Feedly Classic for Android

I love Feedly Classic (and that’s only been reaffirmed after using the new Feedly): it’s simple and to-the-point and works well. But I’ve been running into tons of bugs as of late, especially related to videos in this app. Playing a video can sometimes just break the app entirely and force me to restart it; other times the video frame will still be in the right hand corner after I’ve gone out of full screen. And virtually every video I try to watch in Picture in Picture breaks when I leave Feedly, and turns black and makes it only possible to listen to the audio. This really stinks. Feedly Classic is maybe the last good (i.e. stable, not trying to sell you a subscription) app on the App Store, and it stinks that, unless the developers do something (HINT HINT), this thing is doomed to senescence.

What’s going on.

Slim app, fast, easy to use interface. Such a shame feedly doesn’t keep updating both versions, but I’m so glad they make this one available. Would not be able to use the other one.

Love news. I’ve loved news for a decade, current events and tech mostly. I was using TheVerge.com and Google News to keep abreast. But I would also get far too sidetracked on recommendations, today section, or other side items built into the experiences. I also find Siri’s non-stop adding of recommendations to be detrimental to reading news. Turning off the recommendations made the app feel barren which can’t be right. I’ve found Feedly to be awesome for keeping me in the RSS loop of topics I care about without getting too distracted. It also makes browsing a much faster experience, almost glanceable. My screen time went down 70 percent in my first week. 1h 18m total for the week in news. I used to spend 30 minutes a day just in Google News. Great app. I almost never write reviews. Excellent work dev team.

I felt a bit guilty about still using the Classic version so I thought I’d give the regular one another shot. Nope, I am now back to Classic again. I hated that I’d swipe up on an article to show I’d read it, but swiping wouldn’t work half the time. It got really frustrating to repeatedly swipe ten times on an article only to have it not go away. It would just bounce back into place. I also don’t like the Home Screen options (the first page you see when you open the app) and find the Classic version much better at displaying that info. Classic makes it much easier to save an article for later. The Classic version is faster and less buggy. I’m surprised that after a couple of years of doing this “new” Feedly, they still haven’t worked out those bugs. While it is useable, the Classic version is still much superior.