After a perfect storm of Twitter, Pocket, and podcasts wiped out most of my desire to use a feedreader, I’ve lately been missing it, so I looked at options.

The requirement was runs on Android and web and ideally iOS. Ideally with a river of news.

Results:

Feedly

Used it a bit in the past too and a lot to like. However, the showstopper for me is the Android app uses the dangerous webview model for Google+ login, meaning I have no idea where my Google credentials are going. This was my biggest objection to feed reading on Android 5 years so it’s disappointing it still persists when the operating system has a perfectly sane way to do 3rd party login.

This also applies to some of the nicer 3rd party Feedly client apps too. They also present webviews and in that case your password gets even more exposure.

The simplest solution for Feedly is to introduce a classic password model.

Newsblur

The web client has always been nice,  somewhat like a desktop mail reader (which was one of the  traditional RSS models). I also like the training capability, which is well-reviewed.

However, reviews suggest the Android client had long suffered stability problems, so ruled it out on that basis. Will keep an eye out for updates as I think it would be a fine choice.

InoReader

This is what I ended up using. The web client is very good, works offline, and uses a standard login/password combo. Each category and feed can be viewed as a river, with read/unread automatically updated (like how Bloglines ended up).

The Android app isn’t going to knock your socks off but it does everything you’d expect it to very well. While I’d prefer a river view, it supports swiping right to move to next post. This can of course be preferable at times, as a way to skim posts. I suppose I don’t need to skim much as my feedreading 2.0  regimen consists of following a small number of individuals’ feeds, such that I should only be seeing 5-10 posts a day.