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Comment by gtufano | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

May I ask is that "six figure income" is per month?

He didn't specify.

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.

All Android sales are potentially a double sale.

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.

[1]: http://www.marco.org/2010/06/10/iphone-multitasking-and-back...

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.

I use ReadItLater on Android. It seems to work pretty well, and formats things better than reading actual web pages would.

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