iPad offline reading list not working

It seems everyone is twisting the poster's question around and avoiding answering directly. He saved a page to reading list on his iPad and then can't access that page when offline. I have the exact same issue.

he didn't say anything about clicking on links within the saved page. he can;t access the page at all while offline.

I can't get it to work as you describe. The top item was made a minute before taking the screenshots & was cached in Safari and worked on wifi via the reading list.

This is with wifi on …

This is with Wifi off seconds later…

Weirdly the last item does load when offline.

PS. I do have 'Use mobile data for reading list' disabled in Safari's prefs. If I enable that & enable mobile data items load & then disappear again when mobile data is disabled. I have 1.1GB of free space so I's expect it to be able to cache pages, but it isn't the behaviour I see.

I think Demo is pointing to your problem. Once you add something to your reading list you do not access it from the URL box. You access it from the open book icon just to the right of the URL in the upper right corner of your screen. Once there you select the eye glasses tab. Your reading list should now be visible. Tap the one you're interested in. This is a little off topic but iCloud has no effect on this functionality.

Also check out the link at the bottom of this page under "More like this": Re: Why is Safari not available for offline reading?

That discussion has screen shots of what I am referring to.

From what I can tell it doesn't work offline at all (tested on iOS 7 on an iPhone).

Can anyone here click any item in the reading list without an internet connection and still view page content?

Most items have 'not available for offline reading' in my list descriptions too, these are the older items since I don't use this feature 🙂

Instead I'd suggest Instapaper or any of the other 'read later' apps in the store.

As ever bugs go here…

http://apple.com/feedback/

I know this is an old thread and I expect you've sussed this out for yourself now ... but I landed here because I had the same problem although now my iPad is running IOS 9.3.1

Googling around I got a hint that it might be to do with the amount of storage Safari sets aside to store offline content.

So ...

• I deleted a whole load of older Reading List items and ...
• lo-and-behold, the text in the newest item gave me a progress report that it was "loading offline content".
• Then I switched off WiFi and tested that the offline content was indeed there to be read offline.
• Yes, it was!

I couldn't see any way of telling Safari how much storage to set aside for a Reading List.

I noticed in Settings >> General >> "Storage and iCloud Usage" that Safari is taking up 12.MB even though I have only two small pages of mainly text in my reading list now. So it looks like this figure includes regular web cache files as well as Reading List items.

Also when you are offline (in Airplane Mode or whatever) and reading something from your Reading List if that content has a hyperlink and you tap it you will of course get a "no Internet connection" error msg as that referenced page wasn't downloaded to your Reading List. It would be like a room of mirrors to download all content to all hyperlinks contained in a page.

AActually he kind of did by stating he got a "no Internet connection" error. How do you try to access an offline Reading List item? What IOS version are you on? It helps to provide some background info instead of just stating "it is not working".

MMine has always worked on my iPad and worked fine 30 seconds ago. I use it quite a bit. IOS 7.1.2 ipad 2. This is an iPad forum and I haven't tried it on an iPhone. To debug the problem I would ask the folks to download a simple short article into their reading list now. Then put their iPad into Airplane mode. Then try to access the article from their Reading List and see what happens. If this is successful may be the problem involves old articles downloaded before an IOS update? Before the latest backup to iCloud? Something else?

bensaunders wrote:

Very frustrating!

Instapaper, Read it later, Pocket, Offline Reader… there are many choices in the store to work around this.

The other option is to backup, factory reset & see if it starts to work, then restore the backup & see if it continues. I never really cared for the feature enough to try to resolve it, Instapaper reformats articles in a better way IMO.

Very interestingly I finally able to reproduce your symptoms with my iPad 2 wifi + 3G IOS 7.1.2 after never experiencing a problem before. Unfortunately I was flailing around with resets, iCloud settings etc... and can not reproduce it again. What did fix it was manually turning off my wifi, bluetooth and 3G individually (versus using Airplane Mode). When I initially set Airplane Mode on it was still hosed. This probably won't be helpful to you other than indicating that some type of bug is lurking out there related to Reading List functionality. (Bluetooth is relevant here as you can tether your iPad to an iPhone with bluetooth or wifi.)

I have exactly the same problem as Drew Reece described, and on ALL my 3 devices; my iPhone 5S, my brand new iPad mini 3 and on my company iPad 2. As soon as the wifi is switched off/out of range, the content disappears.

I went to an Apple Store to see a "specialist" or "technician" or whatever these people call themselves, and he was not able to fix it. He did some resets, changed some settings, emptied the cache all to no avail. The advice I got when I left was to do a complete restore and try it from there.

Grrrrreat...thank you Apple, another happy customer! 😟

jpiabrantes wrote:

This issue is 1 year old and no one from Apple gives a reply ?

Read the front page of this site…

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This is a USER support forum. That means other users help each other here, Apple almost never has employees posting here. If you want help from Apple go to an Apple store or contact Apple directly.

On my iPhone 6, 8.4.1, I cannot read my reading list items offline if I have wifi or cellular data turned on. As soon as I turn them off the reading list items pop right up. With wifi and cellular data on Safari tries to load the pages from the internet and if I have a bad internet connection it will not load the reading list items even though they are stored in memorey. I hope this helps.

I Had the same problem and noticed that when I swipe left on the page in the reading list (iOS), the pages that gave this "not available for offline reading" error were marked as read.

i went back online, marked them as unread, waited 5 mins, went offline, and they were all available.