Android Google Reader Apps: Greed is the best
This past year a lot of tech bloggers have been saying RSS is dead. I think that's a load of crap. I love my Google Reader and no amount of Twitter list following is going to change that. Twitter creates a whole lot of noise and retweets of the same information.
As any good member of the tech world does, I invest a lot of time to keep up with the latest developments so as not to be left behind. And so I use any bit of downtime I have to stay on top of things. My Android phone and my Google Reader parsing app of choice is very important in that process! I'd say that easily over half of my news I consume on my phone now instead of my desktop or laptop.
So after rooting my phone, I decided to re-evaluate my options for apps that integrated with Google Reader.
NewsRob (link)
This seems to be the most popular app, but it was actually the one I like the least. It's not bad by any means, but I just don't think the interface is as slick or streamlined as the others. The share button is to me annoyingly hidden under the menu button for some reason. And the headline area takes up too much space.
NetaShare BETA (link)
I guess this is a new player from Japan and actually it's a very nice app. When you are viewing an article, it has this bottom drawer pull up option (similar to the Android pull-up/down menus) that fills the bottom part of the screen and has some nice transparency. It allows you to scroll (swipe) through all of the headlines and therefore jump to others easily... rather than just clicking next or going back to the complete list. I really really like this.
One major disappointment is that, despite reading somewhere it had this feature, I couldn't find any share options. It also crashed my phone once randomly. Plus the ads on the top are annoying, take up valuable space, and I don't see a paid option to get rid of them.
Greed (link)
And finally... the app that I used before and still believe is the best is GREED!
I opted for the paid version this time that added offline caching (which the others have also). I do not mind paying $1.99 for this app that I use basically every day, even though the others are free. Show the developer some support! The new version also has some really nice features the old one didn't have (or maybe this is free vs. full?).
The home scree is really nice looking. The list page gives you visual cludes of which articles you have read, starred, shared, and liked. Once in an article it has the familiar left/right like NewsRob. But it gives you almost full screen reading of the article. The "meta" info at the top fades out after loading (also a nice status bar indicating the loading). You can click on the status bar to show it again which gives you the ability to star, mark it read/unread, and share it. Clicking menu gives you aditional optiosn like sharing it to other apps, viewing the full article, etc. This means that you see a lot more of the article without scrolling! It also has nice zoom in and out features.
Overall, I just think it has the best features and is cleaner.
WISH LIST...
Even though I really like Greed and the others are good, none of them are perfect. Here is my wish list...
- Pinch gesture to zoom in/out rather than the buttons.
- Swipe/flick sideways to change articles... iPhone does this all of the time and I read Android has the ability to, but why is this never an option in Android apps???
- Share with note.... I like to add notes to my shared items, but none of the apps let you add a note.
- NetaShare's bottom drawer or otherwise an ability to flick through other article headlines to jump around in your feed is beautiful. This should be in the other apps as well.
- Search... let me search in my feed for a keyword!
- I think Greed's top bar should not be those checkboxes. Why not make this a toggle button read/unread, like/unlike, share/unshare, star/unstar? And maybe put the general share to other app button up there also (I hate the idea of pressing menu for some reason).
- Add a long press or double-click option on the article body to pop up other options like go to the site or share with note, etc.
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