Facebook Instant Articles Adds Support For Google AMP, Apple News

Facebook made it easier Thursday for site owners and developers to convert Instant Articles pages into a format understood by Google's Accelerated Mobile Project pages and, soon, to Apple's Apple News Format.

The tool is an extension to the open source Software Development Kit (SDK) used to build Instant Articles, Piyush Mangalick, partner engineering director at Facebook, wrote in a post.

The updated in the software development kit generates the code needed to build these other formats, a step that historically frustrated developers. Publishers can then plug-and-play the markup in their content management systems or third party publishing tools.

Consistency and collaboration breeds adoption. Providing the same look and feel across platforms tends to increase the level of use. Facebook explain in a documentation that publishers can now generate AMP documents and retain the look and feel of Instant Articles across platforms.

"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," Mangalick writes. "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."

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It's not clear whether the change will save Instant Articles. Earlier this year, at least one media outlet reported that Facebook was losing publishers and struggled to grow, which could be why Facebook has changed its stance on collaboration with other platforms.  

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