A hack for using Hypothes.is to annotate on mobile

I do a fair amount of reading on my mobile phone and my addiction to Hypothes.is for annotating and highlighting what I read has finally driven me to the brink. I have typically added via.hypothes.is to the URLs of articles manually so I can use Hypothes.is on my phone. I’ve finally had enough of the manual timesuck that I’ve gone in search of an answer since there is not yet a mobile app solution.

I’ve long been an Android user, so I broke out the URL Forwarder app which uses the ubiquitous share functionality of most phone platforms and adds a thin layer of program-ability.

In short I created a new filter and cleverly named it “Hypothesize”. Then I added the filter url “ and left the replaceable text alone.

Now I can take an article from almost anywhere on my phone (reading services like Pocket, my feed readers, or even articles within the browser themselves), click share, choose “URL Forwarder” from the top of the list, select “Hypothesize” and the piece I want to annotate magically opens up with Hypothes.is ready to go in my default browser. Huzzah!

The three taps are ever so much easier than trying to tap a URL to edit it it and then typing. Why didn’t I think of this years ago?

Have you had this problem? Do you have a better solution or work around?