Leave a Review Instapaper
My Most Used App
I’ve used Instapaper for years and it is absolutely indispensable for me. I subscribe to a few email newsletters that have lots of links to articles in them. Reading the newsletter and then each of the articles I want to read in a sitting is not easy. With Instapaper I have the emails come to an address that goes TO INSTAPAPER and then I pull up the app. I can read the newsletter and click “save” on the links I’m interested in and those get added to my reading list. Then I can set the newsletter aside and read the articles as time allows.
It also posts images of text I highlight to Twitter along with a link so I can easily share articles.
If I had any criticism it would be the pagination feature has never worked reliably for me, I often wind up with articles ending (i.e. last page) well before the actual end. Then I switch back to scrolling mode.
This is an awesome app. Indispensable.Show lessMikeK1065
Great, but not OLED black
It’s almost perfect, except for the fact that the dark mode uses a grey background and not a ‘pure black’.
A minor flaw, but one that could easily be fixed.Bos2
You can’t keep changing
You can not expect a customer for 7 years to like paying for anything more than once. You can’t expect a customer to allow changing in subscriptions every time you turn around to be a reason for staying. I’ve been with Instapaper and had others talked into buying it even though they could have went the free route back then. Now the developers turn out to be like all the other businesses like Evernote and everyone to try and make this a 401k app.
It’s been fun but I got to goooo.Show lessLabhustle
Paid for this so many times
I’ve used Instapaper for years. I bought the first paid version and have subscribed in the past. Now, the developer who I used to highly respect sold the app to new people who yanked out the features that I’ve already paid for multiple times and is asking for even more money for them.
Besides bugs that made me switch to Pocket for a year or two, like articles from certain websites (websites that I’ve previously reported using the Report feature when articles in Instapaper are “missing text” literally 100x) with text not being captured, now you can’t even search your folders. So had to delete all of them and plop everything from recipes to politics into the main page.
It’s particularly insulting as it’s known that the more you’ve used Instapaper, the more difficult it will be to switch to another app, since you’ve saved many articles, and organized with folders or keywords, but can’t even find now without paying for it. Our loyalty equals the articles we saved being held hostage for ransom.
It’s so infuriating that those of us who have already paid for this app are now being asked to pay more, again. What’s to say that it won’t go belly up after all of this or even that the app will be sold yet again to even more shady characters holding functionalities hostage for even more money?
I’m so grossed out at the whole situation.Show lessunsoho
Unexpected change without warning
You decided to wait many months to introduce a paywall for what was free. The worst though is that you didn’t bother warning users in advance. Not only that, but you don’t have a pay in app in the App Store, misleading people to download then go to your website and pay there. Why does this feel wrong? Obviously, those considerations didn’t matter to you, just fins a strategy that pits people’s back against the paywall and make it more difficult to end a subscription. I’m not stupid, I see what you’re doing. Yes, you have the right to make changes, but you do not have the right to not announce in advance your intentions to users. And I don’t care if you disagree, because in the end, you will lose when you act this way. Good luck with your hold hostage business model. I’m out.Show lessrollo999
Disappointed After Upgrading to Premium
I upgraded to premium because I wanted to try the playlist feature because reading can be difficult for someone like me with ADHD and I can focus better on audio content. However, the voice that Instapaper reads with is the outdated Mac voice called Fred, which is much harder to comprehend due to it’s robotic voice.
If I slide two fingers down from my iPhone screen, it will read anything on the screen and by default it uses the more natural sounding Siri voice.
I wish the developers could add an option to choose which voice to read the articles aloud in Instapaper.Show lessMaddieMK
Far superior to Pocket®
Remembers the article and place of the last thing you were reading with the app, and reopens it regardless of whether its memory has been aggressively garbage-collected by iOS. (Pocket forgets what you were reading and shows you the home screen if you, e.g., don’t open it for awhile)
Less expensive premium version
Better aesthetic rendering
No adverts, even in free version
Highlights are automatically aggregated without having to clumsily “share to profile” which isn’t even consistently available on Pocket frontends
“Random article” JavaScript can load article in reading view on desktop browsers (haven’t found a way to open a random article with Pocket® in its native view).
More minimalist yet effective browser pluginsShow lessWell Then.
The worst app I have ever had on my iPhone
Short version: It does not include search, Pocket does. The publisher of Instapaper do not maintain their promises. No reason to use this. Get Pocket instead. First, all my archived article just got thrown back into the main list, making it almost useless. Also, although I have paid to be a premium user, my status has been arbitrarily canceled because the new owners want to be paid again. Clearly the value of purchasing a premium subscription from these scammers is close to zero, because of their unreliability so one is stuck with the free version, which does not even include a search function. Instapaper is the worst app I have ever used.Show lesswmute
Removes historic highlights
I use Instapaper mainly for long reads, often pieces that take longer than half an hour to get through. Highlights are important for me, because with highlights I can easily get to the relevant parts of the piece quickly. Recently I noticed that the highlights have not been staying. With the latest update it’s removed more, but only with this update have a received an official notification to say that I’m over the limit of free highlights. I don’t remember this being a feature before, but naturally I feel as if my time has been robbed from me, and pieces which I thought were well highlighted are now bare. To add insult to injury, you can’t even subscribe to premium within the app; you can’t even view the prices for subscription within the app. Terrible.Show lessPk100004
Almost There
I came to Instapaper because my Pocket application was consistently botching saves from the WSJ and the Economist.
In my experience, Instapaper is more consistent in terms of saving articles from major news sites with paywalls. I also find the format to be cleaner and the organizational scheme for the articles better overall (perhaps because I prefer folders over tags) when compared with Pocket.
Where is Instapaper lacking? The service needs permanent copies of articles for premium users. This feature is simply too useful to skimp on. Until then, I send the best saves to Evernote. Support for Kobo devices (for those of us without kindle e-readers) would be a nice touch too, though hardly necessary.
On the whole, Instapaper delivers on its core premise (saving articles) and manages to do an excellent job of it too. It worked for me when Pocket did not.Show lessEnochFranks
