Rui Carmo
I’m probably going to be the only one saying this, but the new Reeder is a massive disappointment.
I pretty much live inside what is now “Reeder Classic”, since it is the first app I fire up every morning on my iPad mini to catch up on 200+ RSS feeds.
And the new Reeder just doesn’t do what I need it to. In fact, it doesn’t even do what it tries to do in a way that I find useful:
- Polling 200+ feeds? Local polling and iCloud syncing won’t cut it, and the lack of support for feed aggregators tells me this isn’t an app to keep track of a lot of diverse interests.
- Catching up on Mastodon? I have custom RSS feeds that track lists from a server, since having my home timeline or tags is just useless and too much noise in my experience.
- Reddit? Erm. Why? I do visit, but (guess what) I already have summary feeds from the couple of subreddits I care about.
- Videos and podcasts? I can get a much better experience in specialized apps like Yattee and Overcast, and I never consume that kind of content together with the rest–the contexts and use cases just don’t overlap for me.
So no, I’m not the target user for this. Nor can I understand all of the enthusiasm some former RSS stalwarts have for the new version, unless they’re reading a lot less feeds than I am…
I also tried it on my phone, and ironically, Flipboard (which somehow isn’t dead yet) does a lot of the above just fine (the Mastodon integration is superb, by the way) and is completely free, so finding out that the new Reeder has a subscription model didn’t help either.
In short, even if I didn’t already have too many subscriptions, the value just isn’t there for me to even consider subscribing for the new Reeder–it is a slick app, but the actual reading experience hasn’t improved to any measurable extent (who ever cared about unread counts?), whereas over the past year I’ve built my own custom AI summary feeds and a few other doodads (like correlating different items across multiple sites) that Reeder couldn’t do–and still doesn’t:
So this new Reeder feels like a missed opportunity, even if it does have a sleek, unified timeline. But it turns out I don’t want multimedia, or to return to the age when apps tried to be unified inboxes for everything–I want to read stuff, not wade through a smorgasbord.