Instapaper, the popular reading service that was once only available for iPhone/iPod Touch owners, is now available on Android. Even though the iOS app has seen numerous massive updates and thus, is more developed, it’s still great to be able to count with this popular app to save and optimize interesting articles for offline reading on your mobile device, e-book reader or even your desktop computer.

There are alternatives to Instapaper, like emailing yourself articles with toread and Pistashio. However, if you are a loyal Instapaper user who happens to sport a trusty Android device, look no further than these highly rated apps that will surely help you enjoy Instapaper on Android.

Official Instapaper Android App [$2.99 for Android 2.1+]

Instapaper took a bit while to make an Android version while its iOS app was flourishing, but cook it up its developer did, surprising users. This version for Android-powered phones and tablets/e-reader combos (e.g. Kindle Fire, Nook Color) is maintained by Mobelux, so you can visit the official app info page at Mobelux’s site or download the app from Google Play.

This app lets you download bookmarked articles when you have a Wi-Fi or data connection. Not only that, the app displays the article text in a clean, readable form that is optimized for mobile or tablet view. That means you don’t need to zoom in and out, and can get text-only versions without all the distracting desktop view elements, like site ads.

This app has support for folders to better organize your article collections, which you can download in batches of 500 articles at a time.

As you can see in the screenshot, there are font type and size options, as well as brightness settings and a night mode option. One of the cooler features that is not quite obvious in the screenshot is that this app also syncs where in an article you last read across different Android-powered devices.

Papermill [$0.99 for Android 2.2+]

Do you have a paid Instapaper subscription? If yes, this app is for you. Papermill lets you access your unread articles from Instapaper while providing the clean, text-optimized reading experience that Instapaper (and Readability) is known for. This app even has a widget for mobile handsets and tablets that have Android 3.0+.

Over a hundred users on Google Play have rated this app an average of 4.4 out of 5 so if you have an Instapaper subscription, you will probably find this app “well-designed” as a review points out.

There are other apps that claim to be able to display articles saved for offline reading from Instapaper, but at least three of these apps didn’t work in my tests. If you know of other promising Instapaper apps, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Android Apps That Send URLs To Instapaper

There aren’t many apps that can access your bookmarked articles from Instapaper aside from the previous two that had good ratings, but there is a good number of apps that can send URLs of that interesting article you want to read later to Instapaper. Here are a few:

• Taptu, a newsreader and curator that is available for Android and iOS,
• Pulse News, a cross-platform (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) newsreader that optimizes reading articles on tablets,
• gReader, a tablet-friendly app that is my go-to newsreader,
• Send to Instapaper, an app for Android 1.6+ that has gotten high (4.4/5) ratings from 99 customers,
• TLDR, also available for Android 1.6+ with high (4.2/5) ratings from over 200 customers.

Do you know of another Instapaper-servicing app? Let us know in the comments below!