Readability — Read comfortably anytime, anywhere. From Arc90 on Vimeo.
Another one of those website scrubbers what we all seem to love is coming to the iPad. Readability has re-submitted an app to the App Store, and this time it’s going to be completely free for anyone wishing to use the application.
You probably remember the hubbub last year when Readability got denied from the App Store and then wrote an open letter to Apple on their blog about their experience.
Richard Ziade, one of Readability’s co-founders, had this to say at the time:
To be clear, we believe you have every right to push forward such a policy. In our view, it’s your hardware and your channel and you can put forth any policy you like. But to impose this course on any web service or web application that delivers any value outside of iOS will only discourage smaller ventures like ours to invest in iOS apps for our services. As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way… towards the web.
Clearly something changed, but we’re not sure exactly what. Our guess is that they were losing out too much to Instapaper by shunning the App Store entirely. Either way, it looks like that web-only approach that they were championing just didn’t seem to work out for them.
The quarrel was originally over Readability’s practice of letting users pay their favourite writers, and then subsequently having to pay Apple 30 percent of all those in-app sales. Readability is now entirely free, and will offer up a premium model that seems to circumvent that process in some way, but there’s no mention of how they plan on implementing that process on their blog just yet.
If you’re a Readability fan, you can get the app on the App Store shortly.
