Switching from Iphone to Android – Feedly Newsreader

Most of you know that I recently migrated from my iPhone 5 to the Android based Samsung Galaxy S5. If you’d like to know my thoughts on that experience, read my post here.

Well, part of the process of migrating to a new operating system is finding all the equivalent software to the apps which you ran in the old system. Here is part of my search for a functional news reader.

Let me tell you guys, I do everything on my phone. My phone is as functional as most computers. I do pretty much everything on this thing. I’m writing this article on my phone. I listen to music on this. I even get caught up on all of my favorite TV shows on this sucker. I get my work emails, communicate with all of my friends and family as well. I also consume my news on here. That’s where a product like feedly comes into play for me.

Feedly is a news reader, a program which you use to pull in the content from all of your favorite websites. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t really have the time to sit and visit every single website that I follow daily. It is extremely convenient for me to open an application and have all the stories in this one place. Feedly is really good with that, it has a nice interface, and it is quite fancy. Cool.

Yesterday among the many emails that I receive I got a message telling me about the new, amazing feedly update. Really? Let’s check it out then. I liked this app, maybe they fixed the few issues that were deal breakers for me. So I went to the Google play store and installed feedly. I played with it throughout the day yesterday, and just decided that it had to go. I literally just uninstalled feedly.

See, the thing is that I spend at least two hours commuting back and forth between work and home. While I’m commuting I’m underground. I ride the NYC Subway system. This means that for the majority of my ride, I have no phone signal. One of the major requirements that I have for an app, is offline access. Evernote, Pocket, and any other app that I use regularly has offline access. It is a core requirement for me. A lack thereof is a complete and total deal breaker. For some reason, feedly has yet to add this functionality. I searched for it in the app and simply could not find it.

When you launch the app, it tries to connect to the Web. After a few moments, it comes back and says, “cannot connect, are you connected to the Internet?” Uhm, no I’m not, I’m on the damn train. Can I please read the posts that are cached on my device from before? Oops, sorry, not gonna happen. You basically are stuck on that one error screen. Oh, that sucks! I immediately uninstalled the program. The app is literally no good to me if I can’t read the news offline in the subway.

The reason I’m writing this post is because I find it really, really weird that an application such as this one could neglect such a core, and what I consider basic functionality. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. Feedly, until you add this functionality, please don’t email me anymore.

As an alternative to this program, try gReader. That one does offline synching, and it is my current news reader of choice.