What makes you think nobody "stepped up" on Android? There are a number of Instapaper clients for sale in the Android Market. I've only tried one (which sounded like the best from reviews I read), InstaFetch, and it's quite good. It has a couple of extra features beyond Marco's client: it can read articles to you (Android comes with a TTS library, I don't know if recent iOS versions let developers use Siri's TTS function from their code --of course, if Marco wanted to add TTS he could license a library or something like that, but it's definitely not as convenient for him as if he could just use a system API), and it updates your articles without you having to run the app (which I understand was not possible in iOS [1], but again, I wouldn't know if a recent version changed that). Plus, with Androids intent system, you don't need to install the send-to-instapaper bookmarklet in the browser: InstaFetch adds an add-to-instafetch intent that you appears in the browser's menu of ways to "share" the page .
The one thing Instapaper 3.0 did really better than InstaFetch is that it's option for changing from the light to dark theme is accessible right from the article view, while in InstaFetch you have to go to settings.
iOS has VoiceOver. Every app should support text to speech, at least if the developer didn’t completely ignore accessibility. I’m just now testing with Instapaper and VoiceOver seems to work perfectly with it.
I don’t know whether that’s default, but I set my iPad up in a way that pressing the home button three times activates VoiceOver. You then select what you want VoiceOver to read to you. If you want it to just continue reading forever (instead of just reading what you selected, like a headline or a paragraph) you scroll down with two fingers.
It’s an accessibility feature, so its primary use case is not reading texts to you, but it works perfectly fine for that purpose – and in the vast majority of apps it just works, even without the developer doing anything.
Oh, thanks! I can't believe I never thought of poking around in the accessibility features to look for TTS. What I used instead on my iPod Touch was a dedicated TTS app (whose name I can't remember right now): to hear an Instapaper article, for example, I'd copy the entire thing to the clipboard (which was a little inconvenient since there didn't seem to be a "select all" command) and then paste it in to the TTS app. If I ever go back to iOS, I'll be sure to remember this tip.
The one thing Instapaper 3.0 did really better than InstaFetch is that it's option for changing from the light to dark theme is accessible right from the article view, while in InstaFetch you have to go to settings.
[1]: http://www.marco.org/2010/06/10/iphone-multitasking-and-back...