iOS 8, Text-to-Speech, Premium, and Profiles

We just launched Instapaper 6 for iOS and Instapaper 4 for Android. It’s a huge update several months in the making, and we’re extremely proud of the result.

iOS 8 - Save to Instapaper from any app

As of today, you can easily save to Instapaper from any application on your iPhone or iPad that supports the iOS system share sheet. No more copying links & opening Instapaper, emailing yourself articles, or installing bookmarklets. Just tap the system share icon, choose Instapaper, and voila! Saved.

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In addition to Instapaper’s share extension on iOS 8, we’ve launched a Today extension to help you keep up with your day’s Instapapering. The Today extension shows you all the stuff you’ve saved that day and lets you open articles with one tap:

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Text-to-Speech

One of our users’ most common feature requests has been for a text-to-speech function, and we’re happy to announce that we now have text-to-speech support in both our iOS and Android apps! Text-to-speech is accessible directly from the share sheet in Instapaper and you can control the playback right on your lock screen.

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Text-to-speech is a free feature but if you have an Instapaper Premium membership, you can create playlists of articles to be read aloud back to you! A text-to-speech playlist may be especially useful for people who like to listen to interesting things as they drive, bike, run, or work out.

Instapaper Premium

As of today, the Instapaper app will be downloadable for free through all channels, with Instapaper Premium (formerly the subscription package) costing $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

The new prices are based on the value of the new features we’ve added over the past year, our future goals as a business, and the price of other similar subscription services. When betaworks took over, Instapaper’s only premium feature was full-text search. Since then, we’ve added great features like unlimited highlighting, and text-to-speech playlists. In comparison to Pocket or Evernote, Instapaper Premium is significantly cheaper (40% on a monthly basis and 33% on a yearly basis).

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Our new business model will help us develop more of the features that you’ve been requesting, while also bringing Instapaper to a larger audience.

All existing subscribers will be automatically upgraded to Instapaper Premium, and will be grandfathered at their current subscription price. Those of you that aren’t current subscribers but have supported Instapaper by purchasing either the iOS or Android apps will get a free month of Instapaper Premium as a token of our gratitude.

Unified Browse

Last year we made the decision to combine the Feature & Friends sections of Instapaper into one “Browse” section, and included Instapaper Daily early in 2014. In order to continue developing awesome, new features for “Browse,” we needed to change the way it was presented. So we took the streams of The Feature, Daily, & Friends and combined them into a single feed:

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You can still narrow down to just Feature or Daily by tapping the blue label at the bottom of those articles in browse, and now you can tap on your friends’ display name to view their user profile.

Profiles

That’s right, Instapaper now has user profiles! Your Instapaper profile is comprised of your “liked” articles, and accessible to your connections within the new Browse section and on the website at your own personal URL.

We understand that Instapaper is a deeply personal application, and we built user profiles with your privacy in mind at all times.

When the first social features were introduced to Instapaper, Marco Arment included a setting called “Visible to Others” which allowed you to completely disable any information about your Instapaper account from being shared with others. “Visible to Others” was disabled by default, and a majority of our users still have it disabled.

With the user profile launch, we’ve renamed “Visible to Others” to “Profile Privacy” but maintained all of the existing values, which you can modify via the apps or your settings on web. When you launch Instapaper 6 for the first time, it will prompt you about your profile privacy and ask you to make a decision about making it public or private:

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If your profile is private, it’s really private. Your liked articles will not appear in browse, people will not be able to find you on Instapaper, and your profile on the website will be only visible to you. You can view your profile here: http://www.instapaper.com/me

If you want to get a feel for profiles, here are some awesome people with public Instapaper profiles that you can have a look at:

We understand that so many new Instapaper features might be a lot to take in, so if you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach us @InstapaperHelp or via support@help.instapaper.com. Today is the beginning of an even better Instapaper experience, and we’d love to chat with you about it.

As always, thanks so much for using Instapaper!

- Instapaper Team