Marco.org

I know it’s bad form to mention your competitors, but I’ve been asked about Readability’s announcement enough today that it’s more of a charade not to talk about it, especially since a lot of people are under the wrong impression.

Here’s my relationship with Readability:

The Readability founders came to me in 2010, shared their idea of paying publishers for what people read with their text-view bookmarklet, and wanted to explore whether we could work together. They’re nice people and we have similar sensibilities, and we had very different priorities at the time: they wanted their service to focus on the publisher-payment system, and I wanted to focus on my iPhone and iPad apps.

We figured out a way to work together: I’d build a white-label version of the Instapaper app that worked with the Readability service instead of mine, with no source-code sharing, and I’d get a royalty for each copy sold. That way, I could keep my efforts focused on what I care most about, the iOS app, and they could have a full-featured iOS reading app from day one without having to build it themselves. I would also advise the company, promote the service on my blog and on Instapaper, and allow people to link Readability to their Instapaper accounts.

In February of this year, the app was finished and ready to launch, but it was rejected by Apple for the in-app-purchase subscription-matching rule, which had just gone into effect. Readability decided that they didn’t want to give Apple the 30%, so the app was put on hold and soon cancelled once it was obvious that nobody was budging.

My involvement with Readability ended then. We still talk occasionally, but we don’t have a business relationship anymore.

Since then, they continued adding features to their service, many of which overlap with Instapaper, and they recently made a new iOS app without my help or any of the Instapaper app’s source code.

They are certainly a direct competitor to Instapaper now. But it didn’t catch me by surprise, and I hope to still remain friendly with them.

This is a very big and increasingly crowded market, and there’s no reason why we can’t respectfully share it.