How Copy A Web Page Using Your Android Phone

Updated Baronial 3, 2017 to reflect Android N (seven.ane.ii) and iOS X 10 (10.3.3).

And so, you're surfing the web on your Android or iOS device when yous come up across a page you want to salve—not just bookmark, but keep, either locally on your handset or to your favorite cloud drive.

Not a problem. There are, in fact, a few different ways to save a webpage as a PDF, which you can so save to your device'due south on-board storage or sync to a cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive. You tin can as well save lengthy articles to an offline reader app, or send the unabridged text of a folio in the body of an email message.

Read on for four ways to relieve a webpage for subsequently using Android or iOS, starting with…

Add a webpage to your Reading Listing (iOS only)

Bookmarking a webpage in Safari for iPhone or iPad does little more than save the page'due south URL in a thicket of nested bookmark folders—and if y'all happen to lose your network connectedness, pulling upward a bookmark volition give you zilch but an error message.

The beauty of iOS'due south Reading Listing feature is that it can take a functional snapshot of any webpage, save it to your handset's local storage for offline reading, and sync it with all your other iCloud-connected devices.

To save a webpage to your Reading List, just open the page in Safari, tap the Action button (the square button with the pointer) at the bottom of the screen, then tap Add to Reading List.

To open your Reading Listing, tap the Bookmarks button (the button that looks like an open book), then tap the Reading List tab (information technology'south the icon that looks like a pair of reading glasses).

Note: Adding a webpage to your Reading List won't necessarily relieve information technology for all time. In my tests, I found that Reading List will try to grab the latest version of a page if your device is online, and if the page happens to disappear from the web, you lot'll go a "page non establish" error (or something forth those lines). If you become back offline, Reading List ordinarily goes back to the older, "cached" version.

Download a webpage in Chrome (Android but)

If you lot're using Chrome for Android, good news: In that location'due south an easy style to download webpages for offline reading.

save a web page downloads chrome android 6 — Just tap the download icon (the one that looks like a downwardly pointer) to save a webpage in Chrome for Android.

Dissimilar iOS'southward Reading List feature, Chrome won't sync downloaded webpages to your other Android devices. But while iOS will attempt to update pages saved to Reading List, even going so far as to requite you a '404' error on saved webpages that accept since disappeared, Chrome treats your saved webpages as permanent snapshots. You can even compared a live webpage and downloaded offline page in carve up Chrome tabs.

To save a webpage in Chrome, tap the three-dot bill of fare button in the top-right corner of the screen, then tap the Download icon (the one that looks similar a down arrow).

To access your saved webpages, tap the three-dot menu button over again, then tap the Download icon. Tap a downloaded folio to view it in Chrome, or tap and hold the page to share it or trash it.

Relieve a webpage equally a PDF (Android and iOS)

While a webpage added to your iOS Reading Listing or Downloads in Chrome volition look pretty much identical to its live, on-the-web analogue, a PDF version of the same page may look jumbled and ungainly compared to the original. The upside of a PDF'd webpage, though, is that it's essentially a digital printout—significant it'south yours to keep, no thing what happens to the online version of the page.

Yous tin can create a PDF version of any webpage on your Android or iOS device, but the methods of doing so are somewhat unlike.

For Android:

First, open the page you want to save in Chrome, tap the iii-dot menu button in the top-right corner of the screen, tap Share, then tap Print.

Save a webpage as a PDF — Want to save a webpage to your Android device? One mode is to "impress" it to a PDF file, then save it to either Google Drive or directly to your handset.

Once Android has finished creating a preview of the page yous want to save, tap the Salvage to drop-down card at the top of the page. Select Save to Google Bulldoze to upload a PDF of the page to your Drive account (brand sure you choice the right one if you're signed in to multiple Google accounts), or tap Relieve equally PDF to relieve the file to your handset's local storage.

Now, just head to Google Drive to view your saved page (look in the Recent section if you're not sure which Drive directory you saved the file to), or tap Downloads in the app drawer to detect the file in your handset's local storage.

Note: Sure, you could effort borer Share > Google Drive to salvage a webpage from Chrome to your Drive account, but all you'd be doing is saving a tiny text file with the page's URL.

For iOS:

There's no "Relieve as PDF" option under iOS's Print menu, but there are some PDF-friendly apps with a "Save PDF" feature under the Action button.

Save a webpage as a PDF in iBooks — You lot can find the "Save PDF to Books" option under the Action button in iOS.

Go alee and open up a webpage in Safari, tap the Action button (once again, information technology's the square push with the upward arrow), then tap a Save PDF button in the height row (at the very to the lowest degree, there should be a Save PDF to iBooks button).

If y'all're a Dropbox user, the Save to Dropbox option under the iOS Activity button will salvage webpages as PDFs to your Dropbox account.

Transport the text of an article in an email (iOS merely)

Allow's say you want to share an article with a friend rather than proceed it for yourself—and instead of just sending the link, you want to send the entire text of the commodity in the body of the message.

One arduous way of doing that would be to select all the text in the webpage and paste it into an email. If yous're an iOS user, though, there'southward an easier way.

Send the text of an article in an email — You tin can ship the entire text of a web article to a friend, with a piddling help from Safari's "Reader View" feature.

Open the article you want to share in Safari, then tap the Reader View button. (It's the three-line push on the right side of the address bar, at the top of the screen. Don't encounter the address bar? Try tugging downwards on the page until information technology appears.)

Tap the Activeness push (the square push with the arrow at the bottom of the screen), then tap Mail.

Safari will paste the entire Reader View version of the article into the torso of an email message, complete with a link at the top. All you need to practise now is pick a recipient and tap the Send push.

Relieve the "decluttered" version of a webpage (Android and iOS)

Sometimes, you just desire to save the meat of a webpage, minus the ads, pop-ups or any other distractions. Safari for iOS's Reader View does a solid chore of "decluttering" webpages, just information technology doesn't salvage the text of a folio forever—that is, unless you paste the text in an email, as I described in the previous tip.

A amend fashion to archive the text of a web commodity is by using a dedicated offline reader app, which saves stripped-downwards web manufactures for after.

Among the height offline reader apps are Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, each of which comes in both Android and iOS flavors.

The best offline reader apps boast cloud-based storage for syncing your saved articles between multiple devices, too equally bookmarking tools that you'll discover under the Android "Share" and iOS "Action" menus.

Best of all, articles y'all salve using an offline reader app will stay saved, even if the original webpage is altered or taken down.

Editor's annotation: This article originally posted Nov 16, 2015.