Story by
Francis Tan
Francis Tan is the Asia editor of TNW, who is based in the Philippines. He is particularly interested in Asian Internet startups, social me Francis Tan is the Asia editor of TNW, who is based in the Philippines. He is particularly interested in Asian Internet startups, social media and e-commerce. Get in touch with him via Twitter @francistan or Email [email protected].
If you don’t have time to sit down and read all of your favorite websites in an instant, you’ll probably need an app that can save those pages for reading later. You’re lucky because there’s a service that does exactly that called Instapaper, which now offers full API access to developers.
All developers can now use the full API of Instapaper, but it will only work for customers with Instapaper’s $1/month subscription memberships. Before today, the API access was limited so it couldn’t be used to make a full-featured Instapaper app. Several developers have evaded this by creating unofficial, half-baked apps that don’t really work as well.
The company decided that since a large number of people used it exclusively via someone else’s API app, and never saw the Instapaper website’s ads or purchased the Instapaper iOS app, it would lose a lot of money supporting those users.
All previous API functionalities will remain free and will work for any account. It is limited to adding pages to people’s Instapaper accounts, as implemented in many feed readers and Twitter clients. However, if an app needs to read data from an Instapaper account, it must use the new Full API, and its customers need to be Subscribers.
Instapaper’s own paid and ad-supported free iPhone and iPad apps in the App Store will continue to work for all customers.
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