Hacker News Reader

Comment by incision | Hacker News Reader

Sounds good, I'd love to give it a try, but it appears to be tied to iOS. Confining what appears be minimalist text content to an app on a single platform seems a bit silly.

View on HN

How is it silly? As he's stated numerous times before:

1. He is not an Android developer. He is an individual iOS developer. He doesn't have a fleet of freely-available Android developers at his command.

2. He doesn't have much free time, he spends a lot of time developing his iOS apps or doing his podcasts/website writing which provide him with substantial income.

3. He doesn't see an adequate business reason to support Android (profit vs skills or outsourcing vs annoyances).

Within the context he's laid out, why should he support Android?

You don't need to "support" any platform. It's a fucking blog that you have to pay for. HTTP Basic Auth and Recurly/Chargify/your favorite payment provider here and you "support" every platform in existence.

A magazine is not an 'app' and does not need to be treated as such.

Sounds easy, you should go build it!

Seriously, sorry for the snark but that has been done and it is just not what Marco is doing here and now.

It is his experiment, and he is clearly willing to own its failure or success.

And clearly other people are willing to own their own opinions on his "experiment".

So we're just going to ignore the established purchasing habits of those with accounts that have pre-registered credit cards for argument's sake?

> A magazine is not an 'app' and does not need to be treated as such.

Ask anyone who is currently trying to stay afloat in the magazine industry and I think you'll get quite a different answer. I wouldn't be surprised if most magazines have almost all their growth in the past year or two thanks to redefining magazines as apps.

Type-setting, layout, user experience. A magazine is not an app, but a magazine can be an app.

But:

1. He did pay to have an Instapaper Android app developed.

2. Being the editor for a magazine seems like it will take up a lot of time to me (even though he seems blase about it). Finding writers, chasing them down at deadline time, etc.

3. The parent didn't mention Android. I think a lot of people would be happy with a web option.

He did not pay to have an Instapaper app developed for Android, the company that developed it did so on their own dime and he only gets a cut of the sale price.

People keep mentioning a web option, but Marco just has to use Newsstand on iOS and not care about billing, logins or what have you. He does some of these things with Instapaper, so he would have a good idea of the time and hassle involved.

I also think along the same lines as grandparent, however I would not suggest Android (as you seem to think), but the most obvious platform for news/magazines (text and images): html5.

> why should he support Android?

Because a huge portion of his potential audience is inaccessible, due to his platform choice.

Maybe he doesn't care. There is no obligation when creating a product to reach the widest audience possible. Everyone when making mobile apps draws the support line somewhere.

Absolutely true. It's his decision which platforms he releases on. It just seems like such a waste of potential audience - iPhone isn't dominant any more, there are at least as many people on Android (especially us hackers) - and it does suck being on the Android side and not having access to this. But it's totally his decision.

you forgot 0. He's an Apple fanboy. The other reasons are just after the fact justifications.

So then where are the Android fans launching magazines exclusive to that platform if it's such a lucrative market and iOS exclusivity is motivated only by fanboyism?

Take a page out of Marco's book then. He built Instapaper, an app for taking content out it's original repository and redisplaying it an alternate format. Somebody just needs to get a subscription to The Magazine and copy the content into an iOS5/Android/Web friendly app for republication, he should be cool with it. You could call the app InstaMarco :)

Instapaper is no different than web browsers that reformat pages according to the user's wishes by changing fonts and colors, hiding ads or saving to an archive. The Instapaper server only saves the URL, title and maybe some other metadata; it does not store the contents of pages.

It does store the web page content. Among other reasons, it gets around paywalls, logins, etc. by uploading the page when you click your bookmarklet.

But only when one has already access, doesn't it? When one hits a paywall without access and clicks the bookmarklet it would only show the login page in instapaper.

This is not correct; the bookmarklet sends along the contents of your browser at the time you click it. Thus it can get around paywalls without having to have your login info.

I believe Marco has said on his podcast that URLs added via the API do get slurped from his servers, but I'm not 100% certain on that.

Okay, I didn't know that.

I think ksherlock is wrong. Marco explained somewhere that he doesn't store for a url the content only once (like the url serves as a hash), but stores the content of a page for every account uniquely (his database is somewhat 200 GB). I also did find this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2336332

> Instapaper honors access. If you have access to that Article it will save it, if not then you won't get it.

From what I understand, it uses Newsstand.

I don't use Android (so, please, correct me if I'm wrong), but I don't think Android has a single, unified Newsstand-like app to handle subscriptions and that kind of thing.

Google Play Magazines

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Unfortunately US only at the moment.

Not sure what I find more irritating. US only or iOS only.

Both really. It's all one big step backwards.

Lots of apps and services and programs are US only or iOS only. It's just that few of them are the talk of HN on a Thursday morning.

It was released in Australia this week. I have to think other places are coming pretty soon.

I find the people that complain about 'US only' to be the most irritating.

Either move to the US already or code up your own.

Cool idea. I will move to US so I can read The Magazine. ;-)

Isn't Google Play Magazines much different than Newstand? As I understand it Newstand is more of a folder and a framework for periodical applications, while Google Play Magazine is more akin to Google Books or Kindle in which you deliver content to them in a specific format and their application displays that content.

If I'm not wrong, Newstand allows for much more control of the user experience since you build the application yourself.

Well, there you go.

(I googled 'android newsstand alternative' to no avail).

Yea, I guess it is weird that this doesn't exist on Android.

Thanks for the link - just what I was looking for. Unfortunately it isn't available in the UK.

In general, trying to sell content on the web is problematic. Lots of people who'll be willing to pay $1.99 a month for this by clicking a button, knowing that they can cancel the subscription trivially (and will be reminded by Apple that they have it every month), will not be so happy to pay $1.99 a month where they have to spend time filling in a credit card form, with considerable uncertainty about how they can cancel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com