There is no Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster for iOS (iPhone iPad, or iPod Touch), because Apple does not allow apps to dig into the bookmarks of Safari or any other web browser. However, this is not bad if you have a Mac, because you can get the desired effect on your iOS devices by using one of our apps on your Mac.
FOR SYNCING BOOKMARKS
• To sync, sort and/otherwise manage bookmarks in Safari on iOS devices, use Smarky, Synkmark or BookMacster to manage Safari’s bookmarks on your Mac, and then switch on iCloud Safari syncing.
• To manage bookmarks in Google Chrome on iOS devices, use Synkmark or BookMacster to manage Google Chrome’s bookmarks on your Mac, and then Sign in to Google.
Voila! Whatever our apps do to Safari or Google Chrome bookmarks on your Mac will be reflected in Safari and Google Chrome on your iOS device. We have some diagrams showing how this works.
We would probably offer an iOS app for syncing bookmarks between Safari, Chrome and other browser on iOS if we could. But such an app is not feasible, because Apple restricts apps from hooking into one another’s data (such as bookmarks) on iOS devices. Although Apple is notorious for denying that they would ever do something until the day they do it, in our estimation, this restriction is never going to change.
Although iCloud in particular got off to a bit of a rough start, presently iCloud and Sign In to Google work quite well, and since all apps require attention, having one less app on your iOS device is good. In summary: We are making the best of a good situation.
FOR VISITING BOOKMARKS
Yes, we could make an app which could access your bookmarks from our app on your Mac, via a non-Apple server in the cloud. Such an app could display all of your bookmarks, and clicking on one of them could either…
• Visit the bookmark in a web browser which was built into our app. The problem with this is that we don’t think we could add much value by building another web browser for iOS. There are many features which we would need to duplicate, and some which we could not duplicate, again due to restrictions by Apple, for example: iCloud Keychain Syncing.
• Visit the bookmark in Safari. In this case, one must ask: What’s the point? Why not just sync your bookmarks as described above, and use the bookmarks in Safari? Sure, we could make a snazzier bookmarks manager than the one in iOS Safari, but the this must be weighed against the inconvenience of watching apps switch whenever you want to visit a bookmark. More importantly, when you are in Safari, again due to Apple’s restrictions, there would be no way to add a bookmark to our app directly, as you can on your Mac. However, if you simply add a bookmark to Safari, and one of our apps is running with syncing enabled on your Mac, it will get it via iCloud, and sync it to your other browsers.
Note that Safari is the only browser in which you could visit a bookmark from our hypothetical iOS app. This is, again, due to restrictions imposed by Apple.
Finally, others have published iOS apps which do one of the above. They average 2-star reviews, for the reasons we’ve given above. They just don’t add much value, and users realize that after they’ve used them for more than a few minutes. We are in the business of making software that is adds true value for you.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
If you think that we could add value in some way to the bookmarks experience on iOS, please send us feedback using the form on the right, send us an email, or discuss it on our forum. Thank you for your interest!