybe that will get fixed along with the lack of full justification, that would be so nice, that I would give it five stars again.