Stache for iOS review: Too much work for great visual bookmarks

Stache promises an easy way to store, navigate, and organize your bookmarks, but it only accomplishes two out of three. Though it displays your bookmarks in an attractive and easily digestible design, getting them into the app is more of a hassle than it's worth.

6.8

Stache for iOS

The Good

Stache organizes your most important bookmarks in an attractive layout that's easy to navigate.

The Bad

It takes a lot of work just to get a bookmark into the app.

The Bottom Line

While it's great-looking, Stache is too much of a hassle to make it a good replacement for managing bookmarks in Safari.

Designed for both the iPhone and iPad, the basic app is $1.99 (£1.49, AU$2.49) and syncs your saved bookmarks across your devices using iCloud. You also can add and view your bookmarks on a Mac by purchasing an additional app for $6.99 (£4.99, AU$8.99). Either way, though, that's too much for an app that requires too much work.

Stache has the looks, but lacks features (pictures)

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Setup

Initial setup on an iOS device is rather tedious since third-party apps currently can't integrate with the likes of Apple's own apps (Safari, in this case). So, before you can bookmark a Web page to Stache, you'll need to create a bookmarklet for it in Safari. Yes, the workaround sounds weird (a bookmark for a bookmark?), but competing apps like Pocket require you to do about the same.

The bookmark links to a JavaScript action that takes the URL for the page you're currently viewing and saves it to Stache. Fortunately, if you have iCloud bookmark syncing enabled for mobile Safari, you'll need to take this step only once.

Saving a page

Now this is where Stache gets even more complicated. To bookmark a Safari Web page in your Stache account, you'll need to launch the bookmark that you created during setup. The page you're viewing will then be opened in Stache, where you'll need to press yet another button in order to save it. I wish this process were faster. One way to speed it up would be for Stache to automatically save an incoming URL, and (if possible) take you back to Safari, but that's not what happens.

The extra steps needed to save a page to Stache compared with Safari's more intuitive bookmarking system (which requires no initial setup, syncing is included, and it takes just a few taps), detract from what Stache is trying to accomplish. When testing Stache, I found having to leave my current browsing session just to bookmark a page both unsettling and complicated.

Stache does offer its own in-app browsing, but it lacks the extra features and speed found in Safari. It's fine for quickly getting to a Web page if you start with Stache, but it's nothing special.

Looks better than Safari

According to its listing in the iOS App Store, Stache is designed to make it easy to view and find your favorite bookmarks. About this I absolutely agree. Each listing is displayed as a screenshot of the page you saved, making it really simple to identify each bookmark. It's a much better experience than you'll get on Safari, and more aesthetically appealing.

In Safari, for example, Apple's plain text list makes it harder to browse, and the titles of longer bookmarks can be truncated. The latter point can be especially annoying considering that Safari bookmarks are displayed only as a text list.

In the end, while Stache is better for browsing bookmarks, Safari remains better for saving them. That's why in the end I'd say that Stache still isn't worth the trouble.

iOS 8 is coming soon

One thing that might help this app is a feature coming in iOS 8 . At the announcement at WWDC, Apple said iOS 8 will let developers use extensions to allow apps to extend functionality to other apps. So, presumably, a lot of the objections I have to Stache's method for saving bookmarks could be eliminated once it's upgraded for iOS 8. If the features work as advertised, you would probably need to "allow" a Stache bookmarklet to be added to Safari, getting rid of the confusing setup process.

Conclusion

I wanted to like Stache because I'm eager to find a better method of managing both bookmarks and pages I want to read later. Sadly, Stache isn't it. At least not yet. The procedure for getting bookmarks into the app is just too much of a hassle. The Stache website claims the easiest way to add bookmarks is to use a Mac. But what about people who don't have a Mac? Or those who don't want to shell out another $7 just to save bookmarks?

I like what the team did by using thumbnails to display the pages you've saved and providing a way to search for items, but Stache simply needs to be easier to use for it to be worth your money. Hopefully the new features coming in iOS 8 will help.