Founded in 2007, Pocket is perhaps the most well-known read-it-later app -- until last year, its name was literally Read It Later. The app boasts more than 10 million users, and for good reason: It's simple and integrates with more than 300 apps, including Twitter and Flipboard.
Pocket automatically syncs across all your devices, lets you email articles to your queue, and you can read content without an Internet connection.
The app’s iOS 7 update refined the layout and typography, allows for faster searching and scrolling, switches to auto-fullscreen when you start reading an article, and syncs instantly in the background, even when the app is closed.
Price: Free
Available for iOS and Android.
With features galore and an easy-to-read design, Instapaper is a popular time-saver that works with 150 iOS apps. Like many others, Instapaper upgraded to a simplified design that follows the new iOS 7’s look and feel, as well as including more sorting and filtering options -- shortest to longest, oldest saved to most recently saved, and more.
Define words and use the Browse feature to discover new content from within the app, post to other social media accounts, tilt-scroll and customize the reading experience. Store up to 500 articles on your iOS device, or an unlimited amount on the website.
Instapaper also has a great blog, where it details what’s on the team's mind -- for example, InstaRank.
Price: $3.99 (iOS); $2.99 (Android)
Readability, released in 2009, is another popular straightforward read-later app. Customize your reading view, tag articles, share to your social media accounts, and easily send articles to your Amazon Kindle. Top Reads displays the most popular Readability articles, and it’s also fully integrated with Longform, Pulse, Flipboard and Twitter clients such as Tweetbot.
Price: Free
Available for iOS and Android.
Organizational powerhouse Evernote rolled out Clearly only two years ago, but it’s since joined the ranks of other well-designed tools.
It focuses on text and gets rid of excess clutter, with a customizable, distraction-free reading experience. What you’re doing stays inside the browser until you decide to send it to Evernote -- just click the Evernote icon to save articles to your account quickly. Of course, everything automatically syncs across devices, as well as allows for offline reading.
It’s downloadable for Chrome, Firefox or Opera, and works with Evernote Business.
Clearly clearly works best in conjunction with the Evernote Web Clipper. Send what you find online to your Evernote account, and Clearly gives you a clean reading environment. Web Clipper works with the aforementioned browsers, as well as Safari and Internet Explorer.
Price: Free
Available on iOS and Android.
For all you overachievers -- or indecisive downloaders -- who employ more than one read-later app, ReadKit is a powerful Mac app that supports Instapaper, Pocket and Readability.
(For the record, it also supports Pinboard, Delicious, Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, FeedBin and Feed Wrangler, but you’ll need a premium subscription for some.)
ReadKit aggregates all your content for you, so you don’t need to switch from one app to another. It has a built-in RSS engine and lets you read articles offline, as well as download and store them locally. Like all the others, ReadKit has a customizable interface. Switch from normal to a stripped-down text version of an article with the push of a button.
Price: $6.99
Available on iOS.
Read ALL the articles! But on your own time.
Read-it-later apps have enjoyed a huge jump in popularity as of late, and for good reason — they allow us to prioritize our time, and choose when and where we want to catch up on the latest Miley Cyrus news. That way, we can at least have a semblance of control over some aspect of our lives.
See also: 20 Apps That Look Great on iOS 7
Check out some of the most popular read-it-later apps in the above gallery. Each has its own downloadable bookmarklet for web browsing, and follows the dual-purpose trend of not only being a read-it-later app, but a read-it-later-in-a-prettier-way app.
Image: Flickr, SmokingApples.com