[spians]

Hey HN,

We've created an RSS feed and offline reader app for android that doesn't show ads/track your activity. The app is a combination of a feature rich RSS reader, minimalist podcast player and an offline article downloader (similar to read it later apps). The app has novel ways to add RSS feeds and has an offline first strategy.

Please try out the app and let us know if you have any questions or what you'd like to see in coming versions!

[binarysneaker]

Freely/Palabre/Flipboard user, and long time feed consumer. I've used Plenary for about an hour, some thoughts...

1. Needs an option to use Firefox as the browser, rather than using Chrome. And an option to open externally or a within the app. 2. Needs an option for the article title link to take me straight to the article. Yep, I could click the link icon, but it's a smaller area and clicking the title is intuitive. 3. When there's no thumbnail, the large placeholder with two letters and a garish background colour feels like wasted space. Either remove the placeholder, or improve the algorithm to insert an image. 4. A zoom slider for the front page grid would be nice. On a tablet there's plenty of layout optimization that could be done. 5. Duplicate link removal, and across different sites/domains/social networks 6. Some trend analysis to determine what's most important to read out of thousands of articles daily

Overall, it's already better than most of the existing feed readers out there IMO. But if you want my money, you gotta have every one of those feature enhancements checked.

[spians]

Hi,

Thank you for trying out Plenary.

1. Plenary doesn't use Chrome as the browser (it uses Android WebView that uses chrome engine internally). We didn't go with custom tabs as we wanted more control on the interactions with WebView. You can open links externally or within the app (If you have premium, you can open your preferred domain urls externally as the main action).

2. Are you talking about opening article externally as the main action?

3. Sure we will improve the algorithm to find the image and also look into removing the placeholder if image is not present.

4. It would be great if you can elaborate more on "zoom slider for the front page grid". Yes, Plenary is currently not fully optimized for tablet experience. That is one area we need to work more on.

5. Because of the way Plenary is designed, everything it does; from fetching, combining and storing feed data to showing it to the user; is done on your mobile device. Catching duplicate content links is hard to implement in this case because that logic will also have to reside on the user device.

6. Same as point 5. Trend analysis is not possible because everything is done on your device. We don't have any server to store any user data.

Thanks again for your detailed feedback. Really appreciate it.

[nemoniac]

Is it open source?

[spians]

No, Plenary is not open source