Last night, Marco Arment announced that he had sold Instapaper to Betaworks.
I have been a big fan of Instapaper for quite some time, but recently I have been looking around at alternatives because it seemed that Marco had moved onto other things (The Magazine being the main one) and did not have the interest in Instapaper anymore.
This made me quite sad because part of the reason I had supported Instapaper was to support the independent iOS development scene. Now, with Instapaper being sold to “A New Medium Company” (that’s directly from Betaworks’s header on their website), I don’t feel nearly as bad about looking at other applications.
Betaworks has quite a few products, including Digg and bitly, which really makes me fear what a very focused application like Instapaper might become in the future.
On the plus side, it looks like Instapaper will be getting some love in the near future. On the minus side, it is now in the hands of a much larger company with a still-unclear future.
Of course, I don’t bemoan Marco’s decision at all. It is his product after all and he is free to do as he likes.
As a user of Instapaper, this makes me more nervous than before. For now I am trying out Pocket, but there are issues I have had with Pocket as well. I’ll probably look at Readability and might even end up back with Instapaper, but I won’t have the same loyalty to the app as I used to have.