Competition is good. Readability is certainly making him stepup. I still think ignoring android is a mistake (assuming he continues to do so in the future.). I foresee sharing happening within these read later apps and the size of the network matters.
It's a "mistake" from the perspective of users who wish it were on a platform they used, but it's not a mistake from the perspective of Marco, who is busy enough working on the iOS and server components of the service; an Android version wouldn't provide enough revenue to warrant an employee or contractor.
Is it a mistake for the developer of TextMate to not spread to Windows?
an Android version wouldn't provide enough revenue to warrant an employee or contractor.
A statement with absolutely zero backing.
Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product. Marco doesn't do analysis but instead just parrots the standard rhetoric, seemingly hoping that his words alone will make Android irrelevant and thus unnecessary of effort. His loss.
> Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product.
Readability has a completely different (if any) business model. They're following the standard approach of using venture funding to gather as much market share as possible and then exploring way to extract revenue once they have a large user-base.
Do you expect him to shell out a large sum of money to develop an Android app to _hope_ he'll regain the money through sales? There's a large amount of risk there, and it's definitely not your call to make how risk-averse he should be. How many apps are only available for Windows or OS X? As an independent developer, it makes more sense to focus on one high-quality product.
Any busines decision is a gamble. Porting to Android is a gamble because you've got an investment in a new platform which you don't have experience in to know if it'll pay off. Not porting to Android is a gamble because, frankly, Android phones are becoming more common in the wild than iOS phones. Tablets, it's still iOS at the moment but who knows what'll happen when Win8 launches?
No decision is risk-free, but if it were me I'd be putting a toe into Andriod's bathwater.
Do you expect him to shell out a large sum of money to develop an Android app to _hope_ he'll regain the money through sales?
I would bet that he could have (well...not any more as the opportunity has long passed) gotten any of countless decent individual developers to write a very good port for free, asking for only a fraction of sales: It is not a complex app and isn't pushing the envelope.
I would never expect that from Marco, however, as he has been hilariously unprofessional about the Android/iOS divide, essentially choose to cheerlead a team over considering rational business choices.
He has invited people to do just that; if you make it with his public API, and he thinks it's good enough, he'll let you call it the official Android version and split revenue 50/50.
I'm not sure that update supports the claim of back tracking.
That was an update after the original piece (sadly not dated) but I think it's more sensible to assume that the update was written in response to Shift Jelly reading it and contacting him, rather than him being in discussion with them before writing it. Certainly I'd think it would be a very odd piece to write if he were already in talks with Shift Jelly.
The piece certainly implies that that there would be discussion around the project ("the details of which we’d work out privately" in relation to the functionality) rather than him thinking that people would just start coding and then come to him with a finished article so it reads more naturally as a clarification than something more radical.
No, he didn't (backtrack). He said, in the original statement, that he challenges anyone to make on, and he will call it "the official Instapaper app for Android"
He probably didn't expect many takers on the offer, but when they emerged it became OBVIOUS that this couldn't happen with more than one taker --only one could be the "official app for Android"), so clarified it with him picking only one to proceed with.
It's backed, in principle, by the fact that Android users are less willing to purchase apps[1], which doesn't fit Marco's business model. It doesn't matter to Readability, so moving to Android makes perfect sense for them.
A statement with absolutely zero backing. Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product. Marco doesn't do analysis but instead just parrots the standard rhetoric, seemingly hoping that his words alone will make Android irrelevant and thus unnecessary of effort. His loss.
1) You forgot that lots of other companies also did the same analysis as Readability and concluded that the Android is not for them, at least for the moment. You can find several such statements on web pages, and a lot more that speak through their actions.
2) You also forget that Readability and Instapaper don't have the exact same business model.
3) Lastly, you forget that Marco makes his own business decisions, and he bases them on his own insights. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Would you go lend him a hand for free on the Android version? Even the overhead of dealing with an extra developer to do the port and the support etc, might be something he doesn't want to deal with, whatever the money. (Why should he? Just because some people are bitter that the don't have his app on their platform of choice, or more general, that they don't get a lot of the cool the apps the iOS market has?)
If Marco is content with his choice, then it's not "his loss", as he does not lose anything.
Lastly, you forget that Marco makes his own business decisions
How so? I didn't forget that whatsoever. Many devs do make individual choices to support only one platform or another, for many reasons (business reasons, bias, etc). That's life.
The person I responded to claimed that Arment had empirical reasons for his claims. Hardly. Arment is a cheerleader of the worst kind, with little professionalism about the market as a whole.
I remember he mentioned in a previous blogpost, that he has no intention to build an android app. But if you build an app for android using the instapaper API and he thinks its good you can brand it official instapaper android app.
I don't really know. Assuming that this is a free market, I think the fact that nobody stepped up on Android (with a noticeable success) is probably an indicator of the fact this could not be an error.
More seriously (hoping we can have a quiet discussion about differences in market between iOS and Android): Instapaper makes (probably serious) money selling the app. Can you make (serious) money in Android without Ads and without going the freemium way? Enough money to justify the additional effort and the fact that this will probably slow the development on the current platform?
Marco has implied that he makes a "six figure income" from it (on the Planet Money podcast) but has never given more details than that that I'm aware of.
My reading of a lot of the commercial Android developer pieces is not that it's impossible to make money on Android, just that where you have limited resources it tends to be the case that they can more profitably be utilised on iOS work. The issue for someone like Marco where it's just him is is less can you make money in Android (with or without ads, that's kind of secondary), more is working on an Android version going to bring him more money than putting that same effort into keeping Instapaper close to the top of the iOS pile.
Obviously if you're a company with several programmers and you're happy with that model then so long as the cost of building an Android version is less than money it brings in, it makes sense because you can just bring in someone else to do it without detracting from your other work. If you're a one man band (or similarly small outfit) with no interest in taking on and managing more people it might not.
Essentially he was talking about what an iOS developer "might" earn. If memory serves he pitched that the equivalent of a six figure salary was possible / reasonable if you were successful and I think agreed that that was the sort of thing he was getting.
Obviously that puts it at between $100,000 and $999,999 a year, so fairly wide error bars on that.
I don't particularly care if Marco makes an Android app, it's his product, his time, he should do what he wants.
But let's assume that his analysis (as biased as it is) is correct. It still might be a net positive to make an Android version if you consider this. All Android sales are potentially a double sale. Android has a majority market share on phones and iPad has a (overwhelming) majority market share in tablets.
There is a strong chance that the person buying his Android version would also have an iPad. This is pretty obvious when you think about it. Android covers a wide spectrum, with a lot of people on the low end. The people who would be buying his app must represent those on the high end (simply because they'll pay for it), and those people are far more likely to also have an iPad.
If the app-making was free. You forgot the "opportunity cost".
Android has a majority market share on phones and iPad has a (overwhelming) majority market share in tablets.
Yes, but does Android have a majority market share on apps sold? From what I have heard, I don't think so.
They just have a majority market share in phones because even people who don't care about a smart phone or apps get an Android phone for free with their contract. Whereas iPhone users are more picky in general about the phone they get, and more prone to fork out for apps. (Notice how I said "in general" --nerds are a small minority of smart phone buyers).
What makes you think nobody "stepped up" on Android? There are a number of Instapaper clients for sale in the Android Market. I've only tried one (which sounded like the best from reviews I read), InstaFetch, and it's quite good. It has a couple of extra features beyond Marco's client: it can read articles to you (Android comes with a TTS library, I don't know if recent iOS versions let developers use Siri's TTS function from their code --of course, if Marco wanted to add TTS he could license a library or something like that, but it's definitely not as convenient for him as if he could just use a system API), and it updates your articles without you having to run the app (which I understand was not possible in iOS [1], but again, I wouldn't know if a recent version changed that). Plus, with Androids intent system, you don't need to install the send-to-instapaper bookmarklet in the browser: InstaFetch adds an add-to-instafetch intent that you appears in the browser's menu of ways to "share" the page .
The one thing Instapaper 3.0 did really better than InstaFetch is that it's option for changing from the light to dark theme is accessible right from the article view, while in InstaFetch you have to go to settings.
iOS has VoiceOver. Every app should support text to speech, at least if the developer didn’t completely ignore accessibility. I’m just now testing with Instapaper and VoiceOver seems to work perfectly with it.
I don’t know whether that’s default, but I set my iPad up in a way that pressing the home button three times activates VoiceOver. You then select what you want VoiceOver to read to you. If you want it to just continue reading forever (instead of just reading what you selected, like a headline or a paragraph) you scroll down with two fingers.
It’s an accessibility feature, so its primary use case is not reading texts to you, but it works perfectly fine for that purpose – and in the vast majority of apps it just works, even without the developer doing anything.
Oh, thanks! I can't believe I never thought of poking around in the accessibility features to look for TTS. What I used instead on my iPod Touch was a dedicated TTS app (whose name I can't remember right now): to hear an Instapaper article, for example, I'd copy the entire thing to the clipboard (which was a little inconvenient since there didn't seem to be a "select all" command) and then paste it in to the TTS app. If I ever go back to iOS, I'll be sure to remember this tip.
The problem I see with the Android market is that there tends to be far more competition. You state that no one has stepped up on Android, however there are a number of decent apps that do exactly what's needed, and Readability have already launched on Android to some success.
Android users are often aware that they're missing out, but there is always something to fill that void. As a result, their users have a siege mentality towards their platform and the businesses that ignore them. As Instagram is likely to figure out when they (finally) move to Android arriving late to the Android game could be fatal to the perception of their brand.
So it's only worth it if you make serious money. But just pretty good money is not worth the effort?
We're not talking about a multi-million dollar AAA development cycle. Probably 2 or 3 months of a single developer and maybe a part-time artist. Achieving some profitability for a major app like his wouldn't be difficult.
But no, let's flush some profitability down the toilet because it'll only buy a slightly used last year's Porsche, not next year's all new one.
As a user, I don't think the sharing aspect is all too important. I get links shared with me in many other ways, then I open them. If something looks interesting, then I add it to Instapaper.
In terms of Instapaper's sharing functionality the bit I really like is it's ability to produce an Instapaper formatted stream of articles linked to by people you follow on Twitter.
Sharing out I'm not so bothered about but a nicer way to consume links shared with you is cool.
Sharing doesn't seem to be too widespread among Instapaper users, or at least those ones who have wired up Twitter cross-posting, too. I built a site to track just this last month: http://viainstapaper.com
I believe Marco, in his podcast, said that he is already bogged down working on Instapaper on the already supported platforms. http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze/67
I think becoming a 'sharing' site is clearly on Readability's radar. Got a Readability API key request rejected for being a "sharing" site recently. Smart move.
As a one man shop he possibly just can't afford to support Android. First porting your existing Obj-C code to Java is a lot of work and then supporting all the android screen resolutions out there would mean he couldn't provide updates to the existing iOS apps.
I'm very impressed by the year over year continued refinements and improvements to Instapaper. Back in 2008[1] Marco mentioned he only spends a few hours a week on it. I wonder how many hours a week he spends on it these days.
That doesn't really make much sense. If reading articles is your main application for the device, why not buy the iPad 2 especially after the huge price drop?
It's the screen. My main motivation for upgrading to from the iPhone 3GS to the 4 was the Retina display, and it was important to me because I do a ton of reading on my phone. Much of it in Instapaper, actually.
I often have problems with eye irritation/fatigue after a long day of work and thought an e-ink device would make night reading easier. Got a kindle touch, tried it for a week. It was worse, without a doubt. I tend to read in dim light (indirect lamp), and found that the kindle needed direct light for me to easily read without eyestrain. iPad with very low brightness, or even in reversed accessibility mode is nicer. For me, that is. And, any book or paper with code samples just doesn't work well on a small e-ink screen.
I've been relatively happy with the IPS panel in the iPad 1 not straining my eyes. My main gripe is that the brightness of the backlight doesn't go low enough -- in a dark room (i.e. in bed with no lights and someone else sleeping nearby), it would be nice to be able to use the iPad with very minimal backlight. E-Ink would require a book light (which is kind of lame). This seems to be one of the places where OLED would be superior.
It's frustrating that IPS LCD, OLED, and E-Ink all have such distinct advantages, so the idea of having a single device with the best screen in all contexts isn't really possible. I assume OLED will eventually be that.
There's nothing inherent in e-ink that makes it less stressful than a backlit display. Photons are photons, whether they are reflected from a light bulb or the sun to the book and then your eyes, or they are send from a led behind the screen to your eyes.
Some early e-ink manufactures used to claim that e-ink is better than backlit for the eyes, but they retracted those claims because there was no scientific evidence behind them.
You just need to set the brightness of the iPad appropriately, to match what the relative brightness of an e-ink reader would be. You can also adjust the colors, i.e have a sepia background etc.
Battery life and reading in the sun is indeed much better with e-ink devices, though.
I can attest that the Kindle Fire is a perfect reading device. Perfect form factor, light yet feels great, etc. I really don't think an iPad is great for reading based on size, but I've never had one long enough to try it.
I had a Fire and really didn't like it for reading -- it falls in the valley of uselessness between a Kindle (DX being my favorite) and the iPad. I don't find my iPad 1 particularly heavy -- the main drawback of the iPad vs. Kindles is lack of daylight readability, and to a lesser degree, potentially distracting apps (email, web).
The Fire seems like a great video watching device, but I don't do much of that (and when I do, it's on a projector with surround sound and other people)
Quite on point. Few people would willingly admit to this, but a lot of research suggests that simply having options available imposes a real cognitive load. Simple additions to text like footnotes and hyperlinks produce real drops in recall/comprehension - it's not a stretch to apply this to the iPad with its notifications and rich entertainment options.
The kindle has only two things that make it competitive enough to be worthy of discussion- e-ink and lighter weight. In every other category (ok, excluding price) it fails compared to the iPad.
on e-ink there isn't really an advantage to my eyes. I've never gotten eyestrain reading on my (first generation) iPad. The image quality of the e-ink display is worse than even the first generation iPad (to my eyes), in large part because the e-ink display is not responsive.
weight- I deal with it on the iPad. The kindle is better in this regard, but not enough to make it compelling.
Amazon had a great product in the original kindle, but it was a single purpose product. It hasn't kept up (or e-ink hasn't advanced fast enough) and its losing the race.
The screenshot is looking great. Ignoring form factor, is the new iPad going to match Kindle's reading quality? I generally read fiction on the Kindle (2nd gen) and anything that has graphics or requires rapid page turning on the iPad (1G).
Having used a retina screen iPhone and iPod I'd say in my opinion the new iPad (which I haven't seen) is going to far exceed the kindle's screen in readability.
Where I think kindle probably still has the edge is in ergonomics, specifically weight. The iPad is too heavy for me to hold like I would a physical book. (but I make do with this fact and use it anyway as one... and I've got the heavier first generation iPad.)
All the other things the iPad does have a big impact, but as a pure reading device (iBooks is my killer app) the iPad is working out great for me, so I look forward to getting a third generation.
I uncovered a bug when naively recompiling a universal (iPad/iPhone) app with the 5.1 SDK. The app had high-res assets for the iPhone but not the iPad.
Apparently the @2x modifier takes precedence over the -Landscape and -Portrait modifiers, resulting in retina iPads preferentially using the high-res iPhone launch screen over the low-res iPad launch screen (which are optimized for each launch orientation).
So you end up with a mildly- (portrait) or greatly-distorted (landscape) launch image on high-res iPads if you simply recompile. I imagine this is what Apple was trying to avoid, with reneging on what their API docs say about modifier precedence.
I didn't know Marco had a podcast until I heard about it in this thread. Got it this morning and I'm listening to him say how he was ready for iPad Retina back in October. I've had that being ahead of the game feeling before then something comes along at the end to throw a wrench in it. I think that's why releasing/shipping is such a good feeling.
Even then, once I built the free version of my app without a necessary ObjC linker flag and shipped it with a bug that caused it to crash on a couple of screens. Was always testing in debug mode...
This is slightly embarrassing: Instapaper doesn’t show Retina-resolution graphics on the new iPad yet.
It's only slightly embarrassing for Apple's culture of product secrecy, which prevents them from releasing tools in time for devs to have gear ready for release.
I'm pretty sure the simulator that devs use supports the Retina iPad, and was available before release date. The tricky bit is that the Retina iPad is higher resolution that most people's desktops, so simulation becomes difficult.
I think the issue is pretty subtle, since it works when compiled with the new XCode and the Retina simulator comes with the new XCode. So if he downloaded XCode and ran his existing code base on it, it would look like it works fine.
Did you read the article? He has been shipping the 2x version, however, was unaware that he needed to rebuild the app with a new drop of the tools that came out last week.
> the new selection of six beautiful, professional fonts designed for maximum legibility and long-form reading
I haven't been following the iPad 3 closely. Are these new fonts included with iPad 3, or are they included with the Instapaper app? If it's the latter, are they available elsewhere? I'm still on the lookout for a nice serif font that looks good on screen.
