Why Are Read-It-Later Apps Suddenly Hot?
Why Are Read-It-Later Apps Suddenly Hot?
2022 is shaping up to be the year read-it-later apps make a comeback, which is odd when you think about it. Read-it-later apps like Instapaper pre-date the App Store and were originally driven by a desire to have something to read when you didn’t have a mobile Internet connection.
Early parsers stripped out everything but the text, making downloading stories over EDGE networks tolerable. As mobile networks matured and coverage improved, the original reason for read-it-later apps waned but was replaced by the desire to tame mobile advertising. With more bandwidth available on 3G and later networks, developers tuned their parsers to include the images from articles, leaving ads and other extraneous website elements behind.