Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

Thursday, February 27, 2025

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

Readwise and Readwise Reader

I have long been a fan of Readwise, a reading app and service for organizing book highlights and notes. About three years ago, Readwise launched Reader, its own read-it-later app that integrates with its book service.

I’ve been using Reader for the past two years, and it’s … okay. It has been a long development effort for the Readwise team. There are updates to it almost weekly, and the app continues to improve and evolve. It can handle most of my read-it-later needs, but I’ve honestly never enjoyed using it.

The user interface is choked with features. There are too many ways of customizing views and gestures. I can never remember the difference between a short or long swipe or a left or right swipe. The article queue is cluttered with menus, yet I often struggle to find a function when needed.

I feel guilty for not loving Reader. It is “free” with my Readwise subscription—who doesn’t like free? But I prefer apps that prioritize minimalist design and style, even at the cost of fewer power features. Readwise Reader abounds in power but lacks the finesse I expect from a well-designed app.

Testing read-it-later Apps

After a frustrating search through multiple menus to send an article to my Kindle, I decided to look for an app that better suited my tastes. I spent an evening installing the leading read-it-later apps on my iPad, Mac, and iPhone.

(A quick disclaimer: I have no financial interest in any of the apps I’ve evaluated. No one is paying me for this blog post.)

I tested Pocket, Instapaper, Inoreader, Goodlinks, and Matter using a checklist of needs and wants. I made some quick decisions. Pocket lacked export capabilities and felt dated. Inoreader’s fixed reading layout was a turnoff. Goodlinks was fantastic but didn’t integrate with Readwise.

Instapaper impressed me with its aesthetics and how it imported articles behind paywalls. Matter, the one I knew the least about, surprised me the most. It matched Instapaper’s immersive reading experience but offered a wealth of additional reading selections as part of the subscription.

I spent the last four weeks pitting Reader, Instapaper and Matter against each other in my daily online reading. The odds were stacked in favor of the incumbent. I did not relish the notion of paying for another app subscription.

After four weeks, the choice became obvious. Matter is my new read-it-later app.

Matter: “1% Smarter Every Day”

Matter is a subscription-based read-it-later app that has been around since 2021. At $80 per year, it costs more than Pocket, Goodreads or Instapaper, but less than Inoreader or Readwise Reader (though you get both Readwise and Reader for the same price).

What sets Matter apart beyond its well-designed reading app is its ability to follow favorite writers and its unique algorithm that suggests complementary articles. I didn’t expect to value this, but as you’ll read, I found these content offerings compelling.

Saving Articles

Matter makes it easy to add articles to its reading queue. Use the share function from an iPhone or iPad or tap a button in your browser’s toolbar. I tested Matter with Safari, Chrome, and Brave, and they all worked well. A double-tap on an article from Unread, my RSS reader, sends it to Matter automatically.

The Reading Queue

Matter’s uniqueness begins to show up in its reading queue. Its minimal design focuses on reading content, not menus or decoration. An iPad mini displays twelve articles in Matter without scrolling. Readwise Reader, with its extra fluff and clutter, shows just five. For each article, you see the estimated time to read, the percentage you’ve already read, and the number of annotations you’ve made. The queue can be sorted by the usual parameters: article length, date added, author, etc. But a flick of your finger launches an article to the top of the list, or for a bit of whimsy, a shake of your device shuffles the order. Archive any article with a simple swipe.

Immersive Reading

Reading an article in Matter is an understated pleasure. The font and screen layout can be adjusted to your liking. Swiping down from the top of the screen gives you an AI-generated article summary. After the title, you see an estimate of the article length in minutes.

Menus and buttons quietly disappear as you read, leaving you alone with the text. When you reach the end of the article, the buttons return and stay present as you continue to peruse what you’ve read, knowing you’ll need to take some action now that you’re done. This is very thoughtfully executed. Here’s a look at the same article on Reader and Matter.

I often read on my iPad at night. There are several dark mode reading choices, and none blinds you with the bright white text glare of less sophisticated apps (like Reader).

Matter provides a brilliant way to explore links within an article. In most read-it-later apps, following a link takes you out of the app into your browser, disrupting your concentration. Matter does something so much better. When you tap the link, a window appears with a scrollable view of the linked article and the option to save it in your queue for later. A single tap on the perimeter of the window brings you back to where you left off.

I love this ability to follow an author’s train of thought and references without losing my own in the process. I seldom clicked on links in Reader because of the inherent disruption in flow. Now, I’m a link-clicking demon, and I feel like I’ve engaged a new level of learning and understanding from what I’m reading.

Capturing highlights is as simple as dragging your finger (or Apple Pencil) over the text. No pop-up menus or distractions. Just yellow highlighted text. Tap again to delete the highlight, add your own notes, copy the text, or create a beautiful image of the quote for sharing on social media. If you add a note, linking brackets and tag symbols hover above the keyboard for those who keep notes in apps like Bear or Obsidian — a subtle but helpful touch.

You have the option to listen to articles with a choice of high-quality AI narrators. As you listen, blue highlighting tracks along with the text. If you’re listening on a walk with your AirPods, a double-click of the stem highlights the sentence or paragraph you’ve just heard. I thought AI narrators were a gimmick until I started using Matter with AirPods. This works with YouTube videos and podcasts as well. I’d love this feature in audiobooks, but sadly, Matter doesn’t offer that.

When you reach the end of an article, you can archive it, share it as a link, or save it as a PDF.

A swipe up from the bottom of the screen provides a “more like this” selection of similar articles sorted by algorithmic match. The recommendations are startlingly good. I’ve been presented with my own blog posts as options a few times, so I know they’ve cast a wide net for the population of articles to include in the matching process.

A swipe from left to right on the screen returns you to the reading queue. I love apps that use universal gestures.

Readwise Integration

If you’re a Readwise subscriber, highlighting a passage in Matter, including notes, tags, and links, automatically flows through to Readwise and your notes app. This removes any mental overhead of having to think about where or how to save what you’re reading. It just works.

Obsidian Integration

I’ll briefly mention the Matter plug-in for Obsidian for readers who use that note-taking powerhouse. The Matter plug-in is fantastic, rivaling the Readwise plugin in options to customize how highlights and annotations are presented in your notes.

Reading PDFs

Matter did the best job among the three of importing PDFs. Instapaper doesn’t support PDFs at all. Reader accepts PDFs but doesn’t transform them. Here’s the same PDF in both Matter and Readwise Reader:

Kindle Integration

It takes two taps to send an article to your Kindle if you prefer to read longer articles that way. Matter automatically adds a “Sent to Kindle” tag, which shows up in the queue list so you don’t forget.

The article format in Kindle is the best I’ve seen. You can send a group of articles in bulk, and they show up on Kindle as a digest with an interactive table of contents for easy navigation. Unlike Instapaper or Readwise, article metadata is preserved when highlights are imported to Readwise and your notes app. Limitations by the Kindle prevent wireless syncing, but Readwise parses and saves all highlights and annotations perfectly via side-loading or emailing the Kindle Clippings.txt file.

Reading Better

When you subscribe to Matter, you get a terrific read-it-later app, as I’ve described. But there’s another part to Matter that delivers even more value, so much so that the $80 annual subscription cost might be a bargain.

Your Personal Daily Digest

In addition to your saved reading queue, Matter offers a changing selection of articles as part of a daily digest. Some are curated staff picks, but most are articles that Matter thinks you will like based on previous reading. The articles presented aren’t always new. Some of the most interesting articles I’ve read from the digest were written three or four years ago, yet are still timely based on my current interests.

If you find an interesting article from the digest, you can read it on the spot or add it to your queue. If you swipe up from the bottom of one of these articles, you can find even more related articles, and so on.

Following Favorite Writers

Matter allows you to follow your favorite writers no matter where they publish. For example, essays from Paul Krugman from both The New York Times and his Substack Krugman Wonks Out can be found on his Matter author page. The depth of writer selection is astonishing, with many available articles only accessible via paywalled subscription sites, and then, only with distracting ads sprinkled through the text. I already subscribe a few of these publications but prefer to read them in Matter because of the comfortable reading experience and power reading tools.

Once I understood the scope of the published writing available in Matter, I took a different stance on its subscription cost. It’s a reading app, yes, but it’s also a potential replacement for many of my magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

Finding Your People

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about why blogs matter. In it, I described the long-pull value of connecting with others through writing and sharing one’s particular interests. If you write it, they will come, goes the theory. Eventually.

Matter’s “more like this” tool provides a much faster way to find and connect with like-minded people.

Here’s an example: I sent my blog post to Matter to test the article import process. On a whim, I swiped up from the bottom of my essay to see if others had written something similar. And, of course, they had.

A few taps later, I read this passage from Henrik Karlsson:

It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen.

I had never heard of Mr. Karlsson, but here in a blog post from 2022, surfaced for me in Matter, I found a kindred spirit. His post led me to a half-dozen others. I would never have found any of these through a conventional Google search. For anyone with interests that border on the fringe or unusual or mildly obsessive, a “more like this” journey with Matter can be fascinating.

Making Reading Fun

The final benefit I’ll mention deals with that awful, soul-sucking dread that comes with opening your read-it-later app, knowing you’ve accumulated far too many articles to read on a Sunday afternoon. For read-it-later veterans, you know the feeling. You’ve got 30 minutes to read six hours of articles. Your good intentions turn to despair as you survey your reading list.

Matter offers several innovative solutions to prevent reading queue angst. First, the audio narration and AirPods integration I mentioned earlier can help you read more during otherwise dead times in your schedule.

But the surest way is to read a little every day. Matter encourages this through goals and streaks. You set a daily reading goal, and Matter rewards you with a fun recognition when you finish. Later, it reminds you to keep your reading streak going.

Many apps do this, and I’m sure it’s annoying for some (it’s optional), but it definitely motivates me. These little recognitions likely explain why I’ve conducted 1,500 straight Readwise reviews and 4,500 consecutive Day One journal entries.

Wish List

There are a few things I would love to see added to Matter in the future.

1. Improvements to Article Parsing. There are some niggling problems with the way Matter imports certain articles. Photo captions are sometimes jumbled with text. Markdown-style tables don’t carry across. Footnotes within articles are often missing.
2. Kobo/Android support. If I finally give up on Kindle, reading articles on Kobo devices or Android e-ink devices would be helpful.
3. Multi-word dictionary lookups. Matter allows you to look up single words in its onboard dictionary, but there’s no easy way to look up a person or place on Wikipedia. I’ve often been reading an article when I had to exit the app to look something up. Instapaper and Reader both do a better job at this.

The last item on my wish list doesn’t count as software improvement. I wish Matter provided potential customers with a more feature-laden free tier or a more robust trial to understand the app’s capabilities better. Matter offers a seven-day trial of its premium app, but users still can’t explore RSS feeds or its excellent writer feeds, which represents a good chunk of the value of the subscription, in my view. I suspect the high annual cost turns off many would-be customers without understanding what they’re really getting. At a minimum, Matter should explain the limitations of the free trial.

Is Matter Worth It?

Matter and Readwise have a lot in common. Both apps target readers who want to be more thoughtful about how and what they read. They both require eye-watering subscriptions to pull this off. One reason for the high cost is the tiny size of the population that values such a service.

In Matter’s case, the potential market is even smaller, as it exclusively targets the Mac/iPad/iOS ecosystem. If you have an Android device, you’re out of luck.

There are many less expensive (or free) read-it-later alternatives. Safari’s built-in “Reading List” function is free. Goodlinks is a terrific read-it-later app with a $10 yearly subscription fee. And, of course, Readwise subscribers get its Reader app for no additional cost.

And yet, for its intended market, the value is extraordinary. Matter gives you an immersive environment that helps you focus on what you’re reading, even when you roam outside the bounds of the article by following links. It suggests additional reading to help you learn even more. It provides a central access point to a vast library of world-class writers and thinkers, many whose works are accessible only through paywalled subscription services. It does all of this in one aesthetically pleasing and thoughtfully designed app.

I came looking for a read-it-later app, but after using Matter daily for the past four weeks, I am staying because of the depth and serendipity of its content.

If you use a Mac, an iPad, or an iPhone and want to get more out of your online reading, you owe it to yourself to try Matter. If you’re on the fence, subscribe for a month and see what happens. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy you did, and wiser for it.

Questions about Matter or any of the read-it-later apps I’ve mentioned? Let me know in the comment section below. Learning about Matter’s full capabilities can be difficult without first committing to a subscription, so I’m happy to assist.

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