I really love Instapaper and use it a lot. Especially the send to kindle feature. Luckily for them I did not stumble upon an easy 1:1 replacement.
But not even explaining the challenges seems quite a bit off and suspect. It is not like I keep my health records there (at least to my knowledge :) )
I have major respect for Brian & co for continuing on the project and trying to make it a long term indie play.
I finally gave up a few weeks back and migrated to pocket, turns out it has an importer for instapaper's CSV export, so it took about 5mn and it worked well enough for my purposes (saving articles from my twitter feed and new chapters of serials from feedly for later reading), so meh.
[0] $3 per month subscription https://p2k.co/
[1] $5 one time payment https://www.crofflr.com/#/home
Pros:
+ QR-codes at the end of articles to go back to them
+ Clean configuration
+ Scheduled delivery
+ Reliable
Cons:
- Often misses images and, sometimes, even text from the original page. To be fair, I have found to be the problem of every web->ebook converter out there.
- It says it supports Kindle Back Issues, but they don't seem to work for Crofflr ebooks even on a top-of-the-line (Oasis) Kindle.
Matter of taste:
~ I'd prefer for every article to be in a separate book so I can read out-of-order, and delete and bookmark them separately. But the navigation interface within the single book (issue) is very nice.
You can look at the diff of their privacy policy on GitHub and see that they added/changed some of the 3rd party libraries that were used, possibly they felt the old ones were not compliant enough for them (they removed ChartBeat and replaced Localytics with Crashlytics).
https://github.com/Instapaper/privacy/commit/05db72422c65bb5...
Most likely, Pinterest's lawyers and executives were not OK with risking the fines, and also did not want to devote enough development resources to GDPR compliance for such a small subsidiary like Instapaper. Also explains why they'd spin it out -- GDPR changed the calculus.
This is speculation, but I've seen this GDPR fear play out elsewhere. Large parent companies are very worried about those worst-case fines and want to ensure there's no risk whatsoever.
The "Instapaper must be up to something sketchy if GDPR compliance took so long" narrative here seems pretty unfair. If their former owners are to blame for the long EU outage, it's understandable that Instapaper isn't going to publicly call them out -- they may even have agreements preventing this. And the whole spin-out probably took some time and logistical effort, so they couldn't reasonably focus on GDPR immediately after that either.
(Edit: not trying to knock Pinterest either; their actions would be completely understandable given the max potential fines.)
Also, what you probably meant is still not possible: As Instapaper was free under Pinterest, market share was connected to $0 of revenue. So any fine would be greater than the revenue of the app's European customers.
In Pinterest's case where an Instapaper complaint could have triggered a general review of their business practices, I'd roughly estimate the costs of talking to the regulator at a half million dollars. Start with their counsel ordering sales & marketing leadership to grab engineers to create and review a consent log for every outbound sales and marketing contact in their system.