Read It Later on Your iPhone, From the Share Sheet

Summary (TL;DR)

Readplace now has an iPhone app in beta. It plugs into the iOS share sheet, the same menu you use to send a link to a friend. Open any page in Safari, Chrome, or another browser, tap Share, and pick Readplace. The link saves to your reading queue and renders in the background, so you stay where you are. The app also lists your saved articles, with pull-to-refresh and swipe-to-delete. For a longer reading session, the website on mobile still reads better. The app is on TestFlight, Apple's free app for trying betas, and takes a couple of minutes to set up.

The article you want to read later is rarely the one you have time for now.

You spot it on your phone, mid-something, and you want it parked for a quiet half hour. Until this week, saving it to Readplace from an iPhone meant copy-paste or a trip to the website, and that one extra step was usually enough to lose the article before you ever opened it.

The iPhone app cuts the step out. It hooks into the iOS share sheet, the same menu you already use to send a link to a friend, so the place you save from is the place you were already going to tap anyway.

Open the page in Safari, Chrome, or any browser, tap Share, and pick Readplace. The link drops into your reading queue. One tap from the page you already have open, with no copy-paste and no need to open the app first.

How saving works

Tap Share and choose Readplace, the way you would share a link to WhatsApp. The app reads the page and saves it in the background, so you stay on the page you were reading.

Switch back to your browser and carry on. A moment later the article shows up at readplace.com, with its title and clean text pulled out.

The share sheet turns any browser on your phone into a save button for your reading list.

This is the part worth testing first. If saving from the share sheet works on your phone, the browsing and beta setup below are the easy bits.

Browse your queue

The app also shows your saved articles. They appear in order, you pull down to refresh, and you swipe an item left to delete it, so you can see what you have lined up and clear out the ones you no longer want without leaving the app.

The website on mobile still gives you the better view for a longer read.

The app keeps to the two things you do on the move, which are saving fast and glancing at your list.

It is a beta, and you can join

The app is in beta through TestFlight, Apple's free app for trying out betas. Setup takes a couple of minutes.

Install TestFlight from the App Store, join the Readplace beta, then install and open the app once. Opening it the first time registers the "Share to Readplace" option in iOS, so saving works from then on. Sign in with your account and leave the server set to readplace.com.

That first launch matters, because iOS only adds the share option after the app has run at least once.

If Readplace does not show up in the share row the first time, close the sheet and tap Share again, or tap More to switch it on. You can favourite it so it sits near the top next time.

Try it

Open the install page on your iPhone and pick the iPhone tab to join the beta. Save a handful of articles from the share sheet over the next week, then open readplace.com when you finally have time to read them, and tell me where the saving felt slow or where a page came out garbled. Feedback from these early saves shapes what the app does next.

The app is built around saving fast so the link is there when you finally have time to read it.

Join the iPhone beta or start at readplace.com.