The best kittens, technology, and video games blog in the world.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Feedly as Google Reader replacement is disappointing

Don't go! by ucumari from flickr (CC-NC-ND)
Sad panda doesn't want Google Reader to go away

Due to imminent death of Google Reader and finally getting a real phone I've been looking for a replacement and one of apps I tried was Feedly. Unfortunately it's pretty bad at its simple task.

The problem is that what RSS feeds contain are web pages. And web pages have links. And links do not work properly with Feedly on a phone.
  • Open Feedly on a phone
  • Select an article you want to read (since usually you'll only see a short summary)
  • Click Visit Website to see the whole article - this is where things start to go wrong, since instead of a real browser Feedly opens some silly view with extra buttons, but I can tolerate that
  • Click a link from the article - since it's not a real browser it doesn't have tabs, but we at least have back button, right?
  • Finish whatever linked thing you read, press back button
  • Feedly goes back to list of your feeds instead of article you were halfway through, WTF!!!
And this makes Feedly completely unusable. Web without properly working links is not really web.

Are there any alternatives before they shut down Google Reader for good?