I’ve been vacillating recently as to which RSS solution I hated less out of feedbin and Newsblur. In feedbin’s favour: It’s simple and just works on the desktop. In Newsblur’s favour: It actually works on Android.
Against Newsblur is that it has lots of bullshit features that get in the way and I don’t really care about and it’s flaky and slow.
Against Feedbin is that they, as far as I can care, literally could not give a shit about Android. They have major but probably easy to fix CSS bugs which make their mobile site completely unusable. I’ve reported many of these and been met with complete silence.
Working RSS on mobile is vital to me, and I’d already paid for a premium newsblur account back when it was the only way to get an import, so I figured I’d give it a try and reluctantly concluded that its slow and unreliable android client was better than feedbin’s not actually being able to see half my feeds, so I decided to jump ship back to it.
I have not enjoyed this experience.
So I was pretty excited when I noticed that Press had released Feedbin integration. Press is a very slick Android RSS client that used to be for Google Reader only but has recently started integrating with a lot of its replacements. I was perfectly happy with the Google reader Android app, so I never tried it before, but figured now was a good time to try it.
I’ve now installed it, and I now consider my RSS problems basically solved. The app is lovely – it’s simple, responsive, and appears to do everything I want. There are a few minor irritations (can’t subscribe from within Press AFAICT, read items from the web interface don’t seem to sync), but they’re so low on the scale of what came before that I’m not even slightly bothered by them.
So, Google reader is dead. Long live Feedbin + Press.