Matter: Reading App

When I heard that Pocket was being sunset, I scrambled to find a solution and I think that this will do just fine. I want to be able to add articles that I don’t have time to read in the moment, so that I can refer to them later, tag the article so that I can group the topics I want to read, and easily save from other sites. Matter ticks all of those boxes, but it also adds features I didn’t know I needed, like the ability to convert those articles to text and listen to them. For an information hog like myself, this has been invaluable because I can listen to the articles I’ve saved in the car or on a walk or while doing the dishes. At first, I was a little bummed out to have to pay for it, but considering I’ve lost all of my saved articles now three times in 30 years of digital existence because of companies going out of business, I’d rather support a company financially and keep it going!

I’m not typically one to leave app reviews, or to pay $60/year for an app. But here I am doing both because Matter is *that* good. I was a loyal Instapaper user for several years, but less than a week of playing with the free version was enough to convince me to switch (which, I’ll note, they make incredibly easy even with Instapaper’s API limitations). The article reading functionality is good - certainly on par with other apps, and things like the natural TTS are big improvements. They’re also clearly actively working on their parser, and the couple of times I’ve reported a content issue they’ve quickly not only fixed it but let me know they had done so. Where Matter is really a game changer is the unified subscription inbox. I’ve thought for ages that surely someone could come up with one place for all newsletters coming from email, RSS, or anywhere else. And here… they did it. Once I got it set up, it’s amazing to no longer have newsletters languishing in my inbox for days at a time, especially for long form ones that I may read a few days after they come out. Now they’re all sitting there, ready and waiting for me to get to them. It’s a newer app so there are still some rough edges to be polished, but it’s already a fantastic app that I’m excited to see continue to improve.

Unlimited highlights. An excellent tagging system. Beautiful, clean UI. Importing email subscriptions. No ads. Great save-for-later feature for Safari and Chrome. A great web app. Text to Speech with a natural voice. It doesn't get better than this, and certainly not for free. I would happily pay for these features, as I think Matter does them better than comparable Pro versions of reader apps, but I also hope that as the app grows, the folks at Matter to keep a good many of them free. Also, the two times I've put in a suggestion or bug in the web app, I've gotten a speedy response : ) . A few small notes and quirks: Some articles don't transfer completely, or transfer with the text of pop up windows, or only transfer the pop up content. That might be user error on my part, and it doesn't happen often enough to be annoying. You can't click links in a highlight, so you have to remember to open or save the link before you highlight. The ability to start TTS from a specific part in the article is a great feature in the mobile app that I hope comes to the web app. The ability to use shortcut keys to delete, archive, favorite, tag, etc. is a great feature in the web app that I hope comes to the mobile app. More consistent treatment of photos (sometimes imported, sometimes not, sometimes caption transferred as body text, sometimes not) would be nice, especially for TTS purposes, but not a dealbreaker.