If you’ve ever stared at your iPhone owning mates with their easy Reader mode built into Safari, worry no more – there’s an easy way to get Reader Mode on Android up and running. Here’s how.
How Do I? covers the basics, because we’ve all got to start somewhere.
Lots of modern web pages are, shall we say, rather busy.
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There’s a lot going on, and it can be supremely distracting when you’re just trying to read the actual content of a given article.
If you’re an iPhone user, there’s a really easy way to cut down on the noise and get to the signal, via mobile Safari’s inbuilt reader mode. If you’re not au fait with that, it’s very easy to get up and running.
- Open a web page in Safari
- Tap the “Aa” icon at the top left of the address bar at the top of the screen
- Tap “Show Reader”
- That’s it. As long as it’s supported for the page, you’ll get a clean layout version of that content for easy reading.
Nice, simple, easy. But what about Android?
Turns out that you can enable a version of a reader mode for Android phones, and it’s even via a Google developed app.
I honestly have no idea whatsoever as to why it’s not just baked into Android itself… but at least the process of enabling it isn’t too hard.
How to enable Reader mode on any Android device:
- Open Google Play
- Search for “Reading Mode” (tip: It’ll find it on anything close, so “Reader Mode” works too, for example)
- Choose the Reading Mode app (by Google LLC) to install.
- Once installed, open the app. It’ll launch an explanation page of what it does. Tap “Continue”
- It will then tell you it needs to change some settings, so tap on the “Settings” button at the bottom of the page
- Reader mode sits under “Accessibility” in the Settings app, and even once installed, by default it’s off. Tap on “Reading Mode”
- Tap on the Reading Mode Shortcut toggle to switch it on. Your Android device will then ask you for control of your device – if you want to actually use Reading Mode, you’ll need to allow this (otherwise you can deny it and it won’t work, or uninstall the app entirely from here)
- Reading Mode’s default is a persistent accessibility floating button at the side of the screen that you can tap to engage Reading Mode simply on your phone. Your other option here is a gesture control; tap Button Settings to choose which you’d prefer to use. My own preference is for gesture controls, using two fingers swiping up from the bottom of the screen, but either is fine.
- That’s pretty much it. Open any longer-form content – home pages with lots of links don’t work but articles should – and tap the icon or swipe up depending on your choice, and you should get the reader mode version of most web pages. You can adjust default fonts and background colours to suit your reading style and visual acuity as needed from here too.
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