![]() It’s a minor glitch, and not one that seems to occur repeatedly, but it certainly made for a few puzzled moments. You have to pop back into a story, turn dark mode off, and exit again if you actually want to see what options are at your disposal. Occasionally when you enable dark mode - a feature that displays light text on a dark background - within a story and then exit it, the settings panel is similarly blacked out. Your mileage on this front may vary - in The Verge’s review of the app, Ellis Hamburger notes that using the app on a One X sticks users with a triple-whammy of navigation bars cluttering up the bottom of the screen, something my Galaxy Nexus thankfully managed to avoid.Īs is the case with just about any 1.0 release though, there are a few hiccups. It’s a snap to switch between each of the app’s three fonts, fiddle with line spacing, tweak screen brightness, adjust font size, and the like, making the reading experience very customizable.Īll of those controls are nestled in a persistent option bar that runs along the bottom of the story screen, and I find it to be less of a distraction and more of a facilitator - the ability to like a story or pass it along to others via any of the networking apps on my Android phone is always just a touch away. Popping into a story proper reveals many of the same granular settings that its iOS counterpart is known for. There’s also a tablet-specific view that I didn’t have much of a chance to muck around with, but it seemed remarkably similar to the iPad-optimized version of the app, down to the use of a two-column grid layout that stories live in. Simply put, this version of Instapaper is meant to pull your saved stories to your device and display them for you with no additional cruft to get in the way. Still, it’s clean and understated - in a sense, it’s perfectly suited to the core function of the app. In terms of design, Instapaper is simple to the point of being sparse, something that tends to be exacerbated by larger displays. ![]() While Instapaper fanatics may bristle at some of these omissions, the app works, and it works very well. ![]() Instapaper’s popular pagination options are absent as well, though to be honest, I’ve got no problem with just scrolling through a story. It’s worth noting right at the outset that the new Android version isn’t a one-to-one translation of the popular iOS app - notably missing is the ability to jump into a full screen view of a story, as well as the option to pore through featured stories culled from the day’s most frequently saved bits. Now the question changes from “when will it be released?” to “how well does this thing actually work?” Instapaper for Android has finally been released into the Google Play Store, where it can be yours for $2.99. A handful of people have tried to bring the immensely useful service to Android with varying degrees of success, but Arment and mobile developer Mobelux have surprised us all by offering up their own official solution. If you haven’t already, check out Instapaper for Android for $3.08CAD.Given Instapaper creator Marco Arment’s less-than-enthusiastic stance on Android, it didn’t seem like an Android version of his popular story-saving app would ever see the light of day. Google has been good about creating curated sections for tablet apps in hopes that users will buy them and encourage more developers to get on board. The Nexus 7 comes with a $25 credit to the Play Store, so it makes sense that users would have used that money to purchase tablet-optimized apps such as Instapaper. But considering until a couple weeks ago it had sold just over 1,000, Mobelux should be pretty happy with the results. Now, don’t let that number morph your expectations of how many copies the app sold Google’s tally still pegs it at below 10,000 overall. The Nexus 7, however, is a success story in its own right, causing sales of Instapaper for Android to rise 600% in the days following the tablet’s launch. Created by Mobelux, it didn’t (and still doesn’t) have the polish, the feature set or the community support that has made the iOS version a must-buy for anyone with an iPad. Instapaper for Android was an experiment to see whether one of iOS’ most popular apps could be translated to Google’s mobile OS and become financially viable as a long-term project. ![]()
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