i’ve been using Matter since it was in beta, having come across it by happenstance. this is my most used app. it sits next to imessage and phone on my home screen. the joy of taking badly formatted or archived articles and importing them into matter is immeasurable. the beauty of listening to a favorite piece with — yes, the most human-like text to speech i’ve encountered — is sublime. the ability to highlight, make notes, share excerpts is delightful. what is really remarkable about Matter, though, is the fundamental ethos of how it exists. everything about the design of the app is meant to emphasize — not Matter, but what you opened it for — the text. every feature, every feed, every tool — it does not leave a distinctive watermark all over it. it instead says: here — this is what you wanted to read. here is what matters.

I am not a particular fan of read-it-later apps for general reading. I do have a need for apps that assist with researching or keeping up with topics of varying scope. I want to easily extract information with an eye to acting on it. This app is not notably better than its competitors, Pocket and Instapaper, which were much earlier to market, and a bit less modern. All of them are frustrating to me. All they do is act as an extra inbox, and they do not make me more productive. They all alter and filter the contents of web pages, and often cut essential information like the authors of articles. Then there are other, more widely applicable issues: First, the price: $60/year, and it’s going up in 2024. I think it’s very expensive for what you get. Then the interface, which I find unpleasant. Each entry takes up a lot of room both horizontally and vertically. It seems thick, somehow. Finally, there’s the curation, which is unimpressive.

I love the use of this app, and when it works, it works well!! A few big problems prevent me from renewing my subscription though….. 1- No Apple Vision Po Support? Not even enabling the iPad version of the app?! This cuts the amount if time I could be using this app drastically. 2- No offline support for the readout-loud feature?! Even when I get semi low service, the audio stops and I have to “change the voices” to temporarily refresh the audio and hopefully get it to work fir a few minutes. 3-The price?! There are cheaper alternatives like Instapaper and my personal favorite, Pocket, that don’t have the two previous problems and are cheaper/free in certain scenarios… These 2 problems unfortunately create a big difference that will make me choose one of the other options for the near future… However, the design and voices of this app are quite nice, so I may try again a year or two from now to see if any changes have occurred.