Folio: A Promising Read-Later App with a Strong Foundation

I’ve been using read-it-later apps since before I had an iPhone. For those of us who were Wi-Fi-only iPod touch users before owning iPhones, apps like Instapaper were great for reading on the go.

Like in those early days, the read-later universe is once again hyper-competitive, with a lot of relatively new entrants such as Matter and Readwise Reader. That’s led to other apps shutting down. ElevenLabs bought and closed Omnivore, and most recently, Pocket, which debuted ages ago as Read It Later and was eventually acquired by Mozilla, shuttered.

In the wake of Pocket’s demise, Nick Chapman, who used to work on Pocket, and the team at Less is Better debuted Folio, a new read-later app for the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and the web that they say is designed to capture the essence of Pocket. I used Pocket on and off over the years but always considered it a step behind alternatives, so my expectations for Folio weren’t high.

Still, I was curious to see what Folio had to offer, especially because it must have been put together very quickly in order to be launched as Pocket shut down. Despite my initial reservations and some gaps in the app’s functionality, the Folio team has laid a great foundation with an excellent reading experience that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Currently, there are four ways to get articles into Folio:

a plus button in the app’s main UI for pasting URLs,

a share extension for sending URLs to Folio from browsers and other apps,

browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox (with a Safari extension coming soon, according to the developers), and

import functionality in Folio’s settings that works with CSV files generated by Pocket (which you can alternatively sign into directly), Instapaper, Matter, Raindrop, and Readwise Reader.

What’s missing, besides a Safari extension, is any Shortcuts support, which is disappointing since automations are some of the key ways I integrate my RSS reading with read-it-later apps. I’d also like to see Shortcuts support for finding saved articles and accessing their URLs along with other metadata.

The iPad layout would probably work better divided into multiple columns when it’s filling the full screen.

Where Folio shines is in its main reading list view, where your saved articles appear as a list that includes:

the article’s title,

the source publication,

how long it will take to read,

a thumbnail of the story’s hero image,

an automatically generated tag that can be changed later, and

Favorite and More buttons.

Along the top of the article list is a sorting button to arrange stories from oldest to newest or newest to oldest, plus filters for favorited, tagged, highlighted, short, long, and archived articles. This view is also where you’ll find a button for full-text search and the plus button for adding new articles.

The UI for reading is Folio’s greatest strength.

The layout is simple and readable, which I appreciate. However, the touch target for the More button – which reveals Share, Favorite, Edit Tags, Archive, and Delete buttons – is so small that it’s easy to miss and open one of your articles instead. The menu of options is also something that I’d like to see in a popover when an article is long-pressed. Article swipe gestures with assignable shortcuts to any of these same actions would be a great addition, too.

When you open a story, the app automatically scrolls to where you left off in the article, which is great. There are also options to listen to the article and open it in a Safari View Controller as well as another More button, which adds options for Display Settings and Open in Browser (your default external browser) along with the actions described above. There are multiple voices for listening to articles that can be played back at various speeds, and all of them are very good. However, the voices play back randomly; I’d like to be able to choose a voice myself. The display settings include a strong selection of over a dozen font choices and options to adjust font size, line spacing, content width, and justification. Together, it’s an excellent set of core settings that should let just about anyone dial in a comfortable reading experience.

Less ideal is how aggressively Folio removes images from articles. The app’s text parsing on the sites I’ve visited is very good, but most articles are reduced to having an image or two no matter how many images the original article contained. Another significant limitation of Folio is that there’s no way to get your articles out of it, which is a shame given the emphasis the developers place on importing from other services. In addition to the ability to export a CSV file of everything, I’d love to see a Shortcuts action that includes filtering to allow for control over what is exported, for those situations when users simply want to use a URL in a multi-step workflow instead of exporting in bulk.

Reading suggestions.

It’s also worth mentioning that Folio includes a tab of reading suggestions, similar to the kinds of mainstream news stories you’d find in Apple News. I haven’t used this tab much because I typically find articles via RSS, but it has a wide variety of stories if you need something to read.

Currently, Folio is free to download and try. Eventually, the team behind the app plans to charge for text-to-speech, highlighting, full-text search, and customizable fonts and spacing, along with other features that are in the works. I like that these features are free to try while the app is still being actively developed, but I’ve never seen it go well when an app takes away features and puts them behind a subscription, even if it’s stated up front as it is here. Still, it’s good to see that there’s a business plan for Folio, and although the pricing hasn’t been announced yet, I hope it will be set at an affordable level that also sustains the app long-term.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of features I’d like to see refined and a lot of functionalities that I’d like to see added to Folio. That said, the core reading experience is excellent, and the app’s availability across Apple devices, the web, and Android covers everything from e-ink readers to desktop systems to smartphones and iPads. That’s a great start for an app that hasn’t been around for very long. Whether Folio can find a niche for itself among its many read-it-later competitors remains to be seen, but its prospects look good so far.

Folio is available on the App Store for the iPhone and iPad as a free download. Certain features are slated to become paid in the future.