Readplace for Android Is on Google Play

"There is still no Android app and no offline reading."

In July, the iPhone launch post carried that sentence under its title. The comparison pages said the first half with less ceremony, in the rows that conceded mobile to Readwise Reader and Instapaper: there is no Android app.

October closed the offline half, when Offline Mode reached the web and the iPhone.

The Android half closes this week.

Readplace for Android is on Google Play, for Android 10 and later.

The share sheet does the saving

The app plugs into the sheet the phone already uses to send a link to a friend. Open an article in Chrome, Firefox or whichever browser the phone runs, tap Share, pick Readplace. The link lands in the readlist and the page renders in the background, so the browser stays on the page it was on.

There's nothing to paste. The first share asks once which readlists shared saves go to, if there's more than the main one, and after that there's nothing to confirm.

The sheet closes on its own, and the article's waiting at the top of the list the next time the app opens.

Android orders that sheet by whatever gets shared to most, so a fresh install starts at the back. A long press on the Readplace icon pins it to the front, once, and it stays there.

PDFs go through the same sheet

A PDF open in the browser shares the way a page does. The browser shares its link, and the paper arrives as its own save.

The save needs that link. A PDF shared from the files app carries none, so the sheet answers that it found no link to save.

Scans count too.

Readplace reads scanned pages in 15 languages, so a photographed contract comes back as text with a summary rather than as pictures.

The link saves straight away, and the app sends the paper itself the next time it opens.

The saved copy opens with its TL;DR

Tapping an article opens the copy Readplace saved, not the live site. The TL;DR sits on top, so whether a piece deserves its 20 minutes is settled before the 20 minutes start.

Signing in happens once, inside the app. The account is the one the laptop and the browser extension already use, so a page saved at the bus stop is on the laptop's list at the desk, with no sync product in between.

Under the surface it's a port of the iPhone app, and both clients talk to the server through the API the browser extension already uses. Like the rest of Readplace, its code is source-available on GitHub.

A blocked site still saves from the phone

Some sites answer Readplace's crawler with a block page instead of the article. The crawler has its own ways around that, and the app adds one more: open a save that came back blocked, and the reader offers to fetch the page from the phone itself and upload that copy.

What a site refuses to a server, it usually serves to a phone.

A block aimed at data-centre traffic has little to say about a phone on its home network. The saved article then holds what the phone saw, which was the point of saving it.

Still missing on Android

Offline Mode is the part of July's sentence that hasn't made it here. The web keeps unread articles in the browser and the iPhone app keeps them on disk, and the Android app does neither yet, so reading in it needs a connection.

The rest it asks for is small: Android 10 or later, and a Readplace account to sign into.

From Google Play to the readlist

The listing is on Google Play, and the install is the ordinary Play kind.

Sign in, pin the icon behind the share sheet's long press, and the tab that's been open in the phone's browser for 3 days finally has somewhere to go.

An account that doesn't exist yet starts at readplace.com.