Simply put, Readability and Instapaper weren’t able to work together because Apple changed the rules of the market. In fact, the only thing I disagree with Marco about in his assessment is the most direct cause of the business partnership between the two companies being unsuccessful. It was amicable, well-handled and resolved as happily as could be, given the circumstances. Marco describes much of this in great detail on a recent episode of his Build and Analyze podcast, which I think is generally very fair, but you can get a brief description of the story from the posts that both Readability and Marco wrote about the end of their partnership. You see, Readability’s original plan was to work with Marco to license a version of Instapaper as the flagship Readability client. These were very well-received, and for the first time, another reading application got as much attention and praise from the tech elite as Instapaper’s been getting. Meanwhile, Readability has been pursuing a network strategy, building its reading functionality first into an API that’s been adopted by a bunch of apps, then launching iOS and Android versions of reading apps under its own name. Until a few weeks ago, Instapaper was the inarguable mindshare leader in this space, pretty much synonymous with the concept of saving articles on the web for later reading, even though the other apps in the space have also been very popular for some time. Rest assured, after a dozen years of blogging here, I write what I write here because I mean it, and I know it to be true, and I hope that’s enough to explain my motivations. And I’m sure there’s more little details you could suss out if you were already convinced that I’m acting in bad faith or don’t mean the words that I say here. I still have some equity in Say Media (the successor to Six Apart), which theoretically benefits from publishing sites that run ads which these apps hide. I am a long-time fan of Marco Arment’s from even before Instapaper was created, and whenever we’ve seen each other socially, I’ve been really impressed by his thoughtfulness. I am an enthusiastic and proud advisor to the good people at Readability and consider them friends. Or, maybe this time, we just don’t have to go through all of that again.# Where We’re Atįirst, I should loudly and clearly disclaim: I’m theoretically conflicted all over this. It’s pretty exciting.Īnd also, it’s a time for the nascent space of reading improvement tools, as pioneered by Instapaper, Read It Later, Readability and others, to reach that inevitable point in a young tech space’s development where things develop into a shitshow flamewar that nobody comes out of unscathed. My friends at Readability have launched an awesome API that marks the maturation of a really powerful network for synching the things you read across a ton of great apps and devices. It’s an interesting time for those of us who care about reading on the web. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose. ![]() But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing “sides” between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. ![]() ![]() In summary: Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren’t in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app.
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