Full Instapaper API now available

From the Terms of Use:<p><i>Apps may not use users’ Instapaper data or other personal data in any way that a reasonable person would likely deem “creepy” or otherwise unacceptable. Instapaper reserves the right to decide whether an app’s usage of users’ data is creepy.</i>

I was quite happy when I saw this, as I have been using a different unofficial client to use my Instapaper account on my Android app.<p>Unfortunately one of it's nicest features is the ability to sync and download it's content in the background. I am very disappointed to see that the api tos especially for forbid this.<p>Combine this with the ability of sites to opt out of Instapaper and the prohibitation against automatically adding things to the user account from an rss feed and my use for Instapaper has pretty much disappeared.<p>I understand the need for Marco to make money on this, and I hope you make so much money of this that you can swim in it, but frankly the way to do this is not to deliver a crippled service - it's to charge what you are worth, which is far more than one dollar.<p>The only reason to charge one dollar is to make it to the top of the iphone sales charts. It's not really a viable strategy anywhere else.

API access for subscribers only is a really interesting idea. I'm curious how it will play out. Are there examples of other apps using a similar scheme?

I like the option he chose.<p>This has the effect that non-iPhone users who want an instapaper client on their phone will have to have a subscription <i>and</i> possibly pay for the mobile app.<p>In a sense, having an iPhone is akin to having a free subscription (at least for now)

This is a very interesting compromise. I wonder if it will have the side effect of confusing users who are not subscribed (and may not even realize what "subscription" means). It could backfire especially if a third party paid app is released. "What do you mean I have to pay for a subscription? I paid for the app!"<p>Still, a smart move for keeping Instapaper profitable (or at least to keep the API from eating at Instapaper's profits).

Yay! We can now finally have an offline Mac client.

Damn, literally as I read this article my mind was working on how quickly I could build a Windows Phone 7 app to take advantage of this.<p>Turns out not quick enough. I think this is the best way to approach an API for non VC backed start ups.

I wonder how much of this was sped up due to Readability's rapid march into Instapaper's territory (e.g. <a href="https://www.readability.com/publishers/api/" rel="nofollow">https://www.readability.com/publishers/api/</a>)

I clicked on this thinking it was Instagram, I'm still waiting to hear back on the dev API registration :(