Facebook announced today that it’s making its Instant Articles platform compatible with competing web publishing standards like Google AMP and Apple News. That way, publishers can build first in Instant Articles and then push near-identical versions of their content to other platforms.
This might help cut down on news organizations’ distribution costs, but it’s also a big deal for the tech industry’s platform wars. Because this announcement doubles as a tacit admission from Facebook that its Instant Articles format is not as popular as other forms of platform publishing, as well as a move to undermine the success of Google AMP and Apple News by incentivizing publishers to create one version of a thing and push it out everywhere. If Facebook can ensure that everyone publishes equally to all platforms, it won’t have to worry about Google or Apple gaining an edge.
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“The SDK already enables developers to easily integrate publishing Instant Articles into their content management systems. By supporting a gateway to generate content across platforms, we’re also making it easy for publishers to apply some of the custom styling templates in AMP and Apple News that they have created in the Instant Articles Style Editor,” explains Facebook’s Piyush Mangalick, a partner engineering director, in a blog post. “For example the custom formats, like fonts, colors and captions, that publishers have designed in the Style Editor, will be closely mirrored in the other formats.”
In other words: if you build once on Instant Articles, you won’t have to worry about stylizing the article for AMP or Apple News. Facebook’s SDK will take care of all the heavy lifting. “This new flexibility with Instant Articles is part of our commitment to open standards of collaboration with the community,” writes Mangalick. “Our goal is to give publishers control over extending and modifying the Instant Articles building blocks to be the best storytellers on every platform.”