Medium may offer its own version of Pocket and Instapaper (update)

Medium may get Instapaper-like capabilities in the future if the company decides to roll out a feature it's currently testing. App researcher Jane Manchun Wong has discovered that the online publishing platform is testing a "Save to Medum" option after reverse engineering its Android application. Just like Instapaper or Pocket, the experimental feature lets you save pages, so you can read them later. Wong tested it out with an article from The New York Times and found that the feature even allowed her to bypass the publication's paywall.

She discovered that while Medium saves page links that open in an in-app browser, the platform also scrapes a page's contents to create an unlisted story. Further, that unlisted story contains the whole article even though the original page is behind a paywall. It also stays on the platform even after you delete the link you saved. Publishers likely wouldn't be very happy with the way it works at the moment, especially since it also seems to strip ads off a page. The feature could be much different by the time it becomes available, though, if ever Medium decides to release it.

Update 9/06/19 8PM ET: A Medium spokesperson has told us that the company will respect publishers' ads and paywalls if it ever releases such a feature.