Flipboard and Instapaper Came to Android, But Do I Care?

Apps. With small screen, battery, processor and everything, you need the right apps to squeeze the most from your smartphone. iOS enjoyed some of the best mobile apps, being more mature platform with more money pouring into store. Developers couldn't be bothered to develop to newcomer Android and its cheap users. Although platform grew in both size and depth of the user's pockets, some of the best apps still remained objects of desire, with Flipboard and Instapaper being most notable examples. They are here now.

Flipboard

Many people consider it the most beautiful feed reader for mobile phones. Launched in 2010, it was iOS exclusive until last week. Choose the feeds, and it will convert it to beautiful magazines that you can browse with a flip of your finger. There are similar apps on Android, but none of them look as good as Flipboard. I can confirm that.

Two main replacement are Pulse News and Google's own Currents. Pulse UI was always a bit overloaded for me; I prefer white, clean Currents app. In the beginning it was quite buggy and it still has it quirks, but I can read news quickly and effortlessly. On the other hand, Flipboard has same issues as almost all newcomers: poor synchronization. Too often it fetches from Internet while Currents already has data in cache. Finding the right words news can be a problem: list shows nice, big pictures but too less text, so I have to go in and out of articles all the time. With the Currents, I can start reading, and if I don't find article relevant, I can simply skip to next one. I'm one of those guys who are not too happy about the new Google+ app interface, too.

Instapaper

Psychologically, Instapaper by Marco Arment is the biggest win for Android. After reading author's blog couple of times, I was under impression that he is strongly biased towards Apple and against Android. He claimed that he will never create Android version. Android community felt that Instapaper for Android would be final proof that it become respectable platform.

Couple of months ago, situation was bad. There were Read It Later and Readability, but both applications were less than perfect. Read It Later had clumsy synchronisation and interface could look better, Readability was to iOS-ish and didn't had Roboto. There were some fine fonts, but I prefer font that I'm used to. While Mr. Arment was trying to decide should he go Android way, Read It Later improved dramatically (note: I stopped following Readability). They rebranded it as Pocket, polished GUI, perfected synchronization and even added paging. I really like paging; if I have to scroll, I scroll every couple of lines. With paging, I read whole page so I'm more focused on text. All in all, Pocket is more feature rich and more native to Android than current version of Instapaper. For me to switch and pay the license, Instapaper should be way better than Pocket. Let's wait and see how it develops.

Android market share rose faster than some developers realized, and more agile companies took their part. If you plan to release for iOS first and Android second, make sure to do it within month - or suffer consequences.

Photo credit: Mobelux