I use +Samuel Clay​’s NewsBlur as my RSS reader. I’m quite satisfied with it on the web, and I bought a premium account even though I fit in the free tier. But the Android app is not quite good enough, which really gets in the way of catching up with things in odd moments. There have been improvements in UI responsiveness by adding a separate network thread. But it has a serious bug that makes me think that no one else really uses it “in anger”…

It loses track of which article you are looking at, at unpredictable times. As a programmer, it looks to me like it is using an index in the UI into a list that is changed by the network thread. Sometimes it happens in the middle of reading a large folder. It almost always happens in the casual browsing case where I am reading a few articles at a time in odd moments, putting my phone away between times. This causes it to mark as read articles that I haven’t read, which makes me miss things I don’t want to miss. Even absolutely critical things like new XKCD strips. :-)

I saw this with the standard channel and hoped it would go away when I switched to the beta channel, but it’s still there. I know, bugs don’t magically fix themselves…

(I’m hoping that the REST API at least uses permanent IDs for articles and that it is not just using transient integer IDs there… Also I know that support is on getsatisfaction but the idea of having yet another account really annoys me…)

Michael K Johnson November 19, 2014 07:15

Oh, now I remember why I didn’t sign up at getsatisfaction—doesn’t work without enabling scripts all over cloudfront. Blech.

Fortunately, someone else willing to enable scripts posted about this problem at https://getsatisfaction.com/newsblur/topics/background-updating-sometimes-means-stories-are-lost#

Michael K Johnson April 15, 2015 20:40

There was no response and no change. I gave up and switched to The Old Reader and gReader for Android which is not perfect but seems better.

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable