I just saw that Upnext is now ‘officially’ launched, according to this tweet
I am interested to see how this market segment will be like in a year’s time. For now, at least I know of the following app / services
there may be others I do not even know
Interested to know your experience and preference in this area
I myself is keeping the Instapaper subscription and also trialling Matter, UpNext and Ominvore but certainly will not keep using all of them
oh yes, forgot about this one , thanks for adding to the list
Instapaper, because it nicely integrates in Reeder (and Tweetbot).
Just curious: why still use a service when Reeder can handle most of this in the app with icloud sync?
Because Reeder is not my only “source”. So is Tweetbot, which has a “Save to Instapaper” menu option… (I would need the Sharing menu to add links to Reeder instead)
UpNext for me. Moved to it early on, coming from Reeder’s built-in read it later function.
I like the categorisation (short read, long read etc) and the way it handles different types of content, even audio. I’m excited about the newly released support for PDFs. And the ability to export notes to Markdown is useful. Alongside Kindle, it looks like UpNext is going to become my main content consumption space…
It does get me thinking about a content consumption suite, though. At the moment, I skim articles in Reeder and send longer/deferred reads to UpNext. I’m an Overcast user for podcasts, but I’m thinking about whether I might move between Overcast and UpNext in a similar way. At the same time, I’m wary of filling my UpNext library with too much stuff, just because it can handle all of these different content types.
I’ve tried most of the read-it-later apps but I always come back to Instapaper. Here’s why:
I’m currently trying to figure out who is behind Omnivore. There is scant detail available. Can anybody provide insight? I like that it has a plugin with Logseq, but beyond that I know no more.
I use GoodLinks for all kinds of reasons:
It’s private. Everything I add to my queue is stored on my devices and syncs through iCloud.
No ads, no data collection.
No need to create an account.
It’s a value-priced, one-time purchase.
The UI is clean and pretty on all my devices.
It’s got a Mac app, which is table stakes for me. (I don’t want to use a browser to read articles from my queue on a Mac.)
It’s a snap to export an article as a plain-text, markdown, or PDF file.
There are things it doesn’t have, however:
No highlighting.
No full-text search.
No Readwise integration. (I gather it’s possible to use Shortcuts to get text selections ported over to Readwise, but if getting things into Readwise is a big part of your workflow, GoodLinks may not be the app for you.)
None of these are deal-breakers for me since I don’t use read-it-later services as article repositories and don’t use Readwise. If I need to archive the full text of an article, I save it as either a PDF or markdown file and will do my highlighting and note-taking in the app I’ve sent it to. Once I’ve read and processed an article, I delete it from my queue.
(I explained my GoodLinks workflow here. I’ve refined it a bit in the interim. I now use Zoterobib to create a quick citation rather than typing it out myself and I often use Goodlinks’ built in copy-to-markdown functionality to paste the article I want to save directly into an Obsidian or Devonthink note. Goodlinks automatically ads a YAML header with title, URL, and author to the markdown file—very handy!)
I’d love to give Readwise Read Later a spin, but I suspect I will be well into my dotage before it exits closed beta.
I moved away from some of these services after reading privacy policies. Readwise is a particularly bad steward of user data. Instapaper is another one I refuse to use…
Never heard of GoodLinks before, but I’m going to try it out now. Sounds like it could replace Instapaper for me. Thanks.
That would do it, yes.
Thanks!
I don’t use Reeder’s read later function because there is no way to quickly delete old articles. I tried it and liked it, until I discovered I had to delete articles one at a time. 700 - 800 taps later (select, delete, confirm) I was no longer a fan.
Of all of the various app segments, this is the one that I track the closest, follow developments in, and track the closest. It’s so hard to find one app that suits all my needs. I think of Instapaper and Pocket as being of the “old” generation – the new batch of tools have them beat in basically every way, from my POV.
Each of the newer solutions has flaws that prevent there from being a clear winner in my eyes:
GoodLinks – best pricing, best native app experience, best privacy, but syncing, especially of paid articles, seems to not work often.
Readies Reader – awesome experience, subjective UI design isn’t very strong, and no native Safari extension on desktop
Matter – Safari extension is great, has the worst document parser of the new crop in my experience
Upnext – not supporting paywalled articles for which I have a subscription is a total showstopper
I mostly use Readwise Reader – it’s good enough to convince me to use a Chrome-based browser rather than Safari to get a good reading experience.
What are paywalled articles???
Sorry – articles that are behind a subscriber paywall, like the NY Times, The Information, paid Substack posts, etc.
I am actually not sure of the technical mechanisms, but some read-it-later services when you save an article seem to visit the page themselves with their own server, hit the paywall, and then only capture the first paragraph or so.
Other read-it-later services seem to capture directly from your screen, so if you can personally see the whole article, they capture the whole article.
Goodlinks has a log in feature that allows the users to pre-enter and cache the log in details to the paywall so that the articles it saves would be behind firewall. At least that is my understanding
according to this article from Verge, Upnext will cost $10/month. I am not sure I would pay for that
If UpNext accomplishes what they are trying to do in an elegant way I think it’s worth the yearly price which is $5.83/mo ($70/yr).
I would love to have one location for everything I want to consume later: articles, podcasts, videos, etc… however I need some things to not be manually entered all the time. I want podcasts to be delivered like a podcast app (automatically as they’re published), videos synced from my YouTube watch later list, articles added from liked tweets or shared from my browser.
Right now I don’t think UpNext is there yet but maybe it will be soon. I wish they had a little more generous trial. 7 days is just too short to really kick the tires. Also they can only import Pocket right now. I need a way to import from other tools.
