Just tried it. Criticism #1: authentication management borderline sucks:
I have to create an account name, not just use an email adderess. Why? Does this get displayed to other people? Not that I can see.
Similarly, why no distributed authentication options? I'd have been happy to log in via Facebook or Google for this app. There's no reason they'd be told what I was looking at, just that I was reading stuff on pocket. That's hardly a privacy issue at all.
So I pick my password on the web site (random, of course) and type it in. And then download the app on my phone, and authenticate again. And then install the chrome extension, and authenticate again. This isn't necessarily easy, but you guys have to streamline this, it's a huge barrier to getting started. Email/SMS a "click on this to get started" link to the phone. Have the chrome extension pick up the existing cookie without asking for a password.
But now I'm saving stuff, and it seems pretty clean. Once annoyance is the lack of pinch zoom on the Android app. I have to click on a text settings button and then hit up/down to play with the text size.
Exactly, that's my reference. If a reader app doesn't work as well as reading the page in Chrome for Android, I'm not really going to want to use it. This is close, and definitely doesn't suck. But it's not really as clean as I wanted it to be. I honestly think I'd be happier if it just synced the web content and let me read it using the browser.
I have to create an account name, not just use an email adderess. Why? Does this get displayed to other people? Not that I can see.
Similarly, why no distributed authentication options? I'd have been happy to log in via Facebook or Google for this app. There's no reason they'd be told what I was looking at, just that I was reading stuff on pocket. That's hardly a privacy issue at all.
So I pick my password on the web site (random, of course) and type it in. And then download the app on my phone, and authenticate again. And then install the chrome extension, and authenticate again. This isn't necessarily easy, but you guys have to streamline this, it's a huge barrier to getting started. Email/SMS a "click on this to get started" link to the phone. Have the chrome extension pick up the existing cookie without asking for a password.
But now I'm saving stuff, and it seems pretty clean. Once annoyance is the lack of pinch zoom on the Android app. I have to click on a text settings button and then hit up/down to play with the text size.