> 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.
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.