[huggyface]

an Android version wouldn't provide enough revenue to warrant an employee or contractor.

A statement with absolutely zero backing.

Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product. Marco doesn't do analysis but instead just parrots the standard rhetoric, seemingly hoping that his words alone will make Android irrelevant and thus unnecessary of effort. His loss.

[rubergly]

> 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.

[eftpotrm]

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.

[rsynnott]

He's also a bit of a perfectionist; I can't really see him using a contractor, so he'd probably have to do it himself.

[huggyface]

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.

[rsynnott]

http://www.marco.org/2011/12/07/standing-up-for-android

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.

[Kylekramer]

FWIW, he backed off that pretty quickly. He claimed it was for Shift Jelly only and his words got misconstrued as a public challenge.

[Tyrannosaurs]

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.

[sjs382]

Wow, really? Source?

[Flenser]

Update at the end of the blog post rsynnott linked to

[batista]

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.

[bradleyland]

It's backed, in principle, by the fact that Android users are less willing to purchase apps[1], which doesn't fit Marco's business model. It doesn't matter to Readability, so moving to Android makes perfect sense for them.

1 - http://www.canalys.com/newsroom/android-apps-are-too-expensi...

[batista]

A statement with absolutely zero backing. Readability did the analysis and certainly seemed to believe that Android supported their product. Marco doesn't do analysis but instead just parrots the standard rhetoric, seemingly hoping that his words alone will make Android irrelevant and thus unnecessary of effort. His loss.

1) You forgot that lots of other companies also did the same analysis as Readability and concluded that the Android is not for them, at least for the moment. You can find several such statements on web pages, and a lot more that speak through their actions.

2) You also forget that Readability and Instapaper don't have the exact same business model.

3) Lastly, you forget that Marco makes his own business decisions, and he bases them on his own insights. He doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to. Would you go lend him a hand for free on the Android version? Even the overhead of dealing with an extra developer to do the port and the support etc, might be something he doesn't want to deal with, whatever the money. (Why should he? Just because some people are bitter that the don't have his app on their platform of choice, or more general, that they don't get a lot of the cool the apps the iOS market has?)

If Marco is content with his choice, then it's not "his loss", as he does not lose anything.

[huggyface]

Lastly, you forget that Marco makes his own business decisions

How so? I didn't forget that whatsoever. Many devs do make individual choices to support only one platform or another, for many reasons (business reasons, bias, etc). That's life.

The person I responded to claimed that Arment had empirical reasons for his claims. Hardly. Arment is a cheerleader of the worst kind, with little professionalism about the market as a whole.

[batista]

Professionalism lies in delivering a good product and keeping YOUR customers happy.

It has nothing to do with market research etc. You can say he is not "market savvy" maybe, but not unprofessional.