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Read It Later Free Now Available For Android

Read It Later, the #1 Paid News app on Android, is now available in a free version.  The new free app provides the same core Read It Later experience and is perfect for light use or as an introduction to new users.

Get the app on the Android Market: Install Read It Later Free

Read It Later

Over 3 million people have used Read it Later to better manage their online reading across every major platform. It has been called “a DVR for the web” by the New York Times, Business Week, Time, TechCrunch and more.

One Reading List, Everywhere You Are

View or add to your reading list from any computer or mobile device. You can save articles from practically anywhere: your computer, browser, phone, mobile device and within over 150 applications that have Read It Later Support. Read It Later even remembers your scroll position in every article so you can start reading on your computer and pick up exactly where you left off on your phone.

Instant Sync (Push syncing, exclusive to the Android app)

When you add a new item to Read It Later, it will instantly download to your Android device.  All wirelessly, seamlessly and without any manual effort on your part.  During your day, simply save articles from any device or app. The next time you grab your phone, all of your content will be waiting for you ready to read, even without an internet connection.

Clean, Beautiful Articles

Read articles in Read It Later’s beautiful Article View.  Content is distilled to show only the words, images, captions, and videos from an article. This gives a clean, consistent reading experience no matter where the article came from. You can adjust the text size, font, alignment and more.

Offline, Read Without Internet

Read It Later downloads all of your articles for offline reading. You can view your articles even when away from an internet connection, which is perfect for reading on the plane, train or your daily commute. Read It Later can download both the complete webpage and the Article View for reading offline.

Get Read It Later Free for Android!

Read It Later Free is now available in the Android Market:  Download Read It Later Free

Go Pro

If you are an existing Read It Later user or want a more powerful experience beyond the free app, go Pro!

Features exclusive to Read It Later Pro include:

• View your entire list (no limits to the number of articles that can be viewed/downloaded)
• Search your list
• Sort your list
• Currently Reading List  (view all open/unfinished articles)
• Rotation lock
• Volume Rocker Scrolling

I have been working hard on a huge new update to the Article View and I’m excited to tell you that it’s finally ready.

Note: Updates to the Article View require no changes or updates on your end.  However if you’d like to update any articles that were saved before today you will need to redownload them.

Multi-page Support

The Article View will now automatically assemble multi-page articles for you!  You no longer have to save each page individually or hunt down a single-page/print view of an article.  In fact, you can even save any page within the set (ex. page 3 of 10) and the new Article View will still grab and combine all of the pages before and after.

A Word on Development

Multi-page support was Read It Later’s longest standing feature request.  The reason it has taken so long to implement was not a lack of importance.  (In fact, I think this is easily one of RIL’s best features now.)  The delay was making sure that it was done right.  If you’ve been here a while you may remember that an early version of RIL’s iOS app actually had multi-page support but it was removed in 2.0 because I was not satisfied with the experience.  I shelved it and decided to wait until I could give it the focus the feature deserved.

I had 3 requirements I had to satisfy:

1. Non-language specific – RIL is a global platform with over two-thirds of its users living outside of the US.  The parser could not simply rely on looking for specific language like ‘Next’ in the page.
2. Non-site specific – There should be no site specific rulesets that have to be constantly added or updated.
3. Be able to save any page – Most of the time when I save a multi-page article its when I’m half-way through it.  I wanted the parser to be able to find all of the pages before and after the page that was saved.

I’m happy to report that after toiling in the bat cave, I’ve finally built a multi-page feature that I’m truly proud of.  I have been testing this for weeks and have yet to find an article that the parser was not able to stitch together.  Go try it out and let me know what you find!

Note: If you try it on an older article and it does not work, be sure to refresh it first. RIL may be serving you the old cached version processed by the old parser.

RTL Support

The new parser has support for RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew.  RTL languages will now be displayed in the proper direction.  The update also provides improved detection of articles written in RTL languages.

Improved Accuracy

In addition to multi-page support, this update brings a significant number of improvements to the parser’s ability to detect article content.  Thank you to all of you who have sent in Article View reports.  They were incredibly useful in improving the parser.

Improved Author Detection

Author and byline detection has been dramatically improved.  I am planning a larger update to improve this even further in the future.

–

Enjoy!

- Nate

Exciting news: It has been a long time coming, but we finally got readitlater.com!

You can already access the homepage directly from the shorter URL.  We are working on our migration plans for the entire site and API but expect to officially make the move to the new, shorter domain name in the very near future.

Begin writing your goodbyes to the painfully long readitlaterlist.com address.  It won’t be wasting our precious keystrokes much longer!

Thank you all for the tremendous response to our Android app so far.  Since our launch last month, Read It Later has remained steady as the #1 paid news app!

Today we are releasing version 1.1.  It brings a ton of enhancements under the hood in addition to a few new features.

We’ve got an exciting roadmap for RIL on Android with a number of big updates lined up for the near future.  Stay tuned!

Get Read It Later for Android

Login Support

You can now access subscriber-based content from Read It Later.  For example, if you are a NYTimes or Wall Street Journal subscriber, you can login to your accounts and RIL will use the accounts when downloading your content for offline reading.

To manage your site accounts and subscriptions, open the new account manager in the options screen.  Then simply select the sites you have accounts for, enter your account information and voilà, you’ll be able to access your content in Read It Later, even offline.  There are no limits to where/how you can save your content.  You can continue to save with the bookmarklet, extensions, and through third-party Twitter or news apps.

Volume Rocker Scrolling

As in many popular Android web browsers, you can now use the volume control to scroll in the Reader view.  Push once to page up or down.  Push and hold to jump to the top or bottom of an article.

You can enable this feature in the advanced settings screen.

What Else is New:

• Ability to edit account (username, password, and email) within the app.
• Improved support for non-English languages/encodings (more improvements coming soon).

Fixed:

• Changed the appearance of the night mode button to be more clear.
• A bug where viewing the Article View of certain pages caused high CPU usage.
• A bug where the scroll position would jump when switching from another app.
• A bug where background syncing was sometimes not occurring automatically.
• A bug where some links would not open properly when clicked on.
• Some cases where the hard search button did not open search.
• Resolved a number of crashes, bugs, and minor issues.

Very recently I experimented with Read It Later’s price and dropped the app to 99 cents.  Amazingly, as a result, Read It Later jumped up to the number 1 spot in Japan overall on both iPhone and iPad for a day. It was Read It Later’s best day ever.

Yesterday was one of Japan’s worst days ever.

I’m so thankful for the support RIL has had from Japan (our userbase is as big there as it is in the USA).  Today, I’ve taken 100% of proceeds from RIL’s best day ever and donated it to the Red Cross to help in relief efforts for those effected by the earthquake in Japan.

You can help on your own by texting REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 instantly.  Developing Read It Later and seeing it used all over the globe has shown me how small and interconnected this world is.  We are all in this together.

——

先日，Read It LaterのiPhoneアプリを特別セールの一環として最低価格に引き下げたところ，日本のiPhone，iPadアップストア両ランキングで一位を獲得させていただきしました．私にとってRead It Later最高の日でした．

しかし，そんな喜びもつかの間で昨日は日本にとって最も不幸な一日となりました．

日本の皆様から頂いたご支援，ご支持にはとても感謝しております（日本のユーザ数はアメリカと肩を並べるほどに成長しました）．今日，私は日本のアップストアで一位を獲得した日の売上を100%日本に充てられた赤十字基金に寄付しました．

アメリカ在住であればSMSで90999番にメッセージすることで簡単に$10寄付できます．Read It Laterの開発を通じて，地球がいかに小さく，世界がどれだけ密接につながっているかを実感させられます．決して他人ごとではありません．被災者の皆様には心よりお悔やみ申し上げます。

The day has finally come.

Read It Later is now available on the Android Market.

The Android app is easily one of the best Read It Later experiences to date.  It’s fast, beautiful and always in sync.

Get it: Install the app

Read It Later

Over 3 million people have used Read it Later to better manage their online reading across every major platform. It has been called “a DVR for the web” by the New York Times, Business Week, Time, TechCrunch and more.

After continued success on the iPhone and iPad as a Top 10 News app, Read it Later is finally bringing an official app to Android.

One Reading List, Everywhere You Are

View or add to your reading list from any computer or mobile device. You can save articles from practically anywhere: your computer, browser, phone, mobile device and within over 130 applications that have Read It Later Support. Read It Later even remembers your scroll position in every article so you can start reading on your computer and pick up exactly where you left off on your phone.

Instant Sync (Push syncing, exclusive to the Android app)

When you add a new item to Read It Later, it will instantly download to your Android device.  All wirelessly, seamlessly and without any manual effort on your part.  During your day, simply save articles from any device or app. The next time you grab your phone, all of your content will be waiting for you ready to read, even without an internet connection.

Clean, Beautiful Articles

Read articles in Read It Later’s beautiful Article View.  Content is distilled to show only the words, images, captions, and videos from an article. This gives a clean, consistent reading experience no matter where the article came from. You can adjust the text size, font, alignment and more.

Offline, Read Without Internet

Read It Later downloads all of your articles for offline reading. You can view your articles even when away from an internet connection, which is perfect for reading on the plane, train or your daily commute. Read It Later can download both the complete webpage and the Article View for reading offline.

And So Much More…

What are you waiting for?  Haven’t you waited long enough? Download Read It Later for Android now!

Version 2.4 of Read It Later for iOS has been approved and should be appearing in the app store shortly.

Login Support

One long-standing issue with Read It Later has been accessing content behind a subscription or login wall.  Many users are subscribers to sites like the Wall Street Journal, ESPN Insider, and Harpers.  However, it was a messy ordeal to provide RIL access to these users’ accounts.  Without a standardized way to access each site and without APIs, it was difficult to create a solution that wasn’t overly complicated or inconsistent to the user.  I held off on implementing this until I settled on an ideal solution.  This solution has finally materialized in 2.4.

The new solution is simple and elegant.  To manage your site accounts and subscriptions, open the new account manager in the options screen.  Then, simply select the sites you have accounts for, enter your account information and voilà, you’ll be able to access your content in Read It Later, even offline.  There are no limits to where/how you can save your content.  You can continue to save with the bookmarklet, extensions, and through third-party Twitter or news apps.

Tweet Attribution

Note this feature is in Read It Later Pro only

Links saved from Twitter will now display the original tweet that contained the link and give you the ability to retweet it directly.  This not only allows you to remember where/why you saved a link, but allows you to respond to and/or give credit to the original poster after reading!

This will work on new links saved after updating to 2.4.  For the tweet to be saved with your link, the Twitter client you used to save the link with needs to support this new feature.  Three Twitter apps already support this feature (Echofon, SimplyTweet, and Gravity) and more are on the way.  If you use another Twitter client and would like this feature, I recommend you suggest it the app’s developers. 

(Twitter Client Developers: see the new ‘ref_id’ parameter in the #add and #send APIs)

#Longreads

The #longreads Twitter hash tag is a fantastic way to discover the best longform content on the web.  The tag forms a feed of longform content posted by readers and publications that are recognizing the trend.  This feed is grazed over and curated by three great services that all support Read It Later:

Longform.org – Posts new and classic non-fiction articles, curated from across the web and separated into a number of categories.

LongReads.com – A curated feed of longform content, updated daily.

Byliner – A new discovery and discussion site for readers who enjoy longform articles and short form books that is launching at the end of the month.

Now, when sharing an article on Twitter that is 1500 words or more, Read It Later will suggest adding the #longreads hash tag to your post.  If you read a great longform article, I encourage you to share it with the rest of us by using the #longreads hash tag.

Bug Fixes

Version 2.4 also fixes a number of important issues in the previous release.

Fixed: Performance/Lag Issue – a bug in the Article View caused a major performance degradation after viewing a few articles.  This has been fixed for good.

Fixed: Digest Recategorization Issue - a bug in Digest caused some topics to appear empty after recategorizing an item.

Fixed: Evernote/Email Article View Encoding – articles in some non-english languages would appear incorrectly when sharing to Evernote or emailing the full Article View

Fixed: Incomplete Web Views After Update – Please see this page for a description of the issue.

I’ve been getting a lot of requests for this one, so I thought I’d throw something together. If you have any leftover articles hanging around in Instapaper, you can now import them into Read it Later.

Try it out: Instapaper to Read It Later Importer

This importer should be considered beta.  I didn’t have a large Instapaper account to test with   If you have any issues, just give me a shout.  Enjoy!

Version 2.1.1 is out now.  You can grab the latest at Mozilla add-ons: Download

What Changed

• Support for Firefox 4.0 Beta
• Replaced text view with new Article View (text only, images are coming in the 3.0 update)
• Replaced threading with web workers
• Drag-drop support in Panorama (FFb5 – FFb7 required)
• Faster start-up speed

Feedback

Please report any problems that you run into at Read It Later Support.

Update: After speaking with a number of other developers, including Silvio from Reeder, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is re-enable MobileRSS’s API key.  The developers who made MobileRSS have a number of other apps with Read it Later support (on Twitter, iPhone and iPad).  I’ve discovered that all of these apps use the same API key so disabling it unfairly affects an enormous number of innocent Read It Later users using the developer‘s other apps.

Ultimately the decision of what app to use/support should be up to the user.  While I may have strong opinions when it comes to defending follow developers, I will leave the decision about what apps to use up to you, the user. It seems that this issue has gotten enough attention that I hope users will have enough information to make their own decision.

Thank you all for your support and feedback.

(Now get off the internet and go drink some Eggnog.)

—

A recent update to the popular MobileRSS application was inappropriate.  It appeared to be an almost identical one-to-one clone of another application: Reeder.

Source: http://reederapp.com/ripoff
Story: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/12/22/when-is-design-inspiration-just-outright-theft/

Inspiration and imitation are a natural part of competition, especially in a market as tight as news readers.  But in this case, I personally felt that MobileRSS went too far.  As a solo developer, I rely on app sales to support myself.  A lot of other iOS developers do the same, including Reeder.  We simply don’t do things like this to each other.

As a result, I have decided to disable MobileRSS’s API key for the time being.  This is not an app that I would like ReadItLater to be a part of in its current form.

This is a tough decision because MobileRSS was the 3rd highest news app used by Read It Later users over the last year.  Understandably, a lot of you are going to lose functionality that you may have paid for.  I do not want to throw all of you under the bus as a result of this decision.

If you have bought MobileRSS and were using it as your main news reader, please drop me a line at support@getpocket.com and I will do my best to find a way to offset the cost for you.  (Please include your username)