Zotero for Android available for beta tests (opens in new tab)

Android may have 70% device market share, but iOS has close to 70% of app store revenue market share. This is because iDevice ownership correlates with higher spending on apps. In other words, publishing an iOS app is more profitable than publishing an Android app.

Even for free apps, if they are associated with an optional payed service (like Zotero Storage), it can make economical sense to publish an iOS app first.

It all comes back to revenue: Android has twice the market share but users are about as third as likely to pay for apps / in-app purchases so the market is a lot more even than it might seem. I don’t think that’s because android users are significantly more inclined towards piracy but rather that there are really two groups, and the ones who bought the cheapest phone they could find contribute market share only for free apps.

> It's funny how on the desktop, Windows has more apps and developers generally target it before MacOS.

I would say this is true for certain types of apps. Games, indisputably are Windows-first (and no matter what the Apple Game Porting Toolkit offers, without Apple going full Valve, this will remain the case), and certain business applications (AutoCAD, some medical stuff, other highly-specific and niche engineering apps, internal LOB apps for corporate clients environments) are either Windows-only or best on Windows, but I would argue that since at least 2005 or 2006, the amount of good software that is Mac-first or Mac-only is significantly higher than any other platform.

Obviously, in 2024, the web is the main application platform. The web won. But despite having a smaller market share (and today the market share is higher than any other time), there has long been a disproportionate ratio of good software on Mac versus other platforms.

Android users don't want to pay for apps, that's why they get lower priority in general.

It's mostly a tool to manage research literature. It allows you to add works you are viewing in your web browser to collections. Then, you can create bibliographies from these collections. As a researcher I use it a lot, since it makes working with references much smoother. There's also extra features like cloud syncing and most recently an integrated PDF viewer and annotator. https://www.zotero.org/

Though it is popular in academia, I use it for daily bookmarking too.

Zotero Desktop extension allows you to convert any web page into an offline HTML. I found it very stable.

It's most commonly used by academics for automatically extracting citation metadata from journal article pages from JSTOR, Springer, Elsevier etc. in a structured format (instead of having to enter them manually) and saving them to a local library. Also automatically saves the PDF locally if you have access to it.

It also has a Word add-on that allows you to insert citations as dynamic Word "fields" linked to items in your Zotero Library, so citations can be automatically kept in sync with your Zotero Library and can be easily converted to different formatting styles.

Yeah, fundamentally it helps you manage records of documents. Of course you can also attach PDFs and full text (if you have them), but it's the record that's important.

A common use case is in academia - it helps you track your citations and then output standardised reference lists, which is a pain to do by hand.

Other tools in this space are Mendeley and Endnote.

(and it doesn't seem to be opensource)

Librera can automatically crop whitespace. And Adobe Reader has Fit Visible (Ctrl+3), which most of the time is good enough.

I use zoo for zotero on my e-ink android tablet (Boox Tab X). It lacks quite a few zotero features but works well for my workflow—I manage my library on my desktop (downloading papers, adding tags, etc.), then sync to my Tab X where I can read and mark up the pdfs and sync them back to my desktop. It’s a great paper reading experience.

Hot take: the iPad/iOS Zotero reading experience is worlds apart from the PDF.js reader in Windows clients.

Yes, this can be used as a document manager for those purposes, with selected plugins (which ones are based on preference; the list is not too long [1]). It now has the ability open and annotate PDFs, although for a long time it did not. There are additional notetaking plugins.

It doesn't have all the features of traditional document managers, but it will be far better for handling annotations.

[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/plugins

JabRef. No cloud component and as a bonus the database is just a BibTex file which you can keep in Git.

I used to use qiqqa for exactly what you describe but I think zotero has won this space

Very well I would say (20gb and counting). More importantly: Zotero is the only one that does Web scraping correctly. If you are looking at a paywalled article, it will capture your DOM from the browser, so you get what you are looking at. DevonThink and many others choke at paywalled content because they try to access the content independently.

Last but not least: thanks to the developers for the latest updates that bring zotero to a more modern experience. The iOS app specifically is awesome!

You can use them both together! Just have Zotero save your PDFs to a directory that DEVONthink will index. That way, you can use the right tool for the job. For inserting citation into documents, the work processor plug-ins that Zotero offers are really fantastic. Similarly, for academic papers, the web clipper that Zotero has is much better suited to those particular types of documents than the more general purpose one included with DEVONthink.

The only server functionality I'm aware of is syncing between devices. Zotero does offer hosting space for this, but you can host your own as well. It works with Webdav, so I have used my own hosted instance of Nextcloud for syncing.

Zotero is an offline software with syncing capability. They charge for extra storage beyond 200MB, which is their only streams of revenue, you can setup a WebDAV server and point Zotero there

Isn’t Zotero already self-hosted?

If you are on a Mac, devonthink.

Although this would be useful. Students currently using Chromebooks can still use it. Install connector(extension) from Chrome app store and choose save to library (online zotero library) instead. It is annoying that you will need to do that with every addition to the library but this will work.