There's an app for that! (Or is there?)

I mentioned previously, so all of my zero readers will know, that I recently caved in and switched from my old trusty Nokia to a smartphone (a midrange Android). To my surprise, I find myself more and more often browsing through links recommended by Google, Medium and others, and find them interesting fare more often than I expected. OK, for most of them I just skim the article, mumble "nothing new" and go on, but sometimes I want to save it for later perusal (that is, actually reading it):

An obvious way is to "share" the URL via e-mail. OK, that kind of works, but is quite cumbersome. But, wait, isn't there an app for everything ? Let's see: of course, dozens of apps for "saving and organizing links". I downloaded several and, of course, found them utterly useless. First, they are all carbon copy of each other - the same to baroque workflow, the same colorful, glitzy, epilepsy-inducing GUI, the same lack of ability to see saved links somewhere else, eg. in the browser on my desktop.

OK, time to Google. An article I found recommends two even more baroque, even flashier, even more colorful in a way three year olds like, but somewhat promising contraptions, only, in order to see the stores stuff on your desktop, you just need a little script in a well known integration tool. What? Ah, I realized finally - the "article" is actually a promo for that same tool. (I won't name it; it is actually quite good, but a tad too expensive for my stomach.)

So, after two hours of dicking around it dawned to me that appropriate tools exist for a decade or so - any old cloud storage. and that's what I use now - none of "clever" special purpose "link storage and organizing" apps, just good old cloud store. After selecting the app as the share target only one additional tap is required, and the link is all over your devices in seconds. This isn't exactly the application these tools were built for, but they are better than those which were.

OK, one more aspect: Kindle. For some unfathomable reason Amazon decided to support sending only files, not web content, to Kindle if you are on Android. (Laptop/desktop browsers do have plugins/extensions that do that quite capably, albeit not perfectly.)

So, I repeated the journey with "Send-to-kindle" apps. Again, most are just obnoxious, requiring the explicit interaction with you e-mail client. Finally, I found one, not free, not perfect, but with exactly the right workflow (that is, no workflow at all except for selecting it as the share target) and with very responsive developers who react to each and every report of imperfectly transmitted web pages: I think they deserve a plug: https://www.fivefilters.org/ 

I though this was going to be a rant, but I cooled down - so, here is just my experience.