Instapaper for iOS and macOS adds article reordering, better Shortcuts integration, more

Instapaper has been on a tear this summer after a major update in May brought CarPlay support. Updates to the iOS and macOS apps this week continue the trend with better ways to manage articles and improved integration with Shortcuts.

This week’s Instapaper for iPhone, iPad, and Mac is jam packed with new features and enhancements.

The first notable change is the ability to drag and drop to reorder articles in your queue. This lets you easily bump articles you really want to read to the top.

That’s especially useful if you want to manually sort articles to listen to while driving with the new text-to-speech feature for CarPlay. Drag and drop reordering is also available on the web.

Also new for iOS and macOS is persistent sorting preferences between sessions. Sorting options on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac include newest saved, oldest saved, longest articles, shortest articles, read progress, recently read, and popularity.

Instapaper for iOS has also modernized swipe action options as well as the long press gesture. From the Instapaper announcement:

Swipe actions are fully customizable in Settings > Swipe Actions, and you can set different swipe actions for short or long swipes. If you decide you prefer the classic swipe actions, you can still enable those in Settings > Swipe Actions.

Lastly, long pressing an article will now show a full list of article options including Like, Move, Archive, Delete, Redownload, Edit, Send to Kindle, and Share.

Lastly, Instapaper has improved Siri, Search, and Shortcuts integration by adding new “intents” for opening your last article or a specific folder.

For instance, you can open your most recent article by saying “Hey Siri, Open Last Article in Instapaper”. You can open a folder by saying “Hey Siri, Open Folder in Instapaper”, and then saying the folder name when prompted.

Users will also notice the use of haptic feedback (which can be disabled in settings), the ability to shake to undo archiving articles, and link previews in articles using long press. Instapaper has also fixed an iOS 17 bug that crashed the app when highlighting text.

The team behind Instapaper says future updates will focus on the app’s Notes feature as well as the Android version of the app. If you haven’t used Instapaper in a while, these recent updates have made it useful in new ways so check it out.