So its been three weeks since Google Reader actually died (July 1st, if you managed to block it out) and I think Ive finally landed on a setup I dont hate. Figured Id write it up since I know at least a few of you are still bouncing between five different apps trying to find something that feels right.
Quick recap in case you missed the whole saga: Google announced back in March they were killing Reader, everybody panicked, and then most of us just... didnt do anything about it for three months. Classic. I was one of those people. I had a calendar reminder to export my OPML file and I still almost missed it. I ended up doing the export at like 11:40pm on June 30th, half panicking, half annoyed at myself for waiting so long. Its a text file. It took four minutes. I had three months.
Anyway. Here's where I landed.
Feedly is doing most of the heavy lifting now. They built out this whole backend (they call it Normandy, which is a weirdly dramatic name for an RSS syncing service) specifically so third-party apps could point at Feedly's API the same way they used to point at Google's. That matters more than it sounds like, because it means I didnt actually have to give up my reading app of choice.
Which brings me to Reeder. If you dont know it, its a paid iOS app, $2.99 on the App Store, and its been my reader on the phone since basically forever. When Google Reader shut down there was a solid week or two where Reeder just... didnt work, because the developer (Silvio Rizzi, one guy, doing this basically solo) had to rebuild the sync layer to talk to Feedly instead. That was a rough couple weeks honestly, I was reading everything in Feedly's actual web app, which is fine but its very magaziney — big images, card layouts, that sort of thing. I dont want cards. I want a plain list of headlines I can blow through in ten minutes with my coffee. Once the Reeder update landed I was back to that and it was a genuine relief.
A few other things worth knowing if youre still sorting this out:
- Digg put out a reader of their own in beta back in late June. I tried it for about four days. Its fine? Clean, fast, does the job. But it doesnt have the same reach into third-party apps yet, so if youre an app person like me it feels a little isolated right now.
- The Old Reader got absolutely hammered with signups back when the shutdown was first announced in March and was basically unusable for a stretch. I hear its stabilized since but I never went back to check.
- NewsBlur had the same problem, a flood of new users crashing their own servers, which is sort of a nice problem to have if youre the one running it, less nice if youre trying to actually read your feeds that week.
What I didnt expect is how much the folder structure migration would matter. I had maybe 140 feeds in Reader, organized into folders I'd built up over probably two years, and the OPML export/import mostly preserved that, but not perfectly. A handful of tech folders got flattened and I had to manually re-sort about a dozen feeds. Not a huge deal, just annoying in that specific way where a fifteen-minute task eats forty minutes because you keep getting distracted re-reading old feed names and remembering why you subscribed to some blog that hasnt posted since 2011.
The bigger thing, and I dont think enough people are saying this out loud: none of these replacements actually replicate what made Reader good, which was that it was just infrastructure. Nobody loved the Google Reader interface. People loved that it was a reliable, boring pipe that a dozen other apps could build on top of. Feedly is trying to be that pipe now and mostly succeeding, but its also trying to be its own consumer product at the same time, with its own opinions about how you should read things, and those two goals pull against each other a little.
If youre still stuck on this, my actual advice is boring: export your OPML now if you havent, pick Feedly as your backend even if you never open their app, and let whatever client app you already like (Reeder, Press, Mr. Reader, whatever) point at it. Took me three weeks of fumbling to get back to something that feels like my old reading habit. Yours can probably take three days if you just start with that.