It’s easy to casually throw around the word “platform” when you’re building a technology, but for us the term carries special meaning. Since day one, we’ve aspired to make Readability a foundational service that others can build upon, not just a singular reading app.
I’m proud to say that we’ve made our platform goal a reality. Even before our native iOS and Android apps were released, 90% of our reading traffic came through our APIs—from apps like Pulse, Reeder, Longform and others that heavily use our service. We’re proud to see others climb on our shoulders to make reading better and we’re excited to see what other apps, scripts, and services—large or small—will leverage the platform in the future. So what can you build with the Readability API?
- Leverage everything Readability has to offer and build entire full-featured clients on any platform or device.
- Deliver a simple and clean normalized reading view of any web article with Readability’s best-of-breed parser.
- Allow readers to send web URL’s to their reading list from anywhere.
Starting today, we’re lowering the bar to get started even further: anyone with a Readability user account can obtain an API key via their account settings page. (The astute Readability user might notice that this has been around for a couple of weeks. We would have announced this sooner, but we’ve had a lot of things to talk about lately.)
To generate your key, go to your Connections page while logged in to your Readability account and fill out the form describing your project. You’ll get your key immediately.
We’re happy to make it even easier to build on the full Readability feature set. Lowering the barrier for developer engagement is just a means to an end: to make reading better everywhere, both inside and out of Readability. We can’t wait to see what people build next.
Happy coding!
