Instapaper < Readability

I’ve been using Readability since it was a bookmarklet developed by Arc90. Today I use three of their products: a Chrome Extension, an iPad app, and an iPhone app.

A few weeks ago I decided to give Instapaper a try. I really wanted to like it — it’d be heartwarming if a sole developer could create a polished product and make a sustainable business out of it. Although I’m convinced that Marco is doing well financially, his product is far from being polished. In my three weeks with Instapaper I was mostly annoyed and often forced to switch back to Readability due to Instapaper’s parsing problems.

I gathered here a list of pros and cons of each service.

Instapaper

Pros:

• payed app
• pagination
• optional “oldest first” ordering
• grid view on iPad

Cons:

• frequent crashes (initially on an iPad I was experiencing one crash every two/three articles)
• confusing UI that requires too many taps
• too many settings
• crappy parser (missing paragraphs, images, etc.)
• broken links in Wikipedia articles
• bugs (sometimes I can’t archive an article in the grid view, but I can in the article view)
• no support for “browse the web and quickly make a page readable” workflow (try to read Programming in Lua…)
• support for only one device orientation (especially annoying when you’re using an iPad upside down because it’s charging)

Readability

Pros:

• good parser
• aesthetic design
• intuitive gestures
• simplicity
• official Chrome Extension

Cons:

• free app (you are the product)
• occasional sync problems (that can be fixed by re-downloading articles)

Update • 2015-06-26

About two weeks ago I switched from Readability to Instapaper because of the following reasons:

1. Readability’s sync is slow and unreliable.
2. There’s an annoying visual bug after switching between portrait and landscape orientations on an iPad.
3. It looks like an abandonware: the last minor app update was on 2014-10-24 and the last post on their blog is from 2014-01-23.
4. Marco sold Instapaper a month after my post. It’s become a better product in the last two years. I like it.